thuviaptarth | [BtVS/AtS] VID: Origin Stories by Gianduja Kiss

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[BtVS/AtS] VID: Origin Stories by Gianduja Kiss

Vid Title: Origin Stories
Song: "Coffee" by Aesop Rock feat. John Darnielle
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel

Summary: It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat.

Download/streaming information at GK's lj.

Notes: Storyboard and editing by

giandujakiss.
Commissioned and conceived by

thuviaptarth for Sweet Charity.
Beta by

counteragent,

boniblithe,

sol_se,

etothey, and

springgreen.

Lyrics
we don't need no walkie-talkies, nope, no walkie talkies
we don't need your coughing when offing the morning coffee, no
we don't need no walkie-talkies, nope, no walkie-talkies
we just want our hermitry to stay and our coffee to go

and the last shall be
first to immerse in the pass-out heat,
face in the mud where the moxie melt
'til he woke up drowning in tchochke hell
war [more?] in a cave with a torch on the wall
then [than?] a window arrangement of porcelain dolls
on a brand new day saw what he saw
property owners who crawl to the mall
with a bad toupee and a face
like you author the law
face like you're mourning a loss
right hand on a can of worms
left full of gold he will trade for turf
i mean that's okay, you got to answer to you at the end of the volatile day
but a model of mercy and might? no way,
marionette who will clap and obey
dude, look, all that noise? call that flight of the water boys,
meet and greet and they all slap five
cheek to cheek when they colonize
and a grown-ass man shall abide as he wish,
walk that path with a dime and a stick,
walk that path with a diamond and wine,
walk that path to the firing line, just walk,
pay no mind to the new recruit with the play-doh spine,
let's be friends from opposite ends, wave to the kid,
don't hop on the fence,
play to the radius far and away, orbit wide
don't park in his space,
one little martyr who talk in his face
make one little Weatherman sharpen the blades.

we don't need no walkie-talkies, nope, no walkie talkies
we don't need your coughing when offing the morning coffee, no
we don't need no walkie-talkies, nope, no walkie-talkies
we just want our hermitry to stay and our coffee to go

and the last shall be
first to the curb with the mad-cow meat,
face in the bars of a regular cell when he woke up high in collectible hell,
boomtown kid who was taught by the binge
that the man who expires with the most shit wins,
that's warpy american nonsense penned by the rich,
not a routine friend in a pinch,
still not used to the stench,
how it throws off otherwise lucid events,
in the case the afraid observe i got a pro-keds box full of layman's terms,
it goes hey, peace, pray for the plagued, major relief from capacious rains,
but just cuz i don't want to war with you,
it don't mean go warm up the barbecue,
i'm like, pardon you, sawed-off limit,
my high noon is a quick little minute,
i don't wanna spend it sitting with a critic
who simply isn't gonna ever really get it,
this HQ is alive and alone,
no driveway, no sign of a home, no dial tone, no line for the phone,
no world's tiniest violin song,
and i might just lie to them all,
lying in the morgue with a deep breath hiding and bored, fighting a smile, highly annoyed,
when the timing is right i will rise and record,
call for the monster beats and blockhead
got animal drums like he's doctor teeth,
it goes red light green light 1 2 3, one large coffee, fuck you, peace.

T-A-K-E-N-O-P-R-I-S-O-N-E-R-S

john darnielle:
i crawled down to the basement when the weather got cold, like a lost lamb returning to the fold, and when the outside world recedes from view, it's just a year's supply of make-up and memories of you, 1967, colt 45, holding back the vampires, keeping me alive, there's an envelope with some cash in it out by the front door, this is what they make you take the medication for

I gave

giandujakiss a song, a summary line, two very long emails about the conceptual basis of the vid, four or five lyric matching suggestions, and a ton of headaches during the beta process. She made a vid that did everything I wanted but even better. It was like all the fun parts of writing a story without any of the hard parts, and she never once complained about the Sweet Charity story I owed her, already three months overdue. It was AWESOME.

I am being all quiet and restrained because I love the vid so much I'm almost exploding with it. But what I want to say most is: GO WATCH IT NOW NOW NOW. PLEASE.

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Ahem. More like a year and three months :-).

But glad you like the vid; it was a pleasure.

Details, details.

I am so glad you made that request.

ME TOO.

This is amazing-- it makes me want to go back and rewatch Buffy so I can understand it better. I can't wait to read other people's more detailed feedback because I want to read their close-readings.

Thank you! GK did a great job fleshing out everything I wanted and adding more nuances to the argument, as well as making it look gorgeous. Like, I sent her a bunch of rambling academic meta and she found visuals. It is awesome how vidders do that.

This is a great vid.

Thank you! I am so happy GK was interested in doing it.

Amazing video. Hard-hitting and has left my mind whirling afterwards. I need to watch it many more times to fully appreciate it.

You checked it out because of the John Darnielle, right? :D

I am so glad GK was interested in making it, and so glad it worked for you.

Actually, I came for the Aesop Rock + Buffy. (I...had to look up who John Darnielle was. I fail at being an indie music fan apparently. *g*)

Huh. Maybe I have you confused with someone else on my flist who is a big Mountain Goats fan? I may have just been associating all new indie music recs with you. (Or

heresluck. Or

vonniek. But I assume you don't mind that company.)

Everything I know about the Mountain Goats I learned through

ascian3, so possibly her?

And, no, I don't mind that company at all. Also, I will most definitely be rec'ing the vid today; I'm still thinking about it!

That sounds very likely.

And I am so happy you are planning to rec the vid. Thank you so much!

Aha! I was wondering who had commissioned it when she sent me a previous draft, mostly because I wanted to FLAIL all over that person. Seriously, I cannot even describe how much I adore the concept, especially with this song choice. So basically? Thank you! (I love your brain.)

Edited 2008-02-24 21:29 (UTC)

You're welcome!

GK forwarded me your email and it was such a relief, because I (we?) were so worried that the idea was too abstruse and that people wouldn't get the literal POV. I was so happy GK was interested in that idea (I sent her four suggestions to pick from and had a few more if none of the first set appealed, because I didn't want her to have to work on something that made her unhappy, but this was always my favorite of the set), but terrified she'd want to back out of it, because it was a weird song for a hard-to-express idea that had to be made out of very limited footage. And then she sent me the first draft and it was made of AWESOME. (Even though I kept driving her crazy about POV changes and suggesting fixes that made her shriek in agony and then have to explain patiently why they were in fact impossible.)

I think its a beautiful video, and congratulations to both of you.
And, um, I would also like to read those two long meta emails, and whatever other commentaries you both went through, since I feel very stupid right now. I don't even get the lyrics, let alone all the nuances that you are pointing at in the video, although I think I get some of the larger picture.
And can I just say that I hate that Joss made it bad Black African Men who raped the Slayer into existence and whom good White American Buffy has to turn her back to.
Sigh. Weird how watching these characters after a long time of not thinking about them makes me renew my appreciation for the hotness that is Robin, when I am more bleh then ever about Spike.

I think from your comments you are getting more than you give yourself credit for! Though I am a little sad the vid leaves you only bleh about Spike, and not full of burning rage.

I have a post two-thirds done, but I am planning to wait a week to post it, to give people time to react on their own first. I should probably wait longer, but I am impatient. :)

But I should tell you that lyrics are the second-biggest recurring argument GK and I had during the beta process. It went something like this:

ME: I love how you matched the image to lyric here, but I think you should use an image that emphasizes the lyric more over there.

GK: I'm glad the image matches the lyric but it is purely coincidental since even after reading the lyrics you sent me I can't make out 90% of the words, and neither will any of the viewers. The vid has to make sense on visuals.

ME: I agree the visuals have to carry the meaning, but it would be great if the lyrics also contributed to meaning for people who look them up. Here is something that you can change.

GK: That is an excellent idea in theory and now I will explain why it will never work.

Our first-biggest recurring argument was whether it was clear enough whose the POV was, if that helps.

No no, the point I so blatantly failed to make was - I used to think Spike was hot, back when he was a normal evil vampire, and then I was filled with burning rage at the morality of the writers with what they did to their characters, and that pretty much killed the show for me, so that I was watching Seasons 6 and 7 with the cynicism of watching your lover as an undead zombie, and then I stopped reading fic pretty much because I hated the existance of Spike at all, in any version, and so then when I watched these images after all this time, I was surprised by how non-existant my shallow, 'oh, Marsters is hot' reaction was, which is to say, the scars the burning rage left me run pretty deep.

::exhales::

I have to say I am glad that GK won the argument, because while I think your version may be far more layered and crafty, the message is complex enough without subsuming the visuals to the lyrics, which are, I have to say, post-modernly abstract in their incomprehensibility. So please to provide annotated meta about lyrics as well, in your commentary. :)

Hmm. Was is Robin's POV all the way through? It felt a little fragmented, because it seemed to talk about the Slayers sometimes as a much bigger entity than one black man, which was thing number 21 to hate about Joss - the sisterhood of slayers defaulted to white women, and the Black slayer, the Chinese slayer, they were always on the outside looking in, being killed, having to defer to white vampires or watchers or slayers, just like Robin did.

Somewhere in this I have a huge rant about how feminism in fantasy has led to the plucky white girl becoming the oppressor for the person of colour other, ALA Robin McKinley's books, and how Buffy was always entrenched in that sort of ignoring of intersectionality.

But I await to hear your thoughts.

See, I continue to think that you are getting more than you think -- because it's not Robin's POV all the way through, or if it is, it's Robin's POV as a collective for the Slayers/Potentials/ignored voices.

GK was the one who added a critique of Buffy-the-character and her choosing Spike over Robin/the Potentials, and that really hit me hard, forcing me -- like the US elections, ha -- to confront my relative privilege as a white woman and the way I had managed to ignore that problem in the text while focusing all my rage on Spike. Because Buffy was and remains a key and beloved character for me. When I watched the show, I was angry at the treatment of Robin and angry at the way women and women's deaths were shunted aside for the reformation of Spike, but I never acknowledged the role race played in *which* women were shunted aside, or how the only POC Slayers we got were the ones who were doomed, died, or in roles explicitly and textually characterized as can(n)on fodder. That's come belatedly for me, in discussions over the past few years, particularly at

deadbrowalking--whose user profile was itself an uncomfortable revelation to me.

It's funny, because from my perspective, the Buffy thing wasn't intended as an additional aspect of the political critique, exactly; it was just part of the narration device, because the injustice wasn't Spike's existence, but Spike's elevation. And Spike didn't do that; Buffy did. In other words, I was thinking of it solely in terms of storytelling - but I'm glad you liked it :-).

Yes, I agree that it was his elevation that was the most problematic, and that you had to include a critique of Buffy in there, because, while her reasoning is understandable--she has a loyalty to those she feels will support her, and little thought to anything outside of that--it makes her a character who is as unconscious of her White American privilege as many of her real-life counterparts.
Not that I want to simplify Spike and Buffy's character arcs to a racism-lens, but merely to point out that the show's treatment (or lack thereof) of racial issues is rooted in the characters as much as in the show writers.

untrue-accounts and giandujakiss - there's been so much awesome commentary on "Origin Stories," even at a casual glance, so I'm editing my halfamoon rec post to link to your comments in this thread. Thanks again for your work on such an amazing video, and for your insightful comments!

ticketsonmyself (logging in?)

That makes sense. I had always focused on Spike's self-elevation and self-centeredness and his tendency to see the world around him in terms of personal ties but not allow others the empathy of personal ties except with him.

P.S.

rilina has a critique of The Blue Sword as a story of colonization that I'm sure you can find by browsing her extremely well-organized tags, if you're interested.

I have spent an hour now riffling through her livejournal and googleing, and have been unable to come up with the post in question, although other interesting discussions have emerged. If you ever come acress it, I'd be grateful for a link.

I have a post two-thirds done, but I am planning to wait a week to post it, to give people time to react on their own first. I should probably wait longer, but I am impatient. :)

Eek! *writes faster*

Eeee! Commentary! I can hold off longer than a week if you've got somethng in queue you want to get out without authorial interference.

Part of me is thinking "pshaw, a week is plenty of time to write a single post," and part of me is remembering my actual track record and laughing hollowly, and part of me is thinking "pshaw? since when do I say that?"

So I'm aiming to get it finished before the week's up, but if I take a little longer and you don't mind waiting, I would appreciate it. :) I'll still post it if you don't wait, though.

I will see if conversations are still going on, because I am fascinated by some of the interpretations that are coming up.

Ow. I don't get everything that's going on--like

deepad, I'm looking forward to getting an explicit outline of what you guys were trying to do--but... ow.

He gets away with it.

Thank you!

Thank you THANK YOU for your commission and the work you did with Gianduja Kiss to create this fantastic video. I've commented over at her journal, and I'm reccing it at halfamoon with her permission (I hope it's okay with you, too!). As I said over at GK's lj, I gotta watch this again, but first I want to applaud the lyric match for "but just cuz i don't want to war with you, / it don't mean go warm up the barbecue." AMAZING. I hated "Lies My Parents Told Me," and although "Damage" sort of admits that white patriarchy is the monster that fuels deadly, "monstrous" rage in those it oppresses, it ends up slotting Dana's story into "female rage is illness" - in particular, collective female rage and action is illness, given that Dana is literally tuned into all the slayers of the ages - and the white-dude triumvirate of Angel, Spike, and Wesley silencing her. I love Robin, and I'm glad this video depicts everything he's inherited from his mother and the slayers before her - that knowledge and pride and life he's got to honor, even as he struggles with how practically no one else is gonna give a crap about that. But you and GK do! In short, I too am filled with burning rage, and I don't understand how you and GK have not yet conquered the world - nay, the universe - with the power of your fabulous brains. I love the Mountain Goats, and I would never have thought John Darnielle could rap, but that's just another thing that makes this video so right. giandujakiss + untrue-accounts + Aesop Rock + John Darnielle = AWESOME.

ticketsonmyself, with lj issues

Thank you so much! All your comments on the vid have made me SO HAPPY!

Wonderful concept. I haven't seen more than the first season of Buffy so I don't understand the fine points of the plot, but it is amazing how clearly the feeling and the argument comes across even so. Really stunning. I can't wait until you post your meta so that I can understand as well as admire. Brilliant stuff, concept as well as execution.

ETA: I didn't have much trouble understanding the lyrics once I'd seen the vid once or twice. Given that I don't know the show that well, it was the lyrics that helped me through in contextualizing what I was seeing. So I am in favor of lyric-matching, personally.

Edited 2008-02-25 12:43 (UTC)

I am really glad the argument came across despite your unfamiliarity with the source! I hadn't expected that and must credit all to GK's wonderful visual/movement/storytelling choices.

This was a fantastic idea! I think GK did a marvelous job with your awesome concept. Thank you both for making such a moving piece of art. :D

The visuals do carry the story, and that's super important, but the lyric matches, when I caught them, also seemed super "on" and amazing. The lyric matches in the Dana section are particularly inspired.

I also think that you guys did fabulous work with the POV--especially in the finished version. Wood is a Slayer in this vid. Yes, he's a man, but his fight is that of his mother's, of all the Slayers before her and after her. Which--is just such a ballsy concept and POV to tackle, and really fleshes out his story (and that of the other Slayers you feature, notably CoC) in a way that could have occured in canon but did not. (Or so I'm told--I stopped watching Buffy after S6 got too depresssing.)

Re: lyrics - that's basically how it was done. There are lyric matches in various places where the lyrics are more audible, like in the Dana section generally, and on lines like "new recruit," and on "war with you/barbeque." Where the lyrics were less audible, I didn't even try, although by pure luck, in some places the images worked out anyway.

I'm really glad it all came through for you - especially with your lack of familiarity with S7. Thank you!

Robin Wood was in some ways, I think, an attempt to redress BtVS' racial problems, and his story isn't as completely bleak as the moment we chose to end on: he survives! He makes it through the final battle, he has sex with Faith (I, personally, think that is always a plus), he does get to be a hero and competent and cool. But--Spike wins that fight and Spike is still wearing Nikki's coat. I can't tell you how much I hated it every time it seemed like BtVS or AtS was going to force Spike to shed that coat, and every time he put it back on. Or I can tell you, and that's the vid.

Dana, too, doesn't end exactly there. After Angel, Spike, & Wesley capture her, she is seized by a group of new Slayers, who take her off to care for her. At the time, I had issues with this plot development but in retrospect I am very, very happy with it.

But again -- Spike puts the coat back on. I had some second thoughts, during the vid-making process, about what it meant to end on such a bleak moment, about making the story a tragedy instead of a compromised triumph, and I decided that was the story I wanted to tell because I was angry and I didn't want that outrage to be ignored because of a partial later victory.

Thank you for expanding on your inspiration for the vid. It is fascinating.

Or I can tell you, and that's the vid.

Yup--loud and clear! :D

counteragent and untrue-accounts - there's been so much awesome commentary on "Origin Stories," even at a casual glance, so I'm editing my halfamoon rec post to link to your comments in this thread. Thanks for your insightful thoughts!

ticketsonmyself (logging in?)

Thank you so much! Your enthusiasm for the vid makes me very happy. :)

But again -- Spike puts the coat back on. I had some second thoughts, during the vid-making process, about what it meant to end on such a bleak moment, about making the story a tragedy instead of a compromised triumph, and I decided that was the story I wanted to tell because I was angry and I didn't want that outrage to be ignored because of a partial later victory.

Every time I watch the vid, the energy and the motion and the anger catch me again and sweep me up, and I think, THIS TIME, this time it'll be different! And then it ends with Spike putting on that fucking coat again.

I think it works for the vid. It *should* make the vid-watcher sit up in their chair and protest "No, it can't end like that!" and feel angry and grim and sad. Because the clips that might have fixed this vid *aren't in the source*, and that realization-- the slow realization, once you've seen it, that there wasn't any other way it *could* end, that the vid has to end the way the show did-- with the same *focus*-- is harsh. And powerful.

A vid about these particular characters and issues that wasn't bleak... would be constructed reality, not critique. *wry grin*

This is a really amazing song choice. I've only been able to watch once, and I need to do it a few more times, paying closer attention to all the lyrcis, but you guys did an amazing collaboration.

:D I am very glad you liked it.

I love the vid's execution, but I wanted to thank you for the concept — it's incredible and horrible and I'm so glad that you got this message out, uncomfortable as it is to reevaluate some things.

Thank you! I'm glad the message was effective.

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[BtVS/AtS] VID: Origin Stories by Gianduja Kiss

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