Birdwings

Occasionally I trawl (stalk? I hope I don't stalk) old DW and LJ archives looking for links to non-AO3 Jeremiah content. It often leads to purged accounts and dead 404 links and other sadness, but sometimes I find treasure, like today, when I discovered a vid.



So I'm sitting there enjoying it for its hard hitting emotions (this was such a dark show) and resigning myself to certain characters not showing up, when all of a sudden it shifts gears, I suddenly recognize the song and it turns into a hit parade of precisely those neglected secondary characters. Ezekiel! Lee! Meaghan! Sims! And I always suspected that Libby's two 'Crossing Jordan' kisses would be insanely hot if juxtaposed and this beautiful person actually did that. And the ending was super emotional and good lord, Michelle and Gabe finally made it into a fanvideo!

This is exactly what I needed today, so I had to squee to commemorate my good fortune. Hopefully I can parlay this inspiration into some writing gains before the day is over.

These are just some of my favorite or most memorable stuff I heard and watched this year, starting with songs embedded in the stories themselves, transforming their original meaning in all manner of pleasant ways going forward.

12 Monkeys was especially good at this task, and made excellent use of incidental music throughout. 'Arms of Mine' turned into my second favorite Otis Redding song because of it, and 'Don't You Forget About Me' by Simple Minds has been granted permanent rotation in my playlist. More impressively, this show elevated songs I hadn't found more than indifferently tolerable before, like Foghat's 'Slow Ride.' I always thought of it as a dumb hard rock song - not the worst but far from the best. This year, whenever it comes on the radio, it carries the charming image of Cole in sunglasses and a bad 70s shirt. This makes a huge difference in my outlook. Even a song I utterly loathe, 'I've Had the Time of My Life' (by... no idea, and I sure ain't looking it up), has been positively affected, in that while I still think the song is annoying, the last time it came on the radio at work I got a gigantic grin on my face in memory of Ramse.

Those were songs I already knew in other contexts. Meanwhile, Hard Core Logo introduced me to the Headstones (Hugh Dillon's band), and I went cruising around YouTube discovering that I liked the film version of 'Sonic Reducer' considerably more than the Dead Boys original (sorry) and that the Headstones did a powerful rendition of 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' in 2019 which is much faster than the original, and done with great passion and a beautiful music video (also, Hugh Dillon is remarkably handsome without the mohawk).



( Other stuff )