Dream Autopsies

Twitter Sonnet #51

In the land where linen and apples heal.
Rum and watermelon just keep giving.
You never know what mobs might be a meal.
Secret agents relocate the living.
I'm twenty thousand leagues under sleep dep.
There's a flattened baby Kraken down here.
Pushing slowly through pea soup for each step.
Might find the English crown in Musgrave's mere.
Somehow 1am keeps coming sooner.
All old paintings will become new again.
Marilyn Monroe was always lunar.
And on the bicycle was Jack Lemmon.
Daphne's the most earnest girl in the band.
As the walrus hides his shells in the sand.

I watched the second episode of Angel's second season last night, which was an episode I liked the first time I watched it, but liked even better now. For one thing, it has one of my favourite moments in the entire series, where Angel thinks the glass of blood Cordelia's handed him has begun to coagulate only to find out she'd put cinnamon in it.

And this time I was delighted to notice a Vertigo reference--in the portion of the episode that flashed back to Angel's 1952 stay in the Hyperion Hotel, he meets a brunette named Judy who's from Salina, Kansas. The episode's Wikipedia entry lists a number of other references, most of which I also caught with the exception of Angel's opening line being a reference to Psycho and the fact that Angel stayed in room 217 was a reference to The Shining. I can't believe I missed that one, with the bellhop character actually saying something to the effect of, "I don't like room 217."

It also seemed to me the episode's music was very Bernard Herrmann-ish, which was actually what first put me in mind of Hitchcock references.

Angel has continued to vastly outshine Buffy for me. Maybe it's just because Angel has more location shots and practical points about crime and life in the city (in spite of the abandoned hotel in the middle of Hollywood), but it makes Buffy look like the kid's table. Especially after the most recent Buffy episode I watched, where Buffy and the gang discovered a corpse in a magic shop at the beginning of the episode and, despite the fact that Giles moved into the shop by the end of the episode, we never found out what happened to the body. He'd clearly been murdered, so was there a police investigation? Did Buffy and her friends dispose of the body themselves, and if so, did they think for a moment about notifying the man's family? The show pulls shit like this, and then expects to deeply contemplate mortality or something when Buffy's mother dies. I'm so not looking forward to that episode. Well, at least I can gripe about it.