Today's News... not really (...spoliers! a J-Continuum first)

No current events stuff for the people today... just two random entertainment/enlightenment recommendations...

On the entertainment front, finally saw one of the last Angel episodes... had a marathon on today here in Brasil. BOY. A very sad ending to the series -- sad, emotionally, not quality-wise.

Though I had some qualms about the quality of the last season, these last episodes did imply there was some method to the madness that had been missing, in my opinion, since the end of the Jasmine saga and a little before that, even. (I think Angel got a lot rockier after Connor buried Angel at the bottom of the sea... though the beginning of the next season was still relatively tight, with "evil" Wes a cool move... but I digress.) I was trying to think of why the (synopses -- still haven't caught the actual last eps) last eps got me so sad, and I think it's cuz, despite the weakened (imho) writing behind their characters, I really miss them. I miss the more "happy go lucky" days of the apocalypse, with Lorne still in Caritas (I think he lost a lot of direction, not just as a character but in the writing for him as a character, after he lost his club), with Gunn still a little more "street" (again a loss of depth in his character as he became Scooby-ized), with Cordy still in the SHOW! (and not completely turned into a nice, 3-dimensional, caring person), and Wes -- Wes actually stayed the most true to his character, throughout I think, though he moved from comic to tragicomic to just tragic... Whereas Spike was moving through this progression the opposite direction, in a way...

Anyway, I was going to say, I think I miss them more than many characters from series because they're *dead* -- some of them -- or just (apparently) *gone*. Fred's dead, seemingly *forever* -- destroyed to the essence (though of course, so was Elektra in Marvel and now she's got her own fucking series, no?). THAT's tragic. Wes' dead. Cordy's dead. (Though at least not dead down to her soul being destroyed). In many series, i.e., Buffy, you can go on to imagine the life their characters might lead (though Buffy did its closure so well, it would've been hard to imagine without Angel's clues to their life continuing, and possibly even being - gasp -- fun!), but in Angel, well not only are the living characters fighting the Apocalypse, but several are dead and gone beyond (easily) conceivable return. And their last few years were not happy ones. I miss them... like friends that are dead. Their deaths were so tragic, and moving (to me, at least), watching old episodes won't cut it -- they're *dead*. They're gone, and memories of them are just that... wow. What good tv.

In other news, hopefully those intellectual elites among you sniffing in disdain about TV and/or Angel specifically made it this far, because YOU MUST READ CORNEL WEST. I'm reading "Democracy Matters" and it is EXCELLENT. It is very refreshing to hear a black voice in the US railing against EMPIRE -- when was the last time you heard Kwesi Mfume and the NAACP talking about Empire? They're been pretty DNC-ized (maybe why their membership is flagging...) The radical strain of American thought is dying, and the NAACP is complicit in this... like West's heroes James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others -- a deep radicalism is needed these days, in my opinion, to reinvigorate the entire left. But perhaps, most especially, the African American Left. We can't play the DNC/Clinton games like the NAACP has been doing and win... we cannot, as it has been said, seek approval from the same system we wish to overturn or reform. Come with me my Democratic friends... the African American community can no longer afford to be Center Left!!!