Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Yaphet Kotto!

Things I learned from Star Trek - remastered

Let's talk about Star Trek - the original series. You know, the genuinely entertaining one with hair on its sack. The one that's not just for nerds. The one that was "just a tv show" at the end of the day, but still showed the power of pulp fiction to connect to our culture and society. etc.

It's been streaming on NetFlix and I finally got around to revisiting it. Boy, am I glad I did. Here's what I learned.

1. I approve of the "remastering." I love rewatching things in HD and seeing things I couldn't before (stuntmen are very prominent), but there's even more here. The vibrant colors are fantastic, so 60's. And Lucas could learn a lesson from how tastefully the updated special effects were inserted. They conformed to the overall aesthetic and even enhanced the storytelling where the old, cheap effects - though charming - were limited. But Lucas won't listen. And he did his damage already, anyway.

2. Now that I'm grown up, I appreciate the futuristic babe-fest that was completely over my head when I was a kid watching re-runs while eating hamburger with a fork and knife (because there were no buns) at my divorced dad's apartment. I now have a major crush on Michelle Nichols. And here's two others: if you don't know who they google Julie Newmar or Barbara Bouchet. Hubba hubba

3. Everyone of the actors is so very lovable (Checkov's a little disposable, but that doesn't matter). Though they all have real chops, I think the writing and the narrative and directing conventions of the time have a lot to do with the affection audiences feel for these characters (Think of other decent actors stranded in mediocre SciFi flicks). I know I've always loved Kirk and McCoy, but I'm not sure Spock was always a favorite of mine. I've come to relish Spock-centered episodes, however, because Nemoy is a real fucking class act, and there's a lot of subtlety to his craft.

(BTW I can now recognize his Boston accent in his sometimes broad, English-sounding "a's," Like in "Transporter" or "Can't." I was very pleased with myself, like when I recognized the Boston accents of the Scarecrow and Tin Man last time I watched the Wizard of Oz. I enjoy that sort of thing.)

4. All that said, William Shatner fucking rocks the house. Yes, he's a ham, but this world needs hams. Enough with the gruff, laconic, tortured leading men of the past decades, Kirk needs to be a real Hero and a leader of men. In terms of acting, Shatner's like the front man of a great rock band. If you want to enjoy a superlative performance, You need to take the whole manic, egotistical, narcissistic package. You can't tell Axl Rose, Mick Jagger, or David Lee Roth, to "just turn it down a few notches."

5. They weren't kidding about those Red Shirts.

6. Scotty, you're fucking useless. Can't you, just for once, do something without all the drama? I kid, but Kirk maybe should think about whether a new Chief Engineer might help things run a little smoother.

7. They really loved their gams in the 60's. It's a Federation regulation or something that if you're a nice-looking gal with great gams, your outfit must reveal every inch of shapely thighs you've got. Even if that means silly little cheerleader shorts underneath the miniskirt that peek out every time you bend over even slightly.

8. I love the Jewish angle, being a jew myself. It's something lacking from the new movie franchise, along with a sense of narrative economy. Anyway, I IMDB'd Shatner, and I'm from the same Jewish stock he's from: those endomorphic Urkranian tribesmen. I relate to his early-middle age struggles to maintain a physique that he was used to as a younger man. And I love him for it. He would not be out of place at a family gathering of mine.

Spock's another kind of Jew, and the dynamic between Kirk and Spock can be seen as having a real intra-Jewish dynamic to it, an ongoing conversation between two tribes of Jews. And McCoy, who is Southern, is America. Or Something.

Or in broad, American terms, Kirk is the American Heartland, Spock is the cold, hard, Yankee Northeast, and McCoy is the sentimental, passionate old South.

Or maybe Spock is the brain and McCoy is the Heart, both for Kirk.

8. Brawls! You'd think in the future all these guys would fight real slick and quick like Jason Bourne, but this is the sixties, and all the fight choreographers were probably working on some Old West barroom brawl the rest of the week. I love the cut to the wide shot when the fight music starts. Gets me pumped. And is it just me, or is the camera woozily swaying to obscure the stuntmen, who are definitely Drunk Russian Sailors that they crammed in to costumes that are one size too small?

That is all for now

Hey, look at this...

Awesome, right?

My Top Podcasts – if anyone cares

5. The Smartest Man in the World (AKA the Proopcast): I just discovered this recently and now I'm delighted whenever I see a new one pop up in iTunes. I feel a connection with the way Greg Proops thinks, though he may be a much older gent than I, much stonier, and more metrosexual by an order of magnitude.

4. The Bugle (Audio Newspaper for a Visual World): A regular dose of English wit is a healthy thing.

3. Mysterious Universe. Covering the paranormal from Australia, these guys know how to keep the fun in their stories. They are also neither embarrassingly credulous or dogmatically skeptical. Everybody loves a good campfire story, and every once in a while, one of the stories on this show will send a good shiver up my spine.

2.WTF podcast with Marc Maron. I remembered this guy from Conan in the nineties, and that allowed me to get in early on what is now the comedy "podcast of record," as Ira Glass called it. Foronce, I got in on the ground floor of a pop culture phenomenon. So there.

1.Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Simply the best. Truth is always stranger than fiction. I find the most most absorbing stories are almost always nonfiction.

Some runners-up that might make the list in the future, if any of these start slacking and they pick up their game: Kunstlercast, Paracast, How did this get Made?, Doug Loves Movies, Comedy Death Ray.

Some popular ones that I used to follow avidly, but now I just don't ever want to listen to for some reason: This American Life, Radiolab, Risk.

On Nostalgia, or 13 Reasons why the Eighties Sucked

My academic pursuits have brought me to the dicey territory of nostalgia. I will unload here some thoughts that won't make it in to the final product, but I need to let out anyway.

My nostalgia is a second-hand longing for the childhood of my parent's generation, but I'll get to that in a future post. God-damn boomers.

Let me start with my own childhood, roughly the early eighties through the early nineties. I am not at all nostalgic for that period. I wish I was a kid today or in the late fifties or sixties.

The eighties were the worst decade of the twentieth century, after the thirties and forties, of course. I'll tell you why:

1. Kid's TV is much better today. 80's cartoons are unwatchable, no matter how nostalgic you're feeling. It's not just CGI, either: I can enjoy the hell out of Sponge Bob any day. As for grown-up tv, it need not be elaborated upon that we are living in a fucking golden age of TV right now. As for sitcoms, they are as good today as they ever were. So is SNL – try actually watching a whole 70's or 80's episode straight through. 
2. Toys are much better today. I always peek at the new Star Wars and GiJoe products when I'm in Target. Everything looks cooler and it all does cool stuff.
3. Kids today have the internet and and video games beyond the wildest fevered imagining of my 11-year old self. How fun is it really to run up the score against the computer in Nintendo baseball?
4. Playgrounds today are awesome. Mine were made of tubular steel and, yes, they were shaped like retro rockets but they were dangerous and ultimately not that fun. I have a chipped front tooth I can point to as battle scar. I saw as an adult my 8-yr old self in a home video moving ever-so gingerly on a tubular steel x-wing-like starship. There was a certain amount of fear I had to overcome if I wanted to indulge my imagination and climb in to that cockpit.
5. There were still ashtrays in public buildings – at chest height to a small child. 
6. The cities were terrifying, bombed-out by the crack wars. Stuck-up over-priveleged white kids who speak disparagingly of low-rent "ghetto" neighborhoods have no idea what a fucking mess our big cities were before gentrification really gathered steam in the mid-nineties. Not just ghettos, but whole downtown districts were terrifying shitholes. Abandoned, stripped cars lined the roads and highways as you drove past empty, mouldering buildings and forlorn vacant lots. Porn films still showed in downtown movie houses across the country – the ones that now house your performances of traveling Irish dance troupes or your local production of the Nutcracker. Litter and broken glass lined the streets. I know there are still shithole cities out there, but that is what all big cities used to look like.
7. American cars were shit, still cluelessly scrambling to compete with the Japanese while losing all their former uncomplicated bravura. 
8. Pop music was overproduced tripe. Something really strange happened to music in the eighties. Everything got all silvery, compressed and tense. It took me twenty years to get past the overproduction and come to terms with the music I liked in the eighties after grunge and alternative beat any appreciation for it out of me in college. That said, I think music today is much better than anything from the eighties. And the magical period of the mid-sixties to early seventies is still, to me, the golden age, no matter how much I'm sick of boomers in general. 
9. Hairstyles and fashion were incomprehensibly awful – parodic, like our houses were becoming.
10. Speaking of which, I'm now pursuing a career in architecture. The time period of my childhood years is the exact nadir of the American Architectural profession. 99% of non-residential architecture built between 1975 and 1995 was shit. Period. As for residential architecture, the period also represents the time when houses gradually stopped being architectural products (however quaint or kitschy in retrospect) and began their gradual transformation to the bloated fat Elvis parodies of domestic architecture we call McMansions. I watched as this retro-virus steadily infected our whole suburban environment. I remember the first round of renovations to our strip mall infrastructure: functionalist boxes began to sprout mansard roofs and develop half-timbering. Even as a child, I remember it all feeling strange. Architects themselves also saw their role in the American mythos shift: from the heroic Gary Cooper as Howard Rourke to, let's say, someone that can be either the everyday schlub like Ted Mosby (Architecture is just another job you can have.) or the laughably esoteric post-modern designer in Beetlejuice (what he did to that house is still a personal touchstone. Even when the style isn't the high post-modenism we see in Beetlejuice, there are definitely buildings that exude, in their own way, a macabre trendiness, for lack of a better term at the moment). The profession may never recover from the self-inflicted damage done by deconstructionism and post-modernism. God damn boomers.
11. President Reagan. If you're one of those drooling cretins who thinks he's one of the greatest presidents ever, well, you're a drooling cretin. And fuck you. When we elected Reagan, this nation collectively jumped the shark and then crammed its head up its ass.
12. Soviet Russia. Scarier than Al Quaeda any day. Terrorism is such a nebulous, impersonal, statistically improbable threat. Being scared of terrorism is just silly. It's like being scared of getting hit by a meteor. It can and has been effectively combatted with police work and counter-intelligence. The specter of Soviet Russia, however, was a horror as real and as black as your own death. Totalitarianism made hundreds of millions of people slaves to their states. It made millions more dead – starved or murdered. The simple fact of its existence seemed to point to a core of reptillian cruelty in the human soul and a dark destiny for civilization. And it was our enemy, with the ability to wipe out all human life if provoked. Not only that, but nobody really knew if our own society was sane enough not to start a global thermonuclear war at any moment. That's real fear: it can't be quantified, like your chances of being a victim of a terror attack, and it can't be can't be directly combatted, like rooting out terrorist cells.
13. On a personal note, my family was poor. Not grindingly poor, just poorer than all my friends. I was raised by a young single mother and we moved a lot (within the same town). I shared a room with my younger brother for most of my childhood and adolescence. So there.

More later...

The new Tron movie looks dumb.

My generation (I'm in my early thirties) has had an interesting run in Hollywood so far. Whereas George Lucas and Steven Speilberg were referencing and synthesisizing classic films and literature, our generation is referencing Lucas & Speilberg, without taking the leap back to the sources. Even the Star Wars Prequels and the new Indiana Jones, horrible as they were, managed to keep this level of postmodernism, looking back while looking forward. Other than obvious gen-x examples like Tarantino or Wes Andersen, where are we in the post-modern framework? Mirrored-glass office building facing another mirrored glass office building in a city of mirrored glass office buildings.

[edit: I saw Tron and it was even dumber than I thought it was going to be]

Alternative Nation

I've been really enjoying the What Ever Happened to Alternative Nation feature over at the A.V. Club:

Part one
Part two
Part three

Required reading for men of a certain age.