Fannish 5: Five Favourite Ships

Five favorite ships - sailing ships, spaceships, etc., not relationships.



1.) The Liberator (Blake's 7). While the B7 budget was tiny to nonexistant, the Liberator was a splendid ship anyway (and for a glimpse of how it would have looked like with GCI, see the Excalibur from Crusade, with the ship not being the only thing in the B5 spin off - or B5 itself - used in homage to B7). It was the first but not the last "living ship" I fell in fannish love with (see below) and Terminal is as sad an episode as Orbit or Blake for me for that reason.

2.) Moya (Farscape). Moya the leviathan, a living ship in which the majority of the show's action takes place never says a single word on the show, but the series manages to convey her personality distinctly nonetheless, and she's as much a cast member as the ones played by human actors. ( Spoilers for Farscape and Doctor Who's sixth season ensue. )

Visually, the brown and golden organic colouring and all the curves instead of sharp angles really sell you on Moya as grown instead of built, and it's part of the unique Farscape world.

3.) The TARDIS (Doctor Who). One of many reasons why shipping wars in this fandom are so very superfluos is that the true OTP was always and without question Doctor (any regeneration)/TARDIS over forty years, and thank you, Neil Gaiman, for devoting an entire episode to this fact. :) (Well, there was that fling he had with Bessie the car , but other than that...) Seriously now, the idea of a blue police box being really the closet to Narnia a ship to traval through time and space with encapsulates the "wonderful nonsense" (lovely quote from The Next Doctor in one of the best verbal reactions to the TARDIS ever, uttered by David Morrissey) that is Doctor Who, and they who do not care for the TARDIS probably can't care for the show, either. Also?

4.) The Enterprise D (Star Trek: The Next Generation). Yes, I'm thoroughly fond of the original Enterprise, and get misty eyed when it explodes in ST III. But I still love the D best, with its bar Ten-Forward, its holodeck, its beige colours, Data's cat Spot and the ready room with Picard's goldfish Livingstone. It had a cosiness and home-iness the other versions lacked, which is of course why it later was disdained by certain fannish quarters. Maybe it's a sign of me getting old, but I like cosy. Space is cold enough anyway.

5.) Serenity (Firefly). Also a ship that feels like a home, despite coming from the other franchise tradition (aka it was obviously and acknowledgedly inspired by the Millennium Falcon). The show in its short life not only gave us one episode which showcased how Mal came to find her (Out of Gas) and why he's as in love as any other captain, but also a River-centric one where Serenity is both an invaded home and one that fights successfully back against the invasion (Objects on Space), and where she's paralleled to River, while the Big Damn Movie in its opening sequence manages to reintroduce the entire cast via a long uncut trip through the ship, thus reintroducing it as well, and ends with a direct Serenity/Zoe equation, and this last one is the one that struck me as most apt. If Moya, the Liberator and the Enterprise are more the motherly types of spaceships and the TARDIS is the Doctor's fellow traveller (or rather he is hers), Serenity is the war veteran of ships, battered, but still flying, and splendidly so.

Faces of the Renaissance

Every now and then, there are art exhibitions that make you - well, me - squee like a fan who has just been given tickets to a concert of their favourite musician, a new book from their favourite author, a new episode of their favourite show, you get the picture. Or pictures. The exhibition in question is called Dürer - Cranach - Holbein: The Discovery of Man: German Portraiture around 1500, was earlier in Vienna and will stay with us in Munich until January. While the three painters named in the title are undoubtedly the stars of the exhbition, there are a great many others represented, painters I vaguely knew the names of and some I had never heard of before, creating a rich context and showing that while those three were certainly extraordinary, portraiture as a whole florished wonderfully in the era. The faces are so extraordinarily alive for the most part, and if, as Dürer once wrote, one of the goals of art is to preserve life beyond death, well, they certainly succeeded. Rich burghers from Augsburg or Nuremberg, two servants (husband and wife, names unknown) from Henry VIII.s court who somehow must have endeared themselves to Holbein so he painted them small double portraits to put in a box, Dürer painting his old master's face after the later's death, a Venetian girl, a young man whose name has long gone - it's fantastic to behold.

Mind you: I find Holbein in general is better with the men than with the women. His Jane Seymour portrait, for example, compared with his portrait of the French ambassador, is so very bland. Cranach and his sharp angles and the heads that make you feel they're just a bit out of proportion with the body strikes me as the most medieval of the three, though in a compelling way. And Dürer is, hands down, the one painter to rule them all. Which isn't news, obviously, but it really is true. I was fascinated that the exhbition didn't choose to use one of his most famous self portraits which we do have in Munich (the one with the fur) and instead went for various family portraits (including one of his younger brother I hadn't seen before), not just his famous portrait of Jacob Fugger but various other studies of the man, and some portraits of women that showcase that female faces could be rendered as compelling (well, he didn't have Henry VIII. in his neck, but still, looking at you, Hans H.):







In conclusion: should you be in Munich before January next year, visit this exhibition by any means possible.