Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: Star Trek

As this is a pop culture and adventure fiction blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the biggest pop culture and adventure fiction event of summer 2009, the STAR TREK movie.

The long and the short of it was that it was pretty darn good. For J.J. Abrams and his writing staff to devote time and effort to setting this movie up as an "alternate timeline" with an actual relationship to traditional Star Trek (as opposed to just a cold reset-button pushing) was a pretty classy decision that respected Trek. I didn't realize this at the time, obviously, but I later read that they even put an effort to keep the stardates in this film consistent with the stardates in the original series. What's more, the movie had a sense of humor and the characters were recognizably themselves...everyone felt "on."

My favorite character from the series, Dr. McCoy, was played with a snap and teeth by Karl Urban, who plays him as a cynical, sarcastic guy and easily the most entertaining member of the crew. Chris Pine does a bang-up job as a Captain Kirk, though I always thought Shatner was a campy, hammy actor, sort of like Adam West only without the comic timing, so he had pretty small shoes to fill there.

In the wake of all the branched-off Trek series like Enterprise and Voyager that just exhausted everyone, it was easy to forget exactly what it was that made Star Trek so great in the first place: the characters. People like the characters and root for them. I've often wondered why Star Trek had such a downright unreally huge set of fans, when other shows from its era (even science fiction shows) have mostly been forgotten (for instance, who today watches, or even remembers, the Ron Ely Tarzan, which premiered the same evening that Trek did?). I think part of it had to have been the great chemistry the actors had, the friendship and warmth and sense of cameraderie. Experiencing this sort of feeling, even vicariously, can be very, very powerful to lots of young people. As Fry put it in FUTURAMA, "Growing up, I didn't have any friends, but STAR TREK made me feel like I did."

Roger Ebert wrote a great review of Star Trek Nemesis where he wrote about how just plain tired all this stuff had gotten. One example he used was the damn forcefield around the Enterprise, where every battle seemed to involve someone counting down the percentage ("shields at 30%!") and how they had to reroute power from the sides to the forward deflector shields or whatever the hell. In this movie, Star Trek is actually exciting: space battles cause explosions and fireball death, and instead of just shaking the camera, cracks form in the metal of the ship itself. Even Warp Speed feels new: the jump effect, in addition to the "thump" sound, actually made the standard jump visually intriguing for the first time. One of my personal favorite effects, and a deliberate throwback to the original series, was the scale-placement of a tiny USS Enterprise near huge, monstrous spaceships and other objects to emphasize the Enterprise's comparative smallness.

The movie was obviously written by a fan. They remembered Sulu was a skilled fencer with a love of swashbuckling, and give him a great sword to boot. They remember that Christopher Pike was the first Enterprise Captain, or Uhura's little silver earring that she wore as a part of her communications duties. A red-shirted crewman gets vaporized as a part of the landing party. They even have a few gags based on Kirk's middle name being Tiberius (a gift given by the Animated Series, incidentally, but more on that later).

It was great they had Uhura as a competent, smart character that actually plays a role in the story as opposed to being a glorified secretary.

The one casting choice that disappointed me was the one I was the most excited about in the beginning, namely Zachary Quinto (Sylar!) as Spock. I didn't realize it until Leonard Nimoy himself showed up, but Quinto lacks Spock's deep voice that lent gravitas to the character, as well as Nimoy's oddball creepiness that made him a natural for unsolved mystery show host duties. Instead of the contained rage that made Nimoy so successful, Quinto more openly expressed emotion to the point where Spock felt more uptight than self-controlled. Worse, except for one great scene at the beginning, Spock just didn't feel all that alienated and lonely: whereas he often stood apart from the Enterprise's mostly human crew if not actively resented (have a look at at "The Galileo Seven"), here Spock is a mostly respected mentor-figure.

The other actor I didn't much care for was Simon Pegg. While the very skilled Karl Urban made a real attempt to duplicate McCoy faithfully, and all the other characters from Pine to Quinto made an attempt to play their characters consistently with their previous characterizations, Simon Pegg went off in a totally different direction that was so "movie comic relief" that he didn't feel like Scotty at all.

The narrative conceit of time travel creating a new timeline felt hoary and overdone, but at least it energized the series with a real sense anything could happen. The movie was truly unpredictable. The one character I fingered as a dead man walking was Christopher Pike...and astonishingly, he actually lives to the end. Christopher Pike lived and Vulcan was destroyed, which is the exact reverse of what I expected would happen.

(I usually try to keep these spoiler-free, but I'm doing this review late so everybody that has an interest in seeing it has probably seen it by now.)

One of the great rules of writing tie-in novels was that you couldn't actually destroy anything important. The decision to blow up Vulcan midway through the film was shocking, because I thought the planet wasn't in danger.

All in all, STAR TREK reminded me of why I like this stuff in the first place. It actually got me scrambling to watch DVDs and list my favorite Trek moments.


GREATEST STAR TREK MOMENTS

1. "Haven"

Part of the reason the Troi-Riker relationship never went anywhere was because how little chemistry there was between Marina Sirtis and John Frakes. Don't get me wrong, both of them are skilled actors, but chemistry requires something unpredictable that those two just didn't have.

The reason I liked Haven was not because of the one thing about it that everyone remembers, namely the introduction of Lwaxana Troi. Lots of people found her annoying. I feel the same way, but that actually works for the character: she reminds me of some of my own relatives. The element of Haven I thought that worked the most was the story involving Wyatt teleporting over to the ship containing the last of the Tarellians, who were all dying of an infectious plague, in the hopes of curing them. I thought it was an extremely powerful ending, but more than that, has greater than normal potential for sequels. What happened to Wyatt and the Tarellians? Did he cure them? Did he die with them? What?

2. The Animated Series

What I always found surprising was that the Animated Series wasn't considered canon over at Paramount. Downright shocking, even, because it was a denial of reality: the animated series introduced valuable pieces of information that have been gospel as it gets ever since, from Spock's childhood (the city he grew up in has been mentioned frequently, as has Spock's pet giant teddy bear) to Robert T. April, to the idea that Tiberius was James Kirk's middle name.

The lack of canonicity of the Animated Series was in general, part of the overall shabby treatment that incarnation of Trek received. It was totally ignored and not even mentioned once, even in passing, in the 25th Anniversary Special and the 30th Anniversary celebration. Leonard Nimoy doesn't even mention it in I AM SPOCK. I have yet to read a single Trek behind-the-scenes book that had the decency to talk to Lou Scheimer about his contributions to the Star Trek legend. In general, the overall narrative among Star Trek fans is that the seventies was a "lost decade" where Trek only had syndicated reruns, conventions and no new material to slake their thirst for things Trek. An astonishing attitude, considering an entire series was produced in that era.

This view of Trek history, nothing more than chauvanism to a "mere cartoon," becomes even more startling when you consider the original cast played their original roles, the series was made under Gene Roddenberry's watch, and many scripts were written by original series writers like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana (and even science fiction great Larry Niven). All of them were writing and working at the best of their ability and produced brassy, thick science fiction of a kind not seen since the show's second season. What's more, the animated series featured Trek standbys like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, and the Guardian of Forever. The animated series obsessively duplicated the details of the bridge and the look of the ship, and created something near-identical to its visual look. For heaven's sake, this show was even set during the original 5-year mission. If this stuff isn't canon, then nothing is.

In some ways, this series is something of an improvement over the original Trek. For one thing, animation has an infinite special effects budget, and this series showed it: with monsters like the slug creatures that thought the Enterprise crew were pets, to the winged snake-god Kukulkan who looks like an airbrushed van design mixed with a peyote-hallucination (only in the seventies!) and other winged, fanged things that fly and slither on all-water planets and hostile volcanic ones. The episode set on the living, corpuscle-filled organic spaceship made the wobbly sand-filled sets of the original even more embarassing. I have no idea why the series is ignored: animation has a real ability to bring Star Trek to life in a way even live action can't.


3. My brother IRL-Trolls Wil Wheaton

According to the way he tells the story, around the early to mid nineties back when the family still lived in New York, my brother was taking a cab down Lexington Avenue. Because the traffic was intense, the car stopped frequently, and once stopped beside a couple movie theaters. Out of one of them, my brother saw Wil Wheaton, Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in the history of Star Trek, emerge from a movie theater with his date.

My brother unrolled the windows and cried, "Hey, Wil Wheaton!"

The little dweeb turned around and grinned, thrilled to be recognized, especially in front of a date.

To which my brother shortly after shouted "...you fucking putz!"



4. Maurishka Taliaferro

Maurishka Taliaferro, credited on-screen as Maurishka, may be one of the most historically significant guest-stars in Trek history. Maurishka was an exotic and successful model that was a huge fan of the series, who used her clout to get herself a role on the show itself, the relatively unmemorable Yeoman Zahra. What was even more amazing is, this was all the way back in Operation: Annihilate, the last episode of the very first season!

Maurishka was the first celebrity to use their clout to get a cameo role on Star Trek, a category that would later include Mick Fleetwood, Whoopi Goldberg, the Rock, and Tyler Perry.


5. Della van Hise's KILLING TIME

It's no secret that lots of the writers of the first wave of Star Trek novels got their start as writers of homoerotic slashfic. In fact, it's actually pretty amazing, since the writers of the series were overwhelmingly female. In fact, the term "Trekkie" originally started with writers of slash, a variation on "groupie." This, incidentally, is why many male fans prefer the more masculine "Trekker."

What was even most astonishing is that the first draft of Della van Hiise's manuscript was accidentally published, which was not only unintentionally, hilariously amateur in craft, but also sported tons of slash elements in an actual, mainstream novel: the warmth of Kirk and Spock's fingers as they mind-meld, and the stated idea that Kirk was Spock's true love. Creepy and hilarious, it is definitely one of the top Trek moments.



6. "Who Watches the Watchers?"

One theme of Trek that I always responded to was the idea that religion and superstition was pretty much flim-flam holding mankind's potential back. Trek operated under the humanistic view: mankind isn't perfect but it's the best we've got and we have nearly limitless potential. This view was articulated over and over, but never so explicitly as in "Who Watches the Watchers," a TNG episode that was, in its way, far more shocking than even the "queer" episode with the genderless aliens.

This is the one where a Starfleet observation post is discovered by Bronze-Age aliens who believe Picard is an omnipotent god and turn to worship him. Picard shows them the error of their ways. There was even a moment where an anthropologist encouraged Picard to abandon the Mintakans to their rediscovery of religion. Picard's eloquent response?

"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"

Sampo!

If you're a Finnophile like me, hearing about the 1960s movie SAMPO was mouth-wateringly exciting: a film dramatization of the Finn national epic, Kalevala (or at least a choice selection thereof). The film's American-edited version by American International Pictures cut over half an hour of footage from the film that has yet to be fully added. Most people are familiar with the shorter AIP cut when it aired in the U.S. as THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE, which aired on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

It's not hard to understand why this movie would look insanely, hilariously bad despite its generally high production values. Mostly because of a Kung Fu flick level terrible dubbing job by American International Pictures, but I think it might have been that the intended American audience lacked any social context for the story so it all just looked schizophrenically insane and random.

At least SAMPO fared a lot better than another AIP hatchetjob, where they redubbed a Soviet movie about a Russian folk tale with a blond main character as SINBAD'S MAGIC VOYAGE. (???)

Still, though. When spoofing THE DAY THE EARTH FROZE, they could have laid off the Swedish and Norwegian jokes. The confusion between Scandinavian and Finnish/Estonian culture is really annoying. I guess Mike Nelson, Joel and the rest were Midwesterners, so everything vaguely arctic-circle and European looked Scandinavian to them!

Here's a great selection of how the film looked in its original Finnish:



Here are a couple of the "lost" scenes from SAMPO, from the German version. These feature a plot cut from the first version of the film, namely the murder and resurrection of Leminkainen.

Greek Mythology

Continuing the series on World Mythology, here's a take on Greece.

In the beginning, classical studies focused in on what made Greece so unusual and their stories so extraordinarily different from the cultures around them. The best book to typefy this was Edith Hamilton, whose perky insistence the Greeks were super-duper special was one of the most irritating parts of the otherwise splendid MYTHOLOGY.

This kind of triumphalism is unsurprising. Classical Studies have always been a darling of the conservative right, since after all, emphasizing the uniqueness of Western culture separates us from our two archenemies, namely the Godless Commies on one hand, and the assorted disgruntled darkie hordes of the Third World on the other.

When education forcused on Math and Science during the 1960s so America wouldn't lose her tech edge to the Commies, William F. Buckley Jr. urged us not to forget Classical Greece and the humanities, which may have been the only time the World's Most Articulate Asshole and his attack dogs in the National Review were ever in favor of anything that benefitted the human race. Likewise, don't forget Victor Davis Hanson, the Dick Cheney psycophant, discredited after his invocation of Greece to cheerlead Cheney's oil-grabbing misadventures. The truth is, there's nothing that could be less relevant to Iraq or Afghanistan than Classical Greece: the Greeks and Romans never had to deal with anything like an insurgency or asymmetrical warfare. Think of it like this: if a native population attacked Greek soldiers, what do you think the Greeks would have done...to the entire city?

Nowadays, the pendulum has shifted and classical scholars are looking at the similarities between the Greeks and other cultures around them. It certainly helps that we know a lot more about Greek prehistory, thanks to archeology revealing more about the Greeks Indo-European ancestors, the Bronze Age period, the Pelasgians (the non-Indo-European original inhabitants of mainland Greece), and the palace culture of Knossos. There was a wonderful travelogue book entitled ZEUS that traced the life's story and origins of Zeus in a Greek travel book, which investigated the Big Guy's origin in Indo-European and tribal belief.

With that in mind, there are a few things important to emphasize when reading Greek Mythology:

1. The institution of the hero came from Ancestor Worship.

In fact, the reason we are familiar with some heroes is because their cults were important at significant places...not the other way around! Castor and Pollux were a part of the state worship of Sparta, for instance. Some hero-cults were downright bizarre: on Samothrace, the Orphic Mysteries believed the hero-musician Orpheus emerged from the underworld with secret knowledge. Since the Orphic Mysteries were a secret society concerned with magic salvation, we know very little about them...but supposedly initiates in the Mysteries were protected from drowning.

In many ways, the Greek form of ancestor-worship was very similar to the Chinese, Aboriginal, and Sub-Saharan African version of the same practice. Ancestors weren't just the spirits of long-dead blood relatives, but superhuman figures from the distant past with real influence on present events.

It's important to note that Greece was divided into closely-related clans or tribes, called ethnos, rather like Scottish Highlanders. In some cases, being a part of one ethnos was, like the Clintons, Kennedys and Bushes today, a ticket to real political power. Each ethnos had its own hero that they claim descent from, which is what makes reading a lot of epics so dense and impenetrable: lots of little shout-outs to minor-league heroes that pop up just to give that portion of the audience a thrill.

The hero-ancestors had great importance for propaganda and political purposes. A hero's fame increased if the tribe he was related to came into power. After pan-Greek sentiment was the big uniting feeling after the Persian Wars, the previously unimportant hero Hellas was pointed to as a common ancestor for all Greeks everywhere.

2. Greek religion had a surprisingly dark flip-side with extremely ancient roots.

Called Cthonic worship, this type of worship was conducted underground and in caves, often with blood sacrifice to earth and death deities. Hecate, a moon goddess of magic and death, was one of the chief of the Cthonic gods. Hades was another. In fact, Hades was often associated with Zeus, either as a split personality or as a twin brother. The clear-cut separation between Zeus and Hades is a modern invention. Hades after all, was often referred to as Zeus Cthonios: the Cthonic Zeus.

3. The Greeks and Romans didn't take their myths seriously. They loved to lampoon, deconstruct, and usurp their own myths, even from the get-go.

The Byzantine Empress Theodosius, prior to marrying the most powerful man in the world, was a professional stripper who specialized in lewd and sexy reinactments of Greek and Roman myths.

This irreverence towards myth is typical of the classical world. It would be a mistake to call most Greeks and Romans atheists (a very modern attitude inappropriate for the Ancient World), but nonetheless the majority of them didn't believe in the literal truth of their myths and didn't take them all that seriously.

One of the great additions to Greek drama was the Satyr play, which were comic parodies of myths often performed in festivals to help the mostly drunk observers wind down after the super-pompous main performances generally shown at such festivals. The Satyr plays often remind me of the Abbot and Costello movies where the duo met Frankenstein or Hercules, with the goofy figures of the satyrs, horny to the point they sported comically oversized prop erections, were casually slipped into the myths like Forrest Gump. The only existing satyr play to come down to us in its entirety was by Euripides and featured a bunch of Satyrs caught up with Odysseus in his famous escape from the Cyclops. The most typical scene was one where the Cyclops threatened to capture and rape a satyr prison-style. Yes, the satyr plays are as totally hilarious as they sound.

In fact, the most readable and entertaining collection of Greek myth was Ovid's METAMORPHOSES. Ovid was wildly disliked because of this very humor, warmth and humanity. Augustus Caesar, like all prudes and snotty moralists the world over, had zero sense of humor and no tolerance for parody, and much preferred the boring, sterile and unreadable Virgil's AENEID (which not incidentally, kissed the ass of the ruling class and their values) rather than the subversive Ovid. Ovid was someone that actually did use humor as a deadly weapon to speak truth to power: aware of the corruption and indiscretion of the priesthood under Augustus (after all, one of the great ironies of human culture is how sexual perversion proliferates under repressed societies and becomes less frequent with more permissive ones) his book AMOR (which was ROMA spelled backwards!) mentions the Temple of Apollo as a great spot to pick up women. Apparently, the uptight Augustus was unamused: it's commonly believed Augustus Caesar ordered Ovid whacked. Of course, Ovid had the last laugh: his METAMORPHOSES is one of the most influential and widely read work in Western history, whereas Augustus Caesar is worm food. Presumably the devils in hell are right now ass-raping Augustus, and he's probably enjoying every moment of it.

Ovid's METAMORPHOSES is almost like a Mad-Magazine parody of Greek myth. When familiar figures in Greek myth appear, they are often bumbling, ineffective and entirely mortal. The only story featuring the Superman of Greek myth, Achilles, is one about the one time he proved himself impotent against the warrior Cygnus. In one humorous scene, after the battle with Cygnus, Achilles kills a guy just to see if he can still do it. Likewise, Apollo, god of reason and superhottie supreme, is shown as being irrational: crazy in love with Syrinx, a nymph that rejected him and turned into a tree to escape him. The only story with Hercules is one of his death. Nestor, the wise councilor of the heroes in the war against Troy, is shown in METAMORPHOSES as a senile Abe Simpson type that tells stories that go on weird, ranting tangents.

Ovid's stories are full of magnificent imagery, funny characters and imagery: the idea of dolphins swimming through forests after Zeus floods the world, for instance. METAMORPHOSES remains one of the only two books in college I didn't sell back to the bookstore after the course was over.

What it would take to make me a Republican

One of the classic tests for scientific validity is refutability – that is, what does it take to convince you you’re wrong? My allegiance to the Other Guys isn’t an emotional one caused by fuzzy childhood memories, but because there are anxieties and concerns that I have that the Republican Party aren’t addressing and have chosen to cede the issue almost entirely to the Democrats instead of remaining competitive with alternate solutions: for instance, the issue of the national problem of health insurance, or for solutions to climate change.



1. Propose a plan to make single-payer health insurance affordable to most Americans.

One of the intriguing ideas in Grand New Party: Conservatism that Can Win Again is the idea that economic issues are a kind of social issue, that there are some topics that Republicans have totally ignored that are of great concern to Americans. For instance, the chief Republican financial solution is a call for greater tax cuts, when the majority of Americans don’t receive much in the way of tax cuts anyway, and the concern and anxiety, the real crisis for most Americans that keeps them awake with worry at night, is health insurance.

Instead of just opposing a universal health system of the type proposed by Democrats in 1994, Republicans should be asking themselves what they can do to make single-payer health insurance more affordable and accessible to the point where the overwhelming majority can qualify for it. Part of this involves, at some level, an admission that the system as it currently is, leaves millions upon millions of Americans without coverage.


2. Admit the anthropogenic causes of global warming, and propose market-centered solutions to the problem.

Science is in a state of universal agreement on the human causes of global warming. Obfuscating this issue is a denial of science and reality.

Instead, Republicans should be asking themselves how, as opposed to straight-up intervention, the market itself can be used to correct the problem. One Republican idea was the idea of taxing emissions: taxation based on the number of carbon emissions can be used to provide a real, market-based incentive to switch to cleaner means of operation, all without the necessity of straight-up legislation, for example.


3. Endorse the idea of limited economic protectionism.

I will never entirely 100% believe that deregulation is the answer for economic problems the way a minority of economists do, because protectionism for workers and others is one of the fundamental tasks of a society concerned about the general welfare. The abandonment of child labor and the establishment of the minimum wage are actions that are principled and a responsibility for a civilized nation that seeks to protect the entirety of its citizens instead of just the wealthy as Republicans often do, at least at present.

Where reasonable people can disagree, however, is where protectionism is called for and where it isn’t. What should be the right percentage in the equation of government sanctions to loose and legally unrestrained finance? Instead of being 100% against any type of economic protectionism, Republicans should be in favor of a limited, responsible type that regulates business practices within ethical reason. The entirety of the housing crisis is almost entirely on the onus of banks and unethical lending practices, for example.




4. Adopt the doctrine that military force is only to be used in areas of strong national interest, and have a clear-cut, practical and real goal that can be completed.

The problems with the wars that Bush II and his buddies started is that they forgot the lessons of Vietnam: before committing to war, the United States has to think hard and cold about what it wants and cannot get moral about a conflict. This is part of the reason one of the few Republicans I admire is George Bush Sr.: the first Gulf War was absolutely the best solution to the problem and one of the greatest American victories since World War II. It wasn’t a moral conflict intended to bring democracy or other such nonsense, but dedicated to rational, cold and real objectives: destroying Saddam’s ability to wage war on his neighbors and then leaving him in charge of his snakepit of a country.




5. Dump the Evangelicals and the social “wedge issues”

Are you a white, Christian male? If so, you’re a minority in the United States. The Republicans appeal mainly to you, and it’s for that reason they consistently lose and are often morally and intellectually in the wrong in ways that are not consistent with the tenets of economic conservatism.

This, incidentally, are the totally cynical tenets of the Rovian election strategy: use an issue that splits and breaks apart the American electorate and hope you end up with the bigger piece. This has been one of the nastier, more vicious elements of Republicans in recent times and the least amenable to reason: the use of social issues that do not directly address any problem that voters have (the ultimate example being the rights of adult gay couples) to cause voters to forget issues on which they would be affected personally (health insurance).

Creationism in particular is an absurdity on the level of the Flat Earth. Republicans should not be dignifying this with support. Ironically, Medieval Christianity (and to a lesser extent, Medieval Islam) created the modern scientific, rational worldview, and the embracing of creationism is an appallingly unjustifiable step.



If Republicans don't believe any of the above represent solutions, that's just fine. After all, all that they have to do to continue losing is to just keep on doing what they're doing.

Doing Comics the Marvel Way!

Leonardo da Vinci, greatest of the Renaissance artists, loved to draw grotesqueries: people in the street, older peasants, crones and so forth, for the simple reason that it was impossible to understand beauty without ugliness. For that reason, to understand why Marvel was so innovative and unique, you have to understand the context the House that Stan and Jack Built emerged from. This means DC Comics, and to a lesser extent, Charleton (Incidentally, I don’t include Tower Comics in this analysis, as Tower was clearly inspired by Marvel humor, Marvel-style solid sense of worldbuilding, and characterization-centered storytelling – even their war comics showed this: FIGHT THE ENEMY was more like Kirby than Kanigher).

In the past 20 years (and most intensively in the last eight or so years since the ascendancy of Geoff Johns in particular), DC has adopted the Marvel-style of storytelling and art, continuing a process that started in the 1970s, when Marvel writers and creators like Wolfman, Englehart, Gerber, Wein and others migrated over and gave DC a sense of Marvel-style dynamism and excitement. So, a lot of you readers, especially younger ones, who think of the DC and Marvel relationship in terms of interchangeable red and blue M&Ms may be thinking, “wow, what’s up with this guy? What’s he on about?” Keep in mind I’m referring to DC in pre-modern ages, when there really was a difference.

What was it that made Marvel such an innovation? Seven things:


1. Long-term storytelling

There is no real reason to read a DC Comic of the 1950s to the 1970s regularly, no reason to buy them regularly. This is because the stories are sitcom-like and compartmentalized, begun and over in sixteen pages. This gives them not only a painfully fossilized status quo, but also leads to a type of storytelling where, that a result of the requirement for convenient resolution, stories have a lack of weight and consequence. In the end, who really cares whether Superman saves this or that alien invasion if the alien race seen in the invasion is never seen again and the invasion attempt isn’t mentioned again? It might as well never have happened, and so it is ephemeral, lacking weight, a diversion to spend three minutes on.

Contrast this is to Stan Lee and Kirby, where they invented multi-issue storytelling gradually, simply because their ideas were too big and epic to tell in a single comic. Multi-issue storytelling was not new, but the reliance upon it WAS new to Marvel. Multi-issue storytelling gave a reason to buy more than one issue of a comic, as was the emphasis on characterization centered storytelling. Because characters remember what happens to them, events have a real significance: if Wonder Man defeated an Ultron, it gives greater tension and sense of occasion to when Ultron and Wonder Man meet again.

If characters remember their history, you’re almost guaranteed to see something new. For instance, as a result of the fact that Hawkeye led an Avengers team (Avengers West Coast) the Hawkeye/Captain America dynamic was fundamentally altered. Hawkeye can’t be a rookie hanging on Cap’s every word anymore.


2. Characterization-centered storytelling

At DC, until the mid-1970s, all the characters had the exact same personality. They had the exact same speech patterns, the same maturity, the same grounded sense of scientific reasoning and disbelief in the supernatural, the same respect for traditional authority: police, judges, the legal system, and so forth.

Many Classic DC fans I’ve spoken to (yes, there is such a animal: living fossils surviving to modern times like the coelacanth despite their own irrelevance – dying, aging, ultra-rare and near-extinct, they still exist to plague mankind like Lillith, Pazuzu and other evil demons of Assyrian mythology), one critique is that the heroes fight each other. Well, sure: if you’re used to characters that think the same, talk the same, have the exact same relationship to the forces of law and order on a practical and philosophical level, have the exact same relationship and view by the public at large, and even a neatly handed out Lois Lane-equivalent girlfriend (with Aquaman and Hawkman as notable exceptions), then yes, of course it’s inevitable that the characters would see eye-to-eye. Change any one of these details, and conflict between heroes is not only possible but an inevitability.

Part of this also meant Marvel characters had a fundamental mortality. As they weren’t meant to be male power projections (at least exclusively) they could be wounded or defeated. Take the cover to AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36. Spider-Man is unmasked, defeated and a prisoner of the Green Goblin. It’s a shocking image, but it was an even more shocking one on the newsstand in 1961, when heroes tended to be of the DC mold: immortal and assured of victory.

This is easily one of the most surprising elements of Marvel storytelling: because of the humanity of the characters (or more accurately, their de-emphasized superhumanity), they tended to lose fights. For the first time, there was actually a very real (instead of illusory) sense of anxiety about whether the characters would emerge triumphant. No DC character, even the Atom or Aquaman, could ever accurately said to be an underdog. Yet even Thor, easily the most powerful of the Marvel heroes, lost the first fight to the Absorbing Man; he lost the first great fight between himself and Hercules; even when he achieved victories against beings like the Destroyer, he was held against the ropes and won by a clever scheme at the end by the skin of his teeth (the Destroyer even broke one of the great “rules” of early Thor and destroyed the supposedly indestructible Uru hammer!). Spider-Man often lost, but pulled himself back together again, as did the Fantastic Four.

3. Worldbuilding

Despite their storied reputation as founders of the Justice League, for the first ten years of the group’s existence, Superman and Batman were at best guest-stars. The reason for this is that DC was divided into editorial fiefdoms: Kanigher (who specialized in war comics like OUR MEN AT WAR), Julie Schwartz (an old school science fiction fan that specialized in stories influenced by science fiction pulps, whose titles were easily the most readable, intelligent and adult of DC’s output), Murray Bolitnoff (affectionately referred to as “Fuckface” by Schwartz), and Mort Weisenger (a very temperamental man who, because of the general childishness and formula of his output, is remembered very poorly by posterity). As a result, as Justice League was Schwartz-edited, Superman and Batman, who were both properties of another editor, were mostly absent from Justice League stories for almost the initial run.

From the outset, Marvel had a sense of interconnectivity that made the world feel more real, and also gave the titles a sense of group identity. When Kurrgo came from Planet X in FANTASTIC FOUR #7, Reed Richards was able to solve the problem using Hank Pym’s shrinking gas. In the very first issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man encountered the Fantastic Four. Villains were shared: in the Marvel Silver Age, Doctor Doom, Namor and the Mole Man fought more or less everyone at some point.

This is true of DC to a considerably lesser extent. There were semi-regular team-ups (the Flash and Green Lantern team-ups in BRAVE AND THE BOLD come to mind, as does the Challengers/Doom Patrol team-ups), but for the most part titles were solidly and airtightly compartmentalized. When Tyrannus, a subterranean ruler was introduced in the pages of the Incredible Hulk, it was immediately wondered what kind of a relationship he had with the Mole Man, another underground ruler, a question that was answered immediately. (They were deadly rivals and enemies, incidentally.)

It sounds cliché to say, but it is worth repeating: Stan Lee’s superhero comics injected a greater sense of real-world logic into them. For the most part, this was used for humor: Spider-Man can’t cash a check just based on his costume and powers; the FF often had money troubles; Doctor Doom claimed diplomatic immunity for many of his schemes, and couldn’t be charged with any of them. After all, there isn’t a law against wanting to take over the world!

With DC Comics, the implications of superheroes on the world wasn’t really explored, apart from clearly wish-fulfillment details like the public’s unconditional love of a given superhero. The emphasis wasn’t on creating something with coherence and internal logic, but rather as clear wish-fulfillment projections. For instance, with characters of the shockingly high power level like the Flash, Green Lantern and Superman, there’s a real question of why there’s any crime at all on Earth-1.

Also, as stories were compartmentalized, they didn’t take worldbuilding seriously. It’s almost safe to say that DC had a universe-wide case of attention-deficit disorder. Ideas of really earthshaking importance are often thrown out and forgotten: for example, there was one Superman story where he joined the army which was never mentioned again, and there was another story (the first Flash/Green Lantern team-up) that established a world existed in a dimensional barrier, which flying heroes can occasionally reach. This vibrationally-off world has not appeared since its first appearance in 1960.

Yes, there are ideas or world elements that Marvel forgot about: the Vanisher barely appeared after his first appearance (in X-MEN #2, no less!), and the Impossible Man has the distinction, along with L’enfant Terrible, Kurrgo, and Master Man, of being the only villains to appear in the first 25 issues of Fantastic Four to never become standard elements of the Marvel Universe. And yes, there are some DC ideas that “stuck around,” that actually were mentioned again and were consequential as a result: the Earth-1/Earth-2 difference introduced in FLASH, the first appearance of Supergirl.

Yet, what is interesting about Supergirl is this: Kara Zor-El is the third such character to have the name of Supergirl. The other two have been forgotten because they didn’t last beyond their debut issues. The only reason Supergirl is remembered is because she was so very anomalous, as far as Superman comics in the Weisenger Era. Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen regularly gained superpowers and went through incredible transformations, which always vanished conveniently at the end of the story. Superman once joined the army, a fact that has never been mentioned again.

Almost any given innovation in any given Superman story was never mentioned again. This is why Superman comics frequently relied on hoaxes, dreams and imaginary stories: otherwise nothing really sticks. This is why the introduction of Supergirl was such an extraordinary event: she wasn’t revealed to have been a hallucination at the end and quickly forgotten. In fact, it’s easy to look at the cover for Supergirl’s debut with just as much skepticism as Superman himself shows on that image: Weisenger-era Superman regularly produced dishonest fakeouts with astonishingly formulaic commonality. Why should this “Supergirl” be any different?

All of this, however, should be seen with something of a caveat. The implications of Superman having a still-living relative weren’t explored. Kara was conveniently shipped off to an orphanage with startling callousness by Superman; another example of DC characters acting out of character to preserve the all-important status quo, a behavior on the part of the writers that is both frustrating and creatively cowardly.

The ultimate effect of this Marvel-style realism, even when used playfully and humorously, was a greater sense of consequence for Marvel books. Superman’s secret identity was a game he played with the people he knew, whereas with Spider-Man, his secret identity was a deadly serious business.


4. Pursuit of a single vision

One of the most annoying parts of DC Comics is how characters are altered as a result of free market forces, to the point where a coherent identity is totally lost. Batman is the most outrageous example of this. In his original issues, Batman was an atmospheric character with dark ambience. But come the fifties, Batman was pushed toward space opera stories that are utterly inappropriate for him, that compromised his identity.

To be clear: I am not saying that characters in Marvel Comics don’t change with the times. Captain America for instance, experienced wide and profound changes based on Watergate and Vietnam thanks to Englehart’s run, but the character Englehart wrote in his issues of Captain America was clearly and recognizably the same Captain America that Stan Lee and Kirby brought back in AVENGERS and appeared in TALES OF SUSPENSE, only adjusting and responding to a different set of circumstances. Batman, come the introduction of Robin, and later during the space opera age, was almost a totally different character, in characterization, behavior and motivation.

The reason Marvel’s characters have a degree of contiguousness is not so much because one man wrote all of them simultaneously, but because the writers that followed Stan Lee thought the key to believability, to say nothing of the long-term audience, was consistency. The Scarlet Witch that appears now in current Marvel comics is the exact same character that Stan Lee and Roy Thomas wrote about in the 1960s. The Thing behaves, speaks and acts today more or less the exact same way he did in the 1960s.

Essentially the revalation Marvel had was that, in order for something to have believability, it can’t be an artificial, fictional construct that varies depending on which writer and artist work, that there has to be a thread of (dare I say it) continuity.

Part of this involves the importance of history: characters have to be able to remember their pasts. This gives greater emotional power to stories. For instance, Avengers stories where Ultron is the villain have much greater weight and a sense of occasion because of the history the Avengers have with Ultron and the toll he has taken on them, as well as his creation of the Vision and his relationship with Hank Pym and the Wasp. If a character was created with roughly Ultron’s powers and ability to create fear, he wouldn’t be as interesting or entertaining an antagonist Ultron because of Ultron’s history with the Avengers.

I apologize if all of this seems painfully obvious, but it was a very real revelation in 1961. And a very real revalation today, as a result of a great number of thickheaded morons that seek to disrespect and reverse the legacy of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with absurd “anti-continuity” sentiments. If I treat this perspective with disrespect, it is because it is unworthy of respect and serious consideration.


5. Pursuing the College-Age Audience

There’s a difference between something being a children’s comic and something being a childish comic.

The problems of Marvel heroes are fundamentally adult problems that are only comprehensible to intelligent children, teenagers and adults. The Thing’s alienation and self-loathing, for instance, or the X-Men’s rejection by society. The shift in audience brought in a smarter kind of storytelling. In fact, the shift in audience made so much else about Marvel possible, like long-term storytelling and a greater emphasis on the characters.


6. Dynamic Art

Last but not least, even the art on Marvel books were almost totally different. DC artists were beautiful but boring, stiff and dead. Gil Kane in particular is like a dead rat: the only way he looks alive is if you jiggle him a little. In fact, if Stan Lee had to work with Gil Kane and Curt Swan (to say nothing of the terminally uncreative DC artists like Sekowsky and Al Plastino) it’s unlikely that the Marvel style of storytelling would even be possible. Even when Kirby was hobbled by lousy inkers (Chic Stone and Vince Colletta) his art crackled and was centered on motion. Marvel artists even tried to draw like Kirby did: John Romita did, as did Rich Buckler (who at least in the beginning did nothing but Kirby swipes).

AFTERMATH

It's difficult to find a way to close this article neatly, except to say that the legacy of Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Jack Kirby, Don Heck and others is alive and well, and should be protected from outside threats. The greatest danger to the very extraordinary, unique creation that is the Marvel Universe are from two different threats: the "Ultimatization" of the Marvel Universe, where the MU itself is influenced by writers and creators that made a name for themselves on the Ultimates, such as Bendis and Mark Millar, who bring the "Ultimate" sensibility to a Marvel Universe where it is unwarranted and inappropriate. The other is from the influx of "DC-minded" people. This is nothing new: Mark Gruenwald perpetrated some outrageous things on the Marvel Universe (the prominence of the Squadron Supreme, for one, and the marriage of Hawkeye to a Black Canary clone) when he believed he was writing for a different company. The greatest offender is Grant Morrison, who with his indifference to consistent characterization and history, no doubt imagines himself at DC in the 1950s.

Through it all, the House of Ideas will survive, particularly with absolutely brilliant writers: Ed Brubaker and his Captain America, Peter David on X-Factor, and Dan Slott on Avengers: the Initiative, which almost makes up for the loss of Busiek.

EXCELSIOR!

Steve Englehart Speaks!

"Stainless" Steve Englehart, superhero comics's greatest writer, does an audio interview from 2005, when he was doing Darknight Detective.

Steve Englehart Speaks

Incidentally, read the comments to his thread. Comics fans are a garrulous, fractious bunch, and if you get six fans in a room, you get nine opinions. But in one thread, not a single negative comment.

Not. One!

I can't think of anyone that has this effect on comics fans, except maybe Alan Moore.

The only downside is a nauseating narrator, who plays Willie Scott to Englehart's Indiana Jones. "I think there's validity to every version of Batman." Well gee whiz, what's so freakin' special about Englehart then, eh, you dick?

Comics Fans Say the Dumbest Things

Comics fans often remind me of a savage tribe in the South Pacific that's confronted with a solar eclipse. They're confused and enraged, and because they don't understand what's going on, they respond with fear or anger instead of reason. They panic, form themselves into mobs, and concern themselves with violence and apportioning blame: who's blood has to be shed in order to bring the sun back?

So it's no surprise that they start believing the most absurd or outrageous myths. Their basis isn't coherent or even rational; it's just a savage panic that seizes onto the nearest idea.

First and foremost, there's the absurd desire to pursue that chimera, so-called "new readers." This or that book needs to attract newbies to survive, and so forth.

In and of itself this isn't that bad, but its a phrase so overused that it has become in and of itself meaningless, the way "freedom" became a goofy catchphrase to justify whatever outrageously exploitative scheme politicians wanted to ram down our throats.

The argument that comics need to appeal to new readers is often used by so-called "fans" to show that it is necessary to jettison baggage (little, unimportant details like consistent characterization, history and worldbuilding!), which they argue, confuses and angers new readers, like cows caught outside in a hailstorm. If I make this argument sound like it treats "new readers" as if they're stupid and illiterate, that's because it does.

When someone is disoriented by a flurry of unfamiliar names, places and events and don't know what is going on in a story or novel, guess what? They don't stop reading. People that make this argument just don't read things, or haven't read anything in the past twenty or thirty years.

Take any science fiction novel that has been written in the past 40 years, for instance. It won't bother to explain terms or worldbuilding; it throws you right in the thick of the middle. If you can guess what's going on after the first fifty pages of Dune, The Stars My Destination, or Neuromancer, or the average Cordwainer Smith story, you're lying or very, very clever. Yet that hasn't stopped anyone from being enthralled by the Girl Who Sailed the Stars or Paul Atreides.

The truth of the matter is, complex and engrossing worldbuilding is a strength rather than a weakness. Why do the same comics "fans" filled with awe and wonder at startling creations like Tolkien's Middle Earth or the dinosaur filled earth of Harry Harrison's West of Eden novels and then reject superhero comics for doing the very same thing?

Many of these same fans turn against so-called "continuity" because they feel it holds comics back. It's interesting to note that these fans are often DC fans; this particular kind is much rarer over in Marvel-land, because the Marvel Universe was built on the idea that suspension of disbelief is aided by consistency, and that characters have to behave like real people, which includes having a history, being affected, growing and changing as a result of their stories, and the idea that characters shouldn't wildly change because a different writer takes over...and finally, the idea that long-term, serial storytelling done over several issues and possibly even years has far greater entertainment value than sixteen page, compartmentalized little distractions that don't affect anything else.

There is nothing wrong with comics that appeal to the strengths of the fan audience.

Finally, this "logic" is also a false dilemma: either a comic appeals to the reader on the street, OR it appeals to comics fans with big memories. This is patently false.

The Truth Betrayed

The most frustrating thing about Peter Schweitzer's THE MOUSE BETRAYED, a story about how Disney was transformed after its founders' death by Eisner and others into something that Walt would find unrecognizable, is that it is sometimes very true: there have been occasions where Disney Theme Parks have kept injuries at their parks secret by transporting wounded visitors to their own facilities instead of to hospitals.

By the far the most surreal anecdote is how at Disneyworld, at least once per day on average in the summertime, one guy in a cartoon character faints from the Florida heat, where they are then shoved into the back of a "Code Blue" van, an internal ambulance. The idea of someone that shoves for a living collapsed Disney characters into an ambulance all day is a pretty bizarre thought.

I got the feeling all while reading this that there was a sort of disingenuousness at work, and it was politically motivated. Only a portion of the book is related to actual, real malfeasance on the part of the Disney company: corruption, mismanaged finances, park injuries, and even one chapter that accuses THE LION KING of plagiarism from the famous KIMBA THE WHITE LION.

(The book was written before the most offensive creative decision, the endless sequelization of everything: Pinocchio II, and so on.)

The majority (two-thirds) of the book are about things that are only bad deeds if you're a right-wing ideologue that rates entertainment in terms of how it subscribes to your ideology instead of any intrinsic value: Disney Parks' tolerance of homosexuals (including the famous "Gay Day"), Disney's multiculturalism (as seen in films like "Pocahontas"). Finally, there's Disney's decision after Eisner to make non-family films under the Miramax label, not "Disney" proper.

The book reads like its top priority is to "score points" and make cheap shots, and there are some occasions where it gets downright sloppy. The moment I realized this book wasn't being honest with the reader was in the first few pages when it lambasted Michael Eisner for supporting the movie WHITE DOG.

The exact quote from the book is like this:

"[Eisner] had insisted on producing WHITE DOG, a movie about a racist canine that attacked only blacks. It was considered so bad it was only shown on basic cable." (Schweitzer, pg. 4)

I can just imagine after writing this diss of a sentence, Peter Schweitzer turned to his wife for a high-five and a BOOYAH! It has the smarmy air of a fratboy slam.

But no one ever considered WHITE DOG a terrible movie; it was denied release because of its incindiary subject matter. It was shown on basic cable not because it was "bad," but because it was the only way to get the movie released after misguided activists and scared suits bailed on its theatrical release. It was just a cheap shot against Eisner, and it bothers me they misportrayed one of my favorite movies to do it.

WHITE DOG was a pull-no-punches, haunting and weird story by one of Hollywood's most subversive directors. The quote above frames WHITE DOG as one the very worst exploitation pictures, a bad concept film like KROG with Joan Crawford, about an unfrozen caveman that goes berserk every time he hears rock music.



I can never find myself ever becoming truly offended about politics or religion. But slam a good movie, or frame it in a false and deceptive way? Now that just ticks me off.

As for the rest of the book, its guilty of an error: assuming that readers will be offended by things the writer clearly finds ofensive. The transformation of Disney from a studio that Tom Hanks once described as "like being at a Greyhound bus station in the fifies" to a slick Hollywood operation just like Paramount, Columbia and the rest is only a truly offensive thing if you buy into the implicit value system the writer may not even be aware is at work, where things that are rural and bucolic are superior to things that are urban; that family entertainment is valued over things that are just for the adults; that in general, things in the past were better than they are today.

For this reason, whenever the writer trotted out something that he invites us to see as tragic, like the idea of a large entertainment corporation having a side arm that produces pornography, it gets a big, fat "so what?" from me.

In the end, that's the most blistering critique I can offer of THE TRUTH BETRAYED: the book only has its effect if you're already a true believer, so it gives you even more to have (self-)righteous ragegasms over. "Gay Day" is only offensive to those that dislike homosexuals. If you're indifferent to the homos, or have a "live and let live" libertarian philosophy, it's impossible to be offended.

Obama as an NPR commenter in 1994

Now this is interesting! Obama, when he was a civil rights lawyer, did an NPR commenter piece lambasting the racism of Murray's The Bell Curve, and encouraged development by blacks within black communities.

Listen to it here.

Who'd have thought in 1994 that Obama would turn out to be more famous than any of the variety of folks that aired their piece on "All Things Considered?" Not bad for a Hawaiian kid with a weird name that wanted to be an artist on Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian.

TV that's good for you

There are a few TV shows that are a part of our lives, and for me, one of them is Dr. Eugen Weber's THE WESTERN TRADITION. It was a series of 52 shows that completely summarized the history of the West, a "lecture" show acccompanied by slides from the Modern Museum of Art.

I have never in my life been a couch potato: I got a grand total of 1 hour of TV every other day when I was a kid, most of that "unsolved mystery" shows (or Star Trek), usually IN SEARCH OF... though I would take whatever I got and frequently settled with Nimoy's lousy imitators.

THE WESTERN TRADITION was a show that came on immediately after I came home from school, and my Grandfather watched it. My Grandfather was an immigrant and spoke English as a second language, so he was always conscious of how people spoke in a way native speakers don't. I guess that's why he loved Dr. Weber: he spoke beautiful English, and Gramps listened to Dr. Weber speak for the same reason most of us put on Coltrane records.

THE WESTERN TRADITION was basically a series of lectures accompanied by a slideshow, which must sound very boring to people that haven't seen it. Eugen Weber was one of the few truly smart people on TV (and perhaps the only one), erudite, funny, truly and effortlessly sophisticated.

Because the show came on when I got home, I heard it in the background all the time. Because the show had 52 episodes, and it came on Monday thru Thursday on our PBS affiliate, it often covered old ground - so the end result is that I saw lots of episodes several times. Most of them I know by memory!

Grandpa, Mom and I ordered a free program from the Annenberg/CPB project containing an episode guide.

So in other words, the show was great and a big part of my life. I even read all of Eugen Weber's books, particularly MY FRANCE.

So imagine my great joy to discover that the Annenberg/CPB project just made the entire series available online for free, for educational purposes.

Visit the Website here.

Every one of the 52 episodes are available on demand, and in pretty good quality. I guess Hanukkah came early this year!

The Greatest Science Fiction Movie Never Made

For information on the aborted 1971 Alejandro Jodorowsky version of Dune, check out this link, a translation of a French-language interview:

Alejandro Jodorowsky's DUNE

The project would have featured:

• A soundtrack by Pink Floyd


• Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor, who made it a condition of his employment that he be seen going to the bathroom in a golden throne of two dolphin mouths (!)


• A cast featuring Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles


• Art design by Moebius, H.R. Giger and Dan O'Bannon

Alejandro Jodorowsky was always a favorite of mine. It helps because of his quote: "I ask of cinema what most Americans ask of psychadelic drugs."

It would have been interesting to see what Jodorowsky, with his otherworldly sensibility, would have done with DUNE.

Me Chinese, Me Play Joke...

One of my original intentions for this blog was that it was to be a culinary cooking and food blog. The blabbing about science fiction pulpsters was an entirely unforeseen development.

Check out this great and hilarious presentation about the origin of "Chinese Food" in the United States, including an explanation as to who this "General Tso" guy was, anyway.





The presentation doesn't talk about Cuban-Chinese food - it's not commonly known, but Havana's Chinatown was the world's 2nd largest besides San Francisco's. In a lot of Miami Chinese restaurants, you can get your honey chicken with a side of platanos fritos.

Some Hate for Proposition Eight

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... by Jack Black

Do you believe that the government has the right to tell people who they can or can't marry?

Prop 8's the one thing that harshes my buzz about finally having a President that talks like a grownup adult (that, and the fact the Three Stooges remain in power here in Florida: I guess running Joe Garcia, a charismaless nerd technocrat, wasn't enough). Proposition Eight is an example of the ugly Karl Rove "old" school of politics the American people categorically rejected: divide the electorate with an issue and hope you end up with the bigger piece. Usually, it nearly always involves smearing a minority group (undocumented workers, homos, Ay-rabs).

This actually affects someone close to me personally, because my Mother has a "civil union" with her boyfriend that gives her hospital and visitation rights and allows them to share insurance.

Incidentally, I fully expect a lot of comments that go "Hey, if you're so tolerant, how come you're not tolerant of my intolerance?" Those just crack me up.

Iraq 'em up

If you knew you could get away with it, would you kill for fun?

It's a fair bet that half of my High School P.E. class would absolutely say yes.

Alright, now pretend I'm paying you (no joke) $160,000 a year to guard State Department officials - which in practice means opening fire on any Iraqi kid that so much as sneezes in your care. And also, you're from the boonies and don't have a college education.

It's obvious by now that I'm talking about the dumb, mean and incompetent employees of Blackwater. The funny thing is, I'm going to take the Foreign Service exam in a couple months, and I'd much rather be protected by a Blackwater merc than what passes for a Marine (or rather, "Freedom Scout") in the deleusional self-parody America has become. I'll take a mercenary in it for the money over a do-gooder anyday.

I don't blame Blackwater for the murders. While Nuremberg established that it is possible to prosecute a soldier even if they were under orders to kill civilians, so much chaos and carnage happens regularly in Iraq that a show-trial for someone that killed the wrong target is hypocritical and darkly comic.

What does gall me about Blackwater is how they reveals every lie we were taught to swallow when we're growing up: that the way to success is to study hard, be smart, and get good grades. If the current financial crisis is anything to go by, assholes like me that studied hard are going broke, whereas the dumb, mean guys that placed firecrackers up the anus of cats are buying McMansions hand over fist.

It isn't that Blackwater is brutal, it's that they're dumb: how many of them speak Arabic, for instance? This is important because in the modern, asymmetrical school of warfare, tanks and jet fighters and big 'roided out Texans with guns are not as important as intelligence operations. A lot of cracks are made at the expense of someone like James Bond, how he isn't realistic or relevant. Actually, with the importance of asymmetrical warfare strategies, now may be the only time that someone like Bond (a hitman with a brain) is even vaguely relevant.

Iraq is a war for linguistics and social studies, not engineering and metal shop. The failure to predict the ensuing sectarian violence after the fall of Saddam can be traced exclusively to the fact that most pundits just didn't get that there is more than one kind of Muslim, and they're not exactly bursting at the seams with brotherly love for each other. As Bob Woodward remembered in PLAN OF ATTACK, George W. Bush didn't even know - and the folks that did know better were too focused on playing with their Green Army Men and the usual military wargaming than focusing on the basic social facts of the region.

And...not to gloat, but this is something I saw coming. Without a strong central government, Iraq would break down into sectarian violence.

And finally, there's definitely an expiration date on this kind of Blackwater model. I'd say it passed in the fifties, when guerilla warfare came into style worldwide, or even earlier, though you wouldn't hear that from the Pentagon: they're still polishing their shiny new toys like they're going to fight the Wehrmacht and the Japanese Imperial Navy instead of al-Queda.

So maybe nerds get their revenge over the vicious after all.

Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr Series

This is kind of embarassing, but the first Asimov stuff I ever read was the fiction he wrote as Paul French - the Lucky Starr stuff, space opera adventure for young adult readers.

Lucky Starr is an agent for the Science Council of the Solarian League, accompanied by his sidekick, the 5'2" ironically named Bigman. Some of the gadgets range from the cool (Lucky Starr's identifying science council tattoo is invisible and changes form beneath his skin), influential (the Force-Blade, the inspiration for all the laser-swords in science fiction), to the just-plain weird (Lucky Starr's hopper, a pogo-car as ludicrous as it sounds).

What's really amazing about the stories is how Lucky Star uses his head: his stories are, contrary to their superficial appearance as Space Opera, science fiction detective stories and mysteries. For that reason, I'll never forgive the cover artist for LUCKY STARR AND THE MOONS OF JUPITER in the seventies series, which blew the ending to the book on the cover!

In this series, the crew is plagued by a Robot spy from the Sirius League, settlers that became cold-war rivals to Earth's solar system. The whole mystery of the novel is who the robot spy might be. In the end, it turns out to be the seeing eye-dog of the blind astronaut.

Lucky Starr manages to beat the robot spy the same way everything gets resolved in an Isaac Asimov novel involving robots: by creating a situation where there's a conflict or loophole in the laws of robotics, so the robot shuts down. This is, incidentally, the same technique that would be a trademark of James Tiberius Kirk years later: using logic problems to destroy evil computers.

What strikes me as interesting about the Lucky Starr books is how they are something that Asimov (and for that matter, most good science fiction writers) don't really do: they have a story that can be rewritten without any science fiction elements as another work of genre fiction. Replace the Orion Confederation with the Commies and the Science Council with the CIA and you've got a mystery/espionage thriller.

The best science fiction is the kind that you can't rewrite as another kind of genre story. Science Fiction's best works aren't Westerns with six-shooters and aliens replaced by ray guns and aliens; they aren't fantasy with laser swords and gizmos standing in for magic and swords. Science fiction is a type of story in and of itself. Science Fiction has problems and conflicts that can only exist in science fiction. By no means is this list complete:

1) Communication. How do you express meaning to something totally different from yourself? "Communication" stories include Harry Harrison's WEST OF EDEN, or all those Ursula K. le Guin stories about cooperating with an alien race.

2) A story that provokes a sense of wonder just by its scale. An example would be Bradbury's "You Just Missed Him," about a crew that goes to another planet and discover that someone of great religious significance (presumably Jesus Christ, but this is not explicitly stated) was just there, but they "just missed him." So they rocket to the next planet, only to learn they were too late, he just left there...and so forth.

3) A strong central concept based on real science. The ultimate example would be Niven's Ringworld. The physics textbook has yet to be made that doesn't have at least one work problem and sample test question involving the mind-boggling math of the Ringworld.

4) Sentience. What exactly is sentience and intelligence? Do humans have it? Robots? The best work of this kind would be H. Beam Piper's LITTLE FUZZY.

In fact, all the hoariest science fiction and space opera cliches are stand-ins for tired elements in other kinds of stories. Space Pirates, for instance, or the unstoppable space-Mongol horde that threatens everything (how many quasi-Oriental stand-ins have their been through the history of space opera?), or the cheeseball story type used to lecture us on the evils of prejudice when two alien races fight. As they're aliens, it's perfectly okay for us to be judgmental and shake our heads self-righteously about their tribalism and prejudice. After all, we're so much better than they are, and since they're aliens, we don't have to admit or confront any real flaw in ourselves!

Ron Ely is Superman

In the 1980s Superboy series, Ron Ely briefly played the role of an alternate universe, adult Superman. It's funny how most Tarzan actors could conceivably play Superman and vice-versa.

Something about that set my mind on fire, even though it was an episode buried in the fourth season of a now mostly forgotten eighties show. It was not just because I'm a big fan of Ron Ely from his days as Tarzan.

The reason I was excited by the possibility of Ron Ely being Superman, the reason it feels so "right," is that Ron Ely personifies best how I've always seen the character of Superman: a quiet, cerebral guy. When I picture Superman, I picture him as an understated, intellectual person with quiet dignity. I've yet to see a Superman like this, though Brendan Routh comes the closest.

George Reeves was a blocky, aged fifties Father-figure, close to someone else's conception of the character, but certainly not mine. Christopher Reeve, as charming as he was, had the understatement down pat but his impish sense of humor felt all wrong. Come to think of it, with his deceptively nice-guy charm and quirky humor, Christopher Reeve would have been a better Hal Jordan than Superman.

A while back I argued that Superman's most important attributes as a heroic character are his experience and intelligence, even more so than his superpowers. Superman uses his powers cleverly, and I'm astonished at writers like Cary Bates and Len Wein that could come up with a new way to use superspeed and superstrength, a new "trick," regularly once per week. A good way to identify a true fan of Superman from a poser is to ask them whether they ever saw Superman throw an honest-to-goodness punch between 1956 t0 1985. Rather, Superman uses superstrength and other powers in really ingenious ways. When a tidal wave threatened to smash a beach, he used superspeed and strength to compress the sand, rub it and turn it to glass. Another example would be how he stopped a burning building by twirling around really fast in a circle to create a vortex that deprived the flames of oxygen. What's more, Superman tends to find ways to benefit people in weird ways. If he has to melt the ice of a speeding comet, he'd do so over a drought-stricken community as an added side-bonus. If Superman was just a really strong flying guy, he'd be indistinguishable from a ton of superheroic characters.

Likewise, a lot of people see Superman as the sort to inspire others and give speeches, a Kennedy, Obama or Churchill type. Thankfully, none of the actors have played Superman this way, as the character would be absolutely unbearable and nauseating, though the Superfriends writers featured Superman giving a Shatner-esque speech as the finale of many episodes. I've never agreed with this characterization.

My good friend Eddie Michigan once said one of the fundamental difference between Captain America and Superman is that Captain America is aware of the effect he has on people, and his ability to inspire (which is partially what led to panics like "Man Without a Country"). Captain America is a leader, a hero that fought in World War II. Superman on the other hand, is a very humble guy, and someone that is very self-sufficient. Captain America leads his friends into battle. Superman, though, charges into battle and looks back and sees his allies flying behind him, ready to go where he goes.

Science Fiction Greats: David Gerrold

I find it hard to believe that one man could create both the loveable tribbles AND the Chthorr, who are nothing short of the stuff of nightmares.

I suppose at this point I'll have to give a shout-out to my bud Paul Chapman, currently in Tarpon Springs, Florida, who got me into David Gerrold out of Paul's interest in the WAR AGAINST THE CHTHORR novels. Sure, I read THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF before, and I knew who the guy was, but I wasn't a fan of his until the Chthorr books.

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF is in the category of unusual time travel stories along with Julian May's THE GOLDEN TORC. I've always enjoyed unusual takes on time travel, and this one posits a fascinating idea: eventually a guy travels through time enough to the point where he "folds himself," and multiple variations of himself exist through time.

It's worth noting that THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF was the direct inspiration for Roger Stern's "resurrection" of Kang the Conqueror (and Immortus). Stern refused to use any of the usual cheeseball techniques for bringing master villains to life, namely robots and clones, and instead borrowed a page from Gerrold: as a result of Kang's time travel escapades, there are dozens of different "variant" Kangs in existence, ruling different branches of the timestream. Thus, Kang really did die in the Old West (or at least that particular variant Kang did).

The CHTORR books have a particularly brainbending and terrifying idea behind them. It is a book series about alien invasion, particularly by formidable worm monsters called Chthorr, but the twist is that the invasion is ecological in nature, an entire biosphere attempting to replace earth life. Chthorr is a world where life is more hostile and lethally progressed evolutionarily speaking, and gradually parts of earth become more like the Chthorr homeworld, including its nasty flora and fauna that outperform our comparatively milder earth life with their toxic, polluting and carnivorous adaptations.

With the Chtorr worms, the question of what qualifies as sentience rears its head, a common science fiction theme also explored in H. Beam Piper's LITTLE FUZZY. One of the worst legacies of science fiction's early years is the tendency to anthropomorphize aliens, particularly in how they think. And, well, not to give any spoilers here, but the Chtorr worms don't think like humans, more like gods. They easily take their role as one of the most fascinating alien races in science fiction, along with Arthur C. Clarke's Overlords, Larry Niven's Puppeteers and Kzinti, and Alan Dean Foster's Thranx.

David Gerrold is best known for "The Trouble With Tribbles," but the one Star Trek script of his that I would most like to see, is one that was ultimately never made: "Blood and Fire," which was supposed to be in the Next Generation's first season. It dealt with the one topic that was taboo even for Trek: homosexuality, and featured an AIDS analogue, bloodworms, a disease so vile Starfleet orders are to kill patients infected with them. Gerrold himself is one of the few openly homosexual science fiction writers. "Blood and Fire" dealt with the way the treatment of fearful diseases creates a kind of anxious, ruthless inhumanity that lets us ignore suffering, which has always been a favorite topic of mine.

And the guy's still writing, too: I for one would love to see the next book in the Chtorr series. At least when it comes out, which at this rate sounds like sometime next century.

Spock's Brain

I vowed I wouldn't use this blog to talk about things I don't like, as I save being confrontational and negative for other people's websites, but still, this YouTube video reduces "Spock's Brain," the worst episode of the original series of Star Trek, into a hilariously awkward, sleek edit lasting four minutes.



It isn't that they say "Spock's Brain," it's that they. Keep. On. SAYING. "Spock's Brain" over and over. Even in the original episode, the effect is, er, impressive.

It's like in one episode they've distilled everything that was head-shakingly embarassing about the original series: female aliens with go-go boots and miniskirts, Shatner overacting and pretending to fall down, accents as unlikely as they are inconstant, and science fiction concepts that Hugo Gernsback would have thrown out from AMAZING for being too ludicrous.

To its credit, most of the original series was cutting-edge in many ways. It also ranks as the only work Theodore Sturgeon (yes, that Theodore Sturgeon) ever did that he somehow didn't insert his creepy incest fascination. Still, it's hard to talk about how the original TREK was a drama comparable any non-genre television before or since, when "Spock's Brain" makes the whole thing look like a goofy comic book.

"Spock's Brain" is like discovering a diary you wrote at age 15. You used purple prose to talk about your greatest crush a girl that, with 20/20 hindsight, you realize was a dimwitted peasant; you read Ayn Rand and had your world "transformed," as if you were the first self-absorbed teenager in history to ever do so, instead of the billionth; you talk about how the only person to ever really express how you feel are Morissey lyrics.

SHAME. SHAME FOREVER!

Barack the Vote!

I could hug a random stranger right now, that's the general feeling. I'll be back to being a bastard that hates being touched in the morning when the euphoria wears off.

It's so weird to know I'm living in a blue state. "Landslide" would be putting it mildly.

The Obama campaign was a victory of ideals: the power of hope over the power of fear. Obama spent oodles of cash on advertizements where he didn't mention his opponent once. McCain spent his campaign either duplicating what Barack was doing (even his Iraq policy!) or arousing our fears with "boogedy-boogedy SOCIALISM!!!" cries.

Hope triumphed over the politics of fear.

The success of Barack Obama was made possible (and I can't believe I'm typing this) due to minorities: latinos, African-Americans. And especially by idealistic young people, who were able to tip the vote in nearly all swing states.

It's revenge of the nerds, like those movies where a bunch of loveable slobs and geeks beat the snooty blonde jocks that run the summer camp: the disparaged underdogs of America (young people, minorities) beat out aged geezers, traditionalists, jocks and snotty cheerleaders. Come to think of it, that's why Sarah Palin seemed to have such popularity: shallow, mean and unintelligent, she was the ultimate High School "Queen Bee."

The contrast couldn't have been more different than the crowd shots of both rallies. McCain's rallies all had reaction shots of depressed looking blonde Scandinavians and other assorted corn-fed douches. The reaction shots of Obama's rallies looked like real Americans.

All through the Bush years, I hoped for something like this to happen: a crushing landslide made possible by the young and by people at the fringe of America. They elected someone that otherwise wouldn't be electable: a black guy with an Arab-sounding name, who was the son of a single mother, who by his own merits rose to head of the Harvard Law Review and graduated at the top of his class in an Ivy League School. He was from Hawaii, not "the heartland."

God, how I hate "the Heartland." Not the actual place, but the dishonest, manipulative concept that America is about white working class Christians from rural areas. It's always irked me that because my parents are both immigrants I'm considered "some Spanish guy" despite my loyalty and love for the United States, the country where I was born and raised...yet Rene Zellweiger, who is also the daughter of immigrants and raised in the United States, is considered the "All-American Girl."

If America was all, or even mostly "hockey Moms" and "Joe Sixpacks" like Sarah Palin famously said, she'd be vice-president elect now. America is about Pakistani-immigrant cabdrivers working to send their daughter to college. It's about homosexual half-Mexican, half-Italian electrical engineers in Brooklyn. America is Christian, but also Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish.

That said, what is shocking is how broad the appeal of Barack Obama is: rural people, working class, whites, blacks, Latinos, urban white collar people, the elderly...heck, if McCain hadn't voted for himself, the win would probably would have been unanimous.

In other words, this election transcended just a mere victory for a single man. It was the victory of a broad, inclusive idea of America. It was a victory for youth and idealism. It was a moment where we shed our cynicism and said that government can be a part of the solution, and not the problem.