2004-06-09 - 1:49 p.m.

Slayage, part 2.

Ok, on the second day we went to the 8am Keynote Address �On the Philosophical Consistency of Season Seven.� Guess what? It was awesome. Guess what? You should�ve gone. I�ve never wanted to hear it from Season 7 trashtalkers & I now really really REALLY don�t care to hear it.

The next session, I was pained to not be hearing these papers:

Spike the Vampire, the Vampire Slayer, or BtVS�s Preoccupation with �New� Masculinity

Alexander Harris: Buttmonkey No More

Demon Power Girl: Regimes of Form and Force in Videogame Versions of BtVS

Slayers, Pre-Slayers, Preachers, and Hellraisers: Comic Influences on the Buffyverse

Christophe Beck and Buffy�s First Romances: Paradoxes of Musical Scoring in BtVS

Be My Buffy: BtVS and Girl Group Music-Cultural Representations of the Teenage Girl

I chose to go to �Cancellation as Apocalypse: A Panel Discussion on the End of Angel�. The panel was 3 ladies from universities and a dude from the New York Daily News. This was an awesome, lively, discussion, that I kept raising my hand in and not getting called on. It was actually a lot of �My favorite moment was�� kind of thing, but great because everyone was smart about discussing why. I wanted to talk about 2 things: One was during a discussion of Lorne ending as a Sam Spade-type character, as a return to Angel�s noir roots. I wanted to talk about how much this relates to all the women dying off � that part of Lorne died too, no more fancy suits or Sea Breezes or songs, just learning to be a proper stoic man who kills. A painful, largely un-mourned loss. My other thing was Gunn and Anne in the last ep, & how she is the hero she is because of Buffy, and she really gave the Big Answer to Gunn and to the audience � you can discuss these big �why� kind of questions, but really the truck needs to be unpacked. If the fight is right, fight the fight. This was a beautiful testament (is that the right word?) to Buffy, much better than �The Girl in Question.� And not only does Anne stand for Buffy/Buffy's influence, but she also brings in concretely, in a way that Gunn used to, the real-life problems of capitalism that all the Buff/Ang stuff is dealing with metaphorically (killer cops and unequal distribution of wealth among other things.) Ok, these are my 2 points & I�ve made them here if not in the session.

Other stuff: The News guy did regular conference calls with other critics and Joss � he said in the last one, a dude was saying how Hamilton is a conscienceless asshole in expensive suits with all the power (my paraphrasing) and asked Joss if Hamilton is the network. Joss said he�s not at all uncomfortable with that interpretation. This entire session made me see the end of AtS as being a lot about Joss as an artist, trying to make complex, progressive, thrilling art, & being continually battled. The critic said that after Freaks & Geeks was cancelled, he saw a column written by another critic that was an open letter to Feig & Apatow saying basically �Please don�t change how you make TV, you did everything perfectly,� and this column being written AFTER the show was cancelled changed how he thought of himself as a critic. It made him decide to champion shows that are great, whether they have a chance of survival or not � it�s not his job to only champion safe things, he should just point out everything that is being done correctly. And when he was asked if he thought the fans� campaign to save Angel accomplished anything (as far as making HBO receptive to something or a feature film more likely), he rejected the question saying making a difference wasn�t the point � we were exemplifying the message of the show. Fighting to keep it on was the right thing to do, so fans fought that fight.

Joss apparently told him we haven�t seen the last of puppet Angel.

Someone made a point in the audience that Illyria allowed Wesley to return to his experience as a Watcher, which he always felt he fucked up with Faith, & re-do some of that stuff better.

I loved this session.

Next session, I didn�t see:

The Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah-Nah Approach to Naming: A Slice of Slayer Slang

�You�re Beneath Me�: The Stigma of Vampirism in Buffy and Angel

�Actually, No Wheeling Is More My Specialty�: Why Buffy Doesn�t Drive

Whose Revolution Has Been Televised? The Transnational Sisterhood of Slayers

I went to Dream and Prophecy. More on that tomorrow!

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