#620. A critical reappraisal of Star Trek: Insurrection

Sometimes I love to be a contrarian.  Although I don't necessarily try to be one, I tend to develop interests that run counter to popular belief.  For instance, since its 1998 theatrical release, I've always been a fan of Star Trek: Insurrection.

Of course, for most people to say Insurrection is one of the lesser films in the franchise would be an understatement.  To say that it probably helped facilitate the end of that part of Star Trek history would be another understatement, especially as it was the opposite of predecessor First Contact in almost every way.

And yet I've always liked it, if not outright loved it.  But the truth is, and this is something even I've struggled with, I've always been on the bubble.  I'm this close to loving it.  And last night I was thinking about it again, and maybe I'm closer than ever.  This post is my bid to maybe convince others to have a reconsideration of their own.  Maybe you won't end up loving it, but you may think about nudging it out of the Star Trek dregs, where it currently sits nestled tightly with The Final Frontier (I refuse to consider Into Darkness as anywhere near this level despite the results of polling earlier this year).

In some ways, Insurrection is really quite brilliant, and years ahead of its time.  Just as Into Darkness was a commentary on the era of the War on Terror, Insurrection is a movie about the unfortunate relationships that helped make it possible, and some of the relationships we're still struggling with today.

Or as Admiral Dougherty puts it, "They have technology we can't duplicate.  You know what that makes us?  Partners."

"Partners" being an obviously loaded word.  And here you can sure bet that I'm thinking of all the relationships involving the transportation of that most precious of modern resources, oil.  But this is not about politics.  This is about a Star Trek movie that was all about this thorny conundrum years before anyone was even prepared to broach the subject.  

Insurrection's basic plot is modest enough: Captain Picard and his crew stumble upon a Starfleet mission to relocate a planet's population in order to exploit the natural resources.  (Sure, there's even some Avatar in there, about ten years ahead of time.  There's even plenty of good old fashioned environmentalism in there, a sort of updated saves-the-whales Voyage Home, minus nuclear wessels).

At the time, the biggest knock against the movie was that it was basically an extended TV episode.  That's another thorny issue right there.  I never saw it that way.  There were certainly episodes of Next Generation that featured a similar situation, but then there was a whole episode that featured Khan in the original series, and no one (or at least loudly) ever said Wrath of Khan was basically just an extended TV episode.

And that point, as I finally understood, never even got the series right.  If this was basically a TV episode, it was from Deep Space Nine and not Next Generation.  I hate to be pedantic about this, but that's the crux of it.  Insurrection doesn't make too fine a point about this, but the whole reason the events of the movie occur is because of something called the Dominion War.  

What's that, you ask?  The Dominion War was a seasons-long arc in Deep Space Nine.  The Dominion was basically the evil version of the more familiar Federation, from the other side of a wormhole.  Not only did Deep Space Nine basically spend its entire run gearing up for the Dominion, but the final two seasons were hotly embedded in the resulting war.

And the whole point of Admiral Dougherty's dirty dealings in Insurrection is because of this war, a relationship Starfleet feels compelled to have because of something so basic as resources.  But these relationships are not always as good for everyone as they can sometimes seem.  

Surprisingly, out of every other conceivable angle covered in the series, Deep Space Nine itself never really got around to this particular aspect of war, how it can drive unexpected new conflicts.  So if anything, Insurrection is that TV episode that never happened, that two-parter or omitted season cliffhanger.

What's more embarrassing than anything is that Star Trek fans were already so splintered in 1998 (the driving force of the coma that began in 2005) that they never even considered that.  Even Deep Space Nine fans didn't realize this.  The first time anyone said that Insurrection was basically an extended episode, everyone just assumed that meant Next Generation, because naturally that was the series that featured Picard.  

And the downright criminal thing of it is that even now there are many Star Trek fans who never even took Deep Space Nine seriously.  And Deep Space Nine remains the most perfect Star Trek.

The problem of it really was that almost every Star Trek movie, probably until the 2009 reboot, was basically geared toward existing fans (and this one was very nearly subtitled Prime Directive, and that should tell you everything you need to know about it).  And fans themselves never really seem to realize that.  Most other fan communities would be thrilled to have a movie, let alone ten of them.  Star Trek fans?  They're notoriously fickle.  Don't believe for a moment that the majority of them actually share Gene Roddenberry's optimism.  

And how to better represent that than the pettiness of how they subconsciously greeted perhaps one of the best elements of Insurrection, Data's opening arc?  Most fans considered the beginning and end of questioning whether or not Data should be considered ethically and morally equal to a flesh-and-blood individual to be the seminal Next Generation second season episode "The Measure of a Man."  And I agree, "Measure" is brilliant.  But that should never have been considered the be-all-and-end-all of the exploration of the rights of the signature android in Star Trek.

How do I know fans were so conflicted?  Because they greeted Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram, or "Doc," the same way, for seven seasons.  Sure, he was a fan favorite, but not a single one of his many similar, "Measure of a Man" episodes were ever considered classics, even though at least one of them ("Latent Image") unquestionably is.

In  the movie, Data begins on a separate mission and must be retrieved by Picard.  This whole sequence has always been the brunt of my justification for considering Insurrection positively.  And it completely changes the perception of how Starfleet really perceives Data, "Measure" and its court settlement considered.  Dougherty doesn't seem to find him quite so special as Picard's crew and Next Generation fans always have.  (Then again, proof positive that Data never reached Spock levels of Star Trek icon-hood can be found in the reception for Nemesis.)

And that's another reason to view Insurrection differently, because it dares to challenge one of the basic tenets of Star Trek.  That no matter how much a pain in the butt these captains can sometimes be, they're always considered to be legends in their own time.  But that's not how Dougherty treats Picard at all.

Picard, mind you, is captain of the flagship.  It should be assumed that if he's active at all during the Dominion War, that he's at the front lines.  And yet even in Next Generation he was always seen as diplomat first.  He was even recognized as such by the finicky Klingons!  In Insurrection, there are any number of reasons to believe he's not as beholden by the Starfleet brass as seems befitting.  And on a subconscious level, that's just not right.  

And yet, what's Picard's defining characteristic?  What any Star Trek lead character's defining characteristic?  The moral compass.  (Which makes Sisko's experiences in "In the Pale Moonlight" so endlessly intriguing.  And consequently why some fans will never forgive Janeway, because she seemed to have a "Moonlight" every other episode.)

And Insurrection is ultimately all about the moral compass.  And that's also the reason why Deep Space Nine couldn't have done this story, because it could never have done Admiral Dougherty.  It had done similar figures before the war, but during?  Just wouldn't have happened.  Would have been too depressing.  Admirals in Star Trek are usually just this side of villainous.  In fact, the first unabashedly good admiral was featured in the Dominion War arc.  Just goes to show.

And Admiral Dougherty has always been my second favorite part of Insurrection.  And a large portion of that is because of Anthony Zerbe.  It only figures that the lone reflection I found of someone else seeing this was from the Matrix sequels, when he shows up in Zion as Neo's confidant.  What Christopher Lee accomplished in the Lord of the Rings films and the Star Wars prequels (to my mind, greater effect), that's what Zerbe did, years earlier.  Not a hugely written part, but Zerbe nails it in scene after scene.  Insurrection would be worth viewing again, I'd suggest, just to prove this out.

And he does this opposite Patrick Stewart.  For some critics, their favorite knock against the Picard films is that Stewart is rarely given material worthy of his acting caliber.  But the funny thing is, Hollywood in general has never given him material worthy of his acting caliber.  Until Star Trek, he was barely a blip on the radar, despite making efforts for years.  And even after Star Trek, he barely made a dent.  So much for material worth his acting caliber.  If anything, his Star Trek film appearances were as close as he ever got to Hollywood material worth his acting caliber.  And Insurrection is no slouch in that department.

And he gets to sing in this one.  Star Trek has always been at its geekiest when it indulges its inner Family Guy.  Here there's a wonderful interlude where Picard, Data, and Worf all sing "A British Tar" from Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.  It's part of the whole sequence featuring Data's early arc in the film, and it's one of the best parts.

And that particular sequence also features some of the CGI work that definitely would never have been in a TV episode.  Even if it's modest compared to what other films were doing even in 1998, that shuttle chase has always been a highlight for me.

There are things Insurrection doesn't quite nail, and there's humor wrongly intended to indulge Star Trek fans, but on the whole, there's a lot to recommend, and recommend quite enthusiastically, about it.  It may not have been the epic it could have been, but that was still a few years off from happening in any genre film successfully (Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films), but then, at least it wasn't insufferably melodramatic about wanting to be epic (Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films).  

And to think most of what you've ever heard about Insurrection was that it was one of the minor efforts, if even that.  Even if it is minor, it's still got a lot going for it.

#619. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse October 2013

The cephalopod of the title to this blogging book club is the Armchair Squid, our beloved and very soggy founder.  Please visit him first (er, after me) and give thanks, preferably with whatever squid love to eat.  Unless it turns out to be books.  Because that would just be wrong.

This month I read far fewer books than has been represented in my past participation in the Coffeehouse, which is actually settling back into a more normal routine, now that I'm settling back in with Maine.  That being said, what's been passing for official as far as I've been doing it:

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I'm currently reading Between Parentheses, which is a collection of Bolano's miscellany, mostly stuff he wrote about literature, which helps inform what I'm going to write about this month in regards to my favorite writer (since of course I also wrote about him last month).

The story of Savage Detectives is this: a pair of zealous poets, so extreme in their devotion to their craft that they would disrupt the readings of those they considered their inferiors by shouting their own works, embark on a sacred quest to track down their mysterious predecessor in a minor circle known as the Visceral Realists.  What they discover informs the whole shape of the book, which is this:

The book is in three acts.  The first recounts how a would-be member of Arturo Belano (a stand-in for Bolano himself) and Ulises Lima's  (Bolano's good friend Mario Santiago) inner circle ends up joining them on their quest after he inadvertently liberates a prostitute from her very angry pimp (whose subsequent pursuit is the alternating dramatic backbone of the plot in the third act).  The second act is all about various perspectives and lives recounted, all somehow relating to Belano and Lima's later, separate travels.  What led to these lives of apparent desperation?

The clever thing about the book is that the second act points the reader in the direction of the answer as one of the frequent voices in the fugue finally gives the reader details on the figure who so entrances our wayward pair, a woman who lived a lifetime ago and seems to have all but fallen through the cracks of history.  And more clever still is the reveal at the end of this act where Lima and Bolano have all but assumed the same fate (and the main character from the first and third acts has succeeded even better).

For large portions of the book it may be easy to assume that Bolano is writing as close to a biography as he ever managed, although to think so is about as depressing a thought as you can get.  It's true that he didn't achieve any real success or recognition until Savage Detectives itself was published, so that he very well could have been the anonymous, charismatic, but somehow always suspect drifter he paints Belano to be.  

And yet truth is not always to be found in fiction.  Or at least there are always more shades to a story than it can sometimes seem (which is perhaps another reason why Bolano has so many voices speak in the second act).  In Between Parentheses a different voice entirely emerges, although very much a zealot, not as pathetic as Belano can sometimes seem.  Bolano pursued literature the way other people breathe.  He absorbed it.  He had opinions, strong ones, about everyone, scores of writers I'd never heard of, whole traditions that have eluded me.  And there's a strong case to be made that much of what I know of as his he borrowed from others.  Which is only natural.  I assume he made it very much his own, because there's got to be a reason why I know his name and not so many of the ones he knew and treasured (or tolerated).

Was it such a good idea to read his nonfiction after reading another book that so brilliantly encased his fiction?  Sometimes it's not wise to peek behind the curtain.  Sometimes the bubble can be burst, when you see how the sausage is made.  And yet even when he exhausts me Bolano fascinates me.  The whole reason I started to devote so much energy into reading as much of Bolano as I can get my hands on is because of something he wrote in 2666.  It only figures.

The way Savage Detectives reconciles itself affirmed that he deserved the acclaim, and deserves my devotion.  Belano and Lima went in search of a myth and ended up disillusioned shells of themselves.  Is that something Bolano experienced?  Is that something he felt, before the acclaim of this book?  If so, he doesn't seem to have confessed that anywhere else.  Do I want to know?

Either way, I'll keep reading Bolano.

#618. 7 reasons Charmed is not just for chicks

My sister is obsessed with Charmed.  She's rewatched the entire eight-season series multiple times, and on several of these occasions I've watched most of it with her as a result.  Would I have watched it even once without her?  Moot point.  I've grown to love it almost as much as she does.

The series ran from 1998 to 2006, and starred Shannon Doherty (for the first three seasons), Holly Marie Combs, Alyssa Milano, and Rose McGowan (for the final five seasons) as the Halliwell sisters, whose Power of Three enabled them to control individual powers and confront nasty demons on a regular basis.  It was basically the best update of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched imaginable.

And yet there's probably the sense that unless you're female or at least a male of the horn dog persuasion (because producers made sure all four lovely ladies wore skimpy clothes), you never thought about taking Charmed seriously.  If that's the case, here are some reasons to reconsider that decision:

1. Deadpan acting.  Hey, the actors in the series knew it could sometimes be silly, too, even if the material was always taken seriously.  That's why all four actresses knew just how to present the material, never melodramatically (which would have been the approach some of the stories could have provoked) or comically (although the sheer blessing of Milano is that she could have it that way and never miss a beat).  Charmed was a drama, but not in the sense of The Vampire Diaries or True Blood (and certainly not Game of Thrones!).  Tone could vary.  So the actors chose a neutral tone to match.  The extremes of the approach are best characterized by Doherty, who took it most seriously, and McGowan, who had the most obvious fun with it.
2. Kaley Cuoco.  The future star of The Big Bang Theory was featured in Charmed's final season as a counterpoint witch unrelated to the Halliwell sisters with family drama of her own and a different kind of learning curve than had been experienced previously in the series.  I already knew Cuoco from her work in 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter (where she was the daughter in question), which is best remembered as the sitcom John Ritter was doing when he died.  I always loved her.  Her part in Charmed is the reverse of Big Bang Theory and 8 Simple Rules, where she's the dumb blonde.  Here she's more capable than the Halliwells are sometimes willing to admit.  In other words, this is her original geek cred.
3. Cole.  The featured villainous romantic figure of the series, Cole was a human/demon hybrid who seduced Milano's Phoebe for three seasons, married to her when he was technically the Source (as in Of All Evil), which was incredibly bad timing.  Cole's demonic half looked like Darth Maul on steroids.  His human half was portrayed by Julian McMahon before he did Nip/Tuck and played Dr. Doom in the first two Fantastic Four movies.  Though the character was the closest the series ever got to soap opera, Cole was very much the male embodiment of the Halliwell deadpan charm, and thus perhaps one of the easiest conduits for male viewers.
4. Leo.  The flipside would be Leo, who was the significant other to Marie Combs' Piper.  Sort of like the Charmed version of Lois and Clark's Dean Cain as far as soft-spoken male protagonists go, Brian Krause's Leo was constantly evolving, and not just because the series necessarily spent most of its time with its female leads.  Leo was introduced early in the series and only gradually revealed as a Whitelighter, what this series called guardian angels, which introduced a whole different level to the mythology.  Leo and Piper had their ups and downs, mostly to explain why Leo wasn't around all the time, but that also meant Leo had a good deal of independence and wasn't always tied strictly to whatever the sisters were up to.
5. Knowledge of its own mythology.  Something every fanboy loves is mythology.  Charmed had that in spades, and always knew exactly how to exploit it.  This was sometimes pretty easy, since the Halliwells were immediately introduced in relation to their ancestral predecessors, including the mother who died when they were young and the grandmother ("Grams") who raised them until her own death (in both cases that hardly meant we saw the last of them!).  Where a lot of other shows would have stumbled when trying to replace a crucial cast member, the subtraction of Doherty and addition of McGowan was handled with aplomb, mostly because the flip-flop was executed perfectly in the fourth season premiere, drawing on groundwork that had been laid years earlier.
6. Wicca for dummies.  As the sisters discovered themselves, their approach to being witches differed greatly from what you might imagine.  There were certainly key recognizable elements, but for the most part everything here was very specific to the characters rather than Wicca lore.  Hence the heavy emphasis on their fictional Book of Shadows, which was practically a part of the cast, the way the starship is in Star Trek, for example.  And their powers were more like superpowers than magic, anyway.  Only Doherty's Prue had something that could have been considered cutesy (and only because of the sound effect that accompanied it), while McGowan's, which ties into my previous point, was perhaps the coolest, the trademark orbing of a Whitelighter (although in her case, half-Whitelighter).
7. Awesome guest-stars.  Here I'm thinking of the likes of John Cho (years before Star Trek or Harold & Kumar), David Carradine (he was always awesome), French Stewart (as a surprisingly dramatic genie), Jim Rash (whom you may know either as a screenwriter or a star of Community, although here he's a laughable demon whose name "will haunt you forever"), Rainn Wilson (years before The Office, in a role that might have typified his career if he'd never struck upon Dwight Schrute), and Brian Thompson (who makes everything better in a completely different way than David Carradine).  You don't need to be a chick to appreciate any of these guys, just a fan of pop culture.

#617. Heading toward 2013 World Series

Been a good amount of time since I've checked in with how the baseball season has progressed, but thankfully plenty of good things to report, such as...

Boston Red Sox vs. St. Louis Cardinals

That's the 2013 World Series match-up.  As you may recall, both teams are personal favorites, and had exceptional years all season long.  The Red Sox in particular, above and beyond a rebuilding year, were magnificent, getting able contributions all around, even though there was a massive hiccup for Clay Buccholz, who had the best season he's ever pitched...until being sidelined for most of the season, although he's since returned and contributed fairly well in the post-season.

Both the Sox and Cardinals are no strangers to the World Series.  Boston historically faced the 86 year drought after the 1918 title (the year before the infamous Black Sox scandal, which featured the Chicago White Sox, as well as the foolish trade of Babe Ruth), snapped in 2004 (a season chronicled in Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan's Faithful) and repeated for emphasis in 2007.  The Cardinals have won recently in 2006 and 2011, and were also the team the Red Sox defeated in '04.

The Oakland A's continued to perform well throughout the season, reaching the division series, first level play of the post-season before being eliminated by the Detroit Tigers, where coincidentally Jose Iglesias had ended up during the season.  Iglesias was a standout fill-in for Boston at the start of the season, remarked upon here, and so it's great that he found somewhere to perform on a regular basis in the Majors.

The only team I followed that didn't do spectacularly was the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, although Mike Trout's season picked up considerably after I stopped tracking baseball here.  His sophomore year started to feel like an improvement over his remarkable rookie season.  He ended up with a .323 batting average.  Albert Pujols missed the end of the season with the same sort of health issues that have been plaguing him since coming to the Angels two seasons ago.  He ended with a .258 BA.  Mark Trumbo, the other player I was tracking, finished at .234, and I probably won't be following his stats again.

No matter who wins the World series I win, but I'm pulling for hometown favorite Boston.

#616. Seven Characters necessary for a Star Wars Middle Trilogy

I've been a pretty big fan of Star Wars for most of my life.  The original trilogy was something I grew up with (sometimes I think I could write a whole book based just on these memories, or perhaps just a blog, or perhaps just a blog post), and I've never lost my passion for the saga, including the prequels.  Consequently, and because when I love something I end up thinking quite a bit about it, I've often tried to imagine how the story expands past the story of the Skywalkers, which is what George Lucas's sextet is all about, how Anakin's journey finally brings balance to the Force.

Now, I've had an idea since the release of Revenge of the Sith for how the whole story begins, which involves iconic names like Palpatine, Yoda, and Chewbacca, but recently I started to think about another piece of the puzzle, the years between the prequel and original trilogies.  I'm fully aware that there are many stories from the likes of the Dark Horse comics and books and probably even video games, but I tend to consider only the films as canon, except when certain useful bits of inspiration populate the expanded universe (which is something Lucas himself has done, for instance to name Coruscant).  Therefore any thoughts I discuss now are mostly based on the films and not anything that someone else has previously considered.

Here, then, are seven key characters I would involve in a trilogy of adventures set in-between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, a Middle Trilogy if you will.

1. An Imperial recruit who defects.  This is an idea that first occurred to me, ironically, based on a Dark Horse comic, which chronicles the similar journey of Biggs Darklighter, Luke's old friend who famously bites the dust in the trench run on the Death Star.  (Even though Biggs has such a small role, he's always been a favorite of mine.)  This character would be the prototype, part of the whole movement that helps create the military aspect of the Rebellion.  The big thing about this character is that he's a personal recruit who works closely under Tarkin and Darth Vader, and so his defection is equally personal.  And because there's another minor aspect of A New Hope that's always fascinated me, this Great Defector is drawn from my extrapolation of the Journal of the Whills prologue from the novelization.  I always wondered who or what the Whills were.  Subsequent research suggests that Lucas may have conceived it as the original version of the Force, but I always considered it to be the surname of an important figure in the unrevealed greater saga.  So for that reason, this character's last name is Whill.  He is the personification of what Vader evokes when he says "There will be no one to stop us this time," the great threat previous to Luke Skywalker that must necessarily have existed.
2. A handmaiden of Padme Amidala.  One of the prominent minor elements of the prequels was the constant presence of all those handmaidens, frequently used as decoys.  To my mind, the death of Padme doesn't mean their role in the story goes away.  I've narrowed down the most likely candidate for this task to Teckla Minnau, who is admittedly another character who's popped up in the expanded universe.  This is a figure who works best in conjunction with:
3. Princess Leia.  I'm hoping that JJ Abrams addresses more forthrightly than the books people have written about the years after Return of the Jedi Leia's growing awareness of her own Force abilities (for those who still wonder why Lucas overlooked the fact that Amidala dies in childbirth but Leia clearly states in Return that she remembers her mother, I would say that she does so with her initial, instinctive knowledge of the Force).  Anyway, Leia becomes the driving hero the way she was never quite able to be in the original trilogy, despite the fact that Hope begins with her very much in that role.  I envision her walking a very fine line between an apparent loyalist to the Empire and secret agent of the Rebellion, using allies like the handmaiden Teckla to accomplish her goals.  Of course, she's aided by her adopted father:
4. Bail Organa.  Present but in a fairly brief capacity in the prequels, Bail is forthright in his suspicions of Palpatine and is a useful figure in the strict politics of the whole thing, in a way that Leia can't be.  Leia is the media darling, whereas Bail is the one who's giving the good fight.  Any resemblance to recent Americans politics I hadn't thought of until just now, for the record.
5. Darth Vader.  This one goes without saying.  Any Star Wars story within this time-frame must necessarily include him.  I once again refer to Hope for the story beats he must represent, which is the Empire's growing disconnect from Force lore, the "old religion" that leaves much of what he and Palpatine are an apparent thing of the past.  And considering that this is the period where Vader truly learns about his new circumstances and the details of the Dark Side, there's plenty to explore here.
6. A secret Sith apprentice.  Given that Palpatine placed all his faith in the future of not only the Sith but the Force in Vader, he's not looking to replace him.  And there's the famous rule of two in Sith business, that there are always and only two.  Apparently.  But the prequels are littered with suggestions that Palpatine played fast and loose with this idea, and even expanded universe lore has played around with this in the Clone Wars TV show.  Just as there are Imperial suspicions of Vader, Palplatine will have his own doubts about his apprentice's immediate effectiveness in his altered state, so he'll have someone up his sleeve not so much to replace Vader but to keep him on his toes.  And what interests me is the idea that this figure could also link in with the Lucasian idea that the best thing about Star Wars is the familial struggles, which means that this secret Sith is the sister of the Imperial defector...
7. Boba Fett.  The bounty hunter immediately captured fans' imaginations even though his role was always a fairly passive one.  I imagine that Vader included him in the Empire Strikes Back line-up that fellow Imperial officers found so discomfiting because they'd worked together in the past.  Chances are very good that Fett and Vader compete in the effort to stop the defector.

I will be drawing up sketches for each individual installment for this Middle Trilogy at my writing blog, Sigild V.  (Incidentally, you might want to read my three previous forays into Star Wars fiction: "Star Child," "I Joined the Rebellion," and "Tarkin, Republic and Empire.")  Stop by and see how it develops!

[EDIT: Here's that write-up.]

#615. Announcing the Ode-athon

Announcing my very first blogfest, the Ode-athon!  Simulcasting here and at my writers blog, which for some reason is called Tony Laplume, the date is November 2, 2013 and you are all invited.  (You may also participate on any day of the regular week that follows.  But you will have to do so while writing your NaNo.  At least this one you can write ahead of time.)

The Ode-athon is a call to write about your favorite writers.  Here I'm thinking specifically of authors, although I'm already planning to cheat myself with a cartoonist in my writers dozen (somewhere around fourteen).  You can choose one or you can go with as many as you can hit without exhausting yourself.  The idea is to tell us about the writers you read most passionately, the ones who have affected you the most, and perhaps even inspired you.  

The last perk I have to share is that on 11/9 I will include a recap post about the whole thing.

Here's the sign-up list:

#614. The Force (of Others)

Last month I talked about a new comic book that's adapting the 1974 version of Star Wars, when George Lucas was still refining the basic concepts of the saga that would become a phenomenon three years later.

Part of the great fun of reading this mini-series from Dark Horse is seeing familiar elements in altered form, and perhaps one of the most intriguing is the version of the Force that knights of the Jedi-Bendu (which sounds like something out of Dune) use.  The phrase "May the Force be with you" is famous from the completed film, but in this version it's modified with "the Force of Others" in it.

And it's made me think a little more about the whole concept of the Force.

I'm not sure how much thought anyone's given it beyond the fact that Yoda can wax poetic about it and even a scoundrel like Han Solo will reference it positively not so long after outright dismissing it, while Darth Vader has a hard time having his "hokey religion" (Solo's words, mind you) taken seriously, plus you get to have an awesome lightsaber and start training as soon as possible (which isn't always soon enough).  When the prequels introduced the microscopic lifeforms that make a Jedi's connection possible, that seemed to be beyond the extent of the fan's interest in studying it further.

And yet there's that scene in Attack of the Clones where Yoda busts out "Jedi-fu" and then immediately hobbles back to his walking stick.

Force of others, force of will.

So, I started giving it some more thought.  Clearly the Force gives its wielders, good and bad, special abilities denied most others, from telekinesis to thought influence and even clairvoyance (well, sometimes).  I would have described it best as a force of will, personally, a little like how the comic book Green Lantern Corps uses a ring to channel willpower into tangible constructs, but the use of will differs quite a bit.  The Force is used to manipulate one's environment, to gain greater control.  One of little Anakin Skywalker's calling cards was his greater instincts in podracing (or it might have been that clairvoyance thing), at any rate certainly good in a fight (though not good enough to keep limbs from being lost on a routine basis, but then we're talking about electric swords here).

So when I first read about "the Force of Others," it gave me another idea.  Instead of being a tool tailored to one individual, what if the Force is a literal translation of the "strength of ten men" effect?  That's how I interpret at least this version of the Force, which may influence even the canonical approach.

What if a Jedi (or Sith) is able to tap into a collective will instead or merely their own?  They gain the strength of others and are therefore able to go beyond the ordinary abilities of a single individual.  It would be like a tug-of-war contest waged by one person against a whole team as if the one person had a phantom team around them for support.

Anyway, that's my idea, the mystery behind the mystical concept of the Force.  When Yoda switches from bouncing here there and everywhere back to the frail sage we know and love, clearly he's just relied heavily on the Force.  And maybe a little more.

#613. 7 Ways the original Star Wars trilogy is superior to the prequels

Earlier this year I presented my case for why the Star Wars prequels are better than the originals.  In all fairness to the persistent opposition, I'm now going to present the case for exactly the opposite.

1. Distinct film-making for its era.  The thing that made Star Wars such a smash hit in 1977 (and every year since) was that even with all the acknowledged antecedents there had never been anything like it.  George Lucas created a new cinematic vernacular both visually and narratively.  The prequels, and all blockbusters since really, exist in that new landscape.  How do you compete with something like that?  As many fans have decided, you really can't.  
2. The prototypical rogue.  Another signature element of the original trilogy that everyone and their mother has attempted to duplicate in the years since is the lovable rogue archetype embodied by Harrison Ford so successfully that it not only gave him a career (he'd been struggling for years and had gone to carpentering in lieu of acting roles, having even been an afterthought in Lucas's own American Graffiti four years earlier).  My favorite Han Solo knockoff is Sawyer from Lost, but Ford was so good at it that he became a box office staple for years, twisting the type for another iconic character in Indiana Jones.
3. Slow burn storytelling.  The originals told their saga a lot more methodically.  I suppose the prequels didn't have this opportunity because they were literally explaining something that fans already knew about.  This wasn't the case in the first three films.  Every piece was dropped into place very deliberately, from Luke discovering his aunt and uncle had just bought a differently kind of farm entirely to Han finally figuring out why Leia only had eyes for him.
4. The humor of the humor character.  The fact of the prequels will always be that the fans will probably hate Jar Jar Binks.  Lucas acknowledged this in the second two films of the second trilogy by drastically reducing to practically eliminating entirely the controversial amphibian.  Except Jar Jar was basically an update of C-3PO, who gradually obtains the honor of bugging the hell out of the most popular character in these films, Han Solo.  The funny thing is, Threepio can very easily be viewed as just as annoying as Jar Jar, and Lucas seemed to get that, too.  By Return of the Jedi, the protocol droid is far better integrated into the rest of the plot, spending less time dropping non sequiturs and more being involved directly in the story.  Yet, and perhaps because fans always loved the beep-bopping R2-D2 (even though he could easily be considered annoying, too, from a certain point of view) and the droids spent a lot of time together, you don't hear fans grumble so much about this one while they relentlessly hate that one.
5. The big reveal.  It's the moment even non-hardcore Star Wars fans love to talk about, the ending of The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader reveals that he's Luke's father (sorry, thirty-year-old SPOILER ALERT).  It's a huge, huge moment, capping a film that many still consider to be the best in the whole series.  And it's the voice of James Earl Jones.  The voice of James Earl Jones can do no wrong.
6. A standout after a standout.  Actually, my final three points all relate to Empire.  The best way to create a continually beloved trilogy is to have at least two of the three become instant cultural institutions.  The first one was a phenomenon.  Like The Godfather Part II, Empire is the rare sequel that not only doesn't suck but can be argued to be superior to its predecessor.  That's a great way to make a lasting memory.  
7. New icons introduced after the first film.  Most of the icons in Star Wars were introduced in the first film.  But then the second film added more.  That's the sort of thing that makes institutions, folks.  There was Yoda.  Everyone loves Yoda.  They love to quote him.  There was also Boba Fett.  For a guy who has far less to quote, he was another instant sensation.  He remains the only thing about the Star Wars Holiday Special that anyone will admit to remembering, because technically he debuted in it as part of a cartoon segment.  There was also Lando Calrissian, still my personal favorite!  How do you do that?  The Fast & Furious films did it by accident years later.  Star Wars did it by design.

And they remain eminently rewatchable.

#612. Superpolitics, or It's Great to Be a Politician When Your'e Doing What Politicians Do Best

I'm not going to get into the politics of the government shutdown, but I figured it would still be fun to talk about.

The crux of it seems to be that President Obama is desperately trying to ensure the Affordable Care Act (or "Obamacare") remains intact, because he sees it as his lasting legacy, just as Republicans are using this to maneuver themselves for 2016.  It sucks about all the economic fallout that's resulting from all this, but then, we haven't exactly been in the best possible shape for a good number of years now.

What excites me is that aside from the economic frownie face, this is politics as you read about it in the history books.  JFK wrote the whole of Profiles in Courage about this.  (If you've never read it, consider it your 11/22/63 anniversary duty.)  Who doesn't vaguely remember the one dude who beat the other dude right on the senate floor, and how batshit insane that was even for that time?

No, this is politicians doing what they do best.  Voters naively believe that politicians are elected to perform a civic duty.  No, politicians are elected so that they can make impressive speeches in front of each other.  The same principals they espouse during their campaigns are the same things they talk about upholding while shaping new laws and whatnot.  And they're so busy doing that, trying in vain to convince each other, that nothing ever gets done.

Every once and a while, all this grandiose posturing makes an impression on people other than politicians.  Ted Cruz made a 21 hour filibuster to kick off the shutdown.  Now, granted, his filibuster was probably not nearly as awesome as Patton Oswalt's.  Nothing will ever be that awesome.  In evidence:

But still, Cruz had the real world equivalent, and that's something to celebrate, even if you couldn't possibly sit through all 21 hours of it awake, or agree with everything he said.

And that's the sort of thing that's been going on ever since.  Great time to care about politicians being politicians.  Because this is what they love the most.  Aren't you happy to see them so happy?

#611. Seven Fun Facts about The Rifleman

Watching old TV shows can be fine even if they were originally broadcast decades before you were born.  Recently I've been watching a lot of old TV shows, and I figured I'd share with you a few interesting observations about one of them, The Rifleman.

The Rifleman originally aired from 1958 to 1963 for a total of five seasons and 168 episodes.  It starred Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain, the eponymous character for the simple reason that he did all his shooting with a rifle (a Winchester).  It was an early TV Western, debuting a few seasons after the start of Gunsmoke and one before Bonanza.

Anyway, the observations:

• It occurred to me that comic book artist Howard Chaykin may very well have based his whole art style on Chuck Connors.  The resemblance between the two is uncanny.  Distinctive jawlines and piercing stares!

(via wikipedia)

(via amazon)

• Another signature of The Rifleman is McCain's son Mark, who has a knack for getting in trouble even though he's a generally capable and bright kid.  It reminds me of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Speaking of Star Trek, the bond between widower Lucas and young son Mark is also reminiscent of Benjamin and Jake Sisko from Deep Space Nine.  It shouldn't be too surprising to see parallels of this kind, considering Gene Roddenberry originally pitched Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the stars."  Wagon Train was another TV Western.
• I know Connors from another role, "Swiftie" Morgan in Support Your Local Gunfighter, a 1971 James Garner films that also features Harry Morgan and Suzanne Pleshette.  "Swiftie" is a character who looms like a specter over the whole movie, but doesn't appear until the very end.  I grew up loving the name "Swiftie" Morgan.
• Director Sam Peckinpah created The Rifleman from a rejected Gunsmoke script.  He eventually left the series and soon began his film career, with such hits as The Wild Bunch to his credit.
• As you might have assumed from the photo of Connors, he also had careers in professional sports, including stints in baseball (he played for the Cubs!) and basketball (he played for the Celtics!).
• The Rifleman provided early roles for Dennis Hopper and Michael Landon.  Landon quickly landed Bonanza (and then Little House on the Prairie and then Highway to Heaven) after a few guest appearances.

#610. The Cephalopod Coffeehouse September 2013

I'm only a day early for this month's Cephalopod Coffeehouse meeting!  All thanks still go to founder, who sometimes refers to himself as A Squid.

As has been my routine, here's a preliminary list of the books I read in the month (now slightly less impressive!):

• Fated by S.G. Browne
• How to Live Safely in a Science Ficitional Universe by Charles Yu
• Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolano
• The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano
• The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolano

I'm currently reading The Savage Detectives by...Roberto Bolano.

I've already done a post on HL2SU.  Fated was pretty good, too (although it ends on the most interesting note of the whole piece, like a segue to a Christopher Moore book).  And then I reached Roberto Bolano.

Roberto Bolano is my favorite writer.  He died ten years ago, but you'd hardly know it from his English language publishing schedule.  I first learned about him from the wildly anticipated release of 2666, which was kind of like the Harry Potter of the literary set in 2009.  The massive tome, split into five volumes, is everything conceivable and good about fiction, what I like to consider the ultimate book.  Reading it was the first best way to fall in love with Bolano, which anyone really should have, and in the best of all possible worlds his name would now be as famous as any of the other classics writers you can think of.  At the moment he's not any kind of ready presence in a bookstore, however, at least not here in the States (and my survey is as extensive as it can be), and that's as big a crime as what lies at the heart of 2666.

Anyway, after the massive (and richly deserved) hoopla, it became necessary to release the rest of Bolano's works in English, a project that has only recently, after near a dozen releases, reached its climax.  I haven't managed to collect all of them, but of the ones I have I've finally gotten around to reading them.  That is to say, savoring them.

Most of his books are short works, under two hundred pages.  I'd previously enjoyed By Night in Chile, which affirmed my devotion to Bolano.  Monsieur Pain did likewise, as did The Skating Rink.  The Insufferable Gaucho is a collection of still shorter works, including some essays (and for those interested *cough* Pat Dilloway *cough* in those he sounds a lot like Kurt Vonnegut), and is probably a release better suited to devotists.

Bolano had a rich voice, and he immersed himself deeply in his characters, who tended to be melancholic literary types exploring mysteries without resolution.  It was always the journey that was the point, as his subjects took readers on a guided tour of their lives as they saw them.  Like many writers, Bolano tended toward sensational, often sensual individuals, though ones who lived on the margins, or who interpreted themselves as living on the margins, of society.  The Skating Rink in particular is extraordinary as it explores three different people whose rotating viewpoints pivoting on a murder in the eponymous location, each at different social levels.  Like a lot of his stories, it reads like a prototype 2666, but is also distinctly its own story.

One of the great benefits of reading Bolano is his focus on Latin America as well as locations in Europe, notably Spain and France.  Bolano himself was Chilean, but he traveled extensively.  When I think of ways my life could have gone differently, this is how I imagine the ideal to be.  In Bolano's view, the literary life was still very much the romantic life, with circles of friends the way it was, say, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.  This was something I knew in college, but I had no idea how to sustain that.  Maybe it's something only the young experience?

Before 2666, there was The Savage Detectives, Bolano's second longest work and what originally brought him international acclaim even among English readers.  Having only read the first sixth so far, I can't speak too much about it, but it rings true with everything I've said in this post, and is recognizable as classic Bolano.

To read Bolano is to truly enjoy reading.  Along with a select few, he's the ideal of all writers for me, and the standard by which I compare all writers, why it can sometimes be difficult for me to appreciate not merely other styles but different levels of skill.  To me, you're either this good or aspire to be, and if you don't, I have no idea why you're writing.  Is this elitism?  Perhaps.  The love of writing should look this good.  And the amazing thing is, Bolano considered himself first and foremost to be a poet (and he was good at that, too, as evidenced in The Romantic Dogs).  Perhaps good writers must be good poets, too.  They must be in love with language.

I will be savoring The Savage Detectives for as long as I can, thank you.

#609. Longest Game in Professional Baseball History

Sometimes the game doesn't end.

When you think of a baseball game going into extra innings, you probably think tenth innings, maybe a few more, right?  You may have heard of a few major league games that went on for twenty.  Seems pretty extreme, right?  Well, the game I'm going to talk about today had runs scored by both teams in the twenty-first inning, and there were still more than ten innings left to play.

Yes, you read that right.  I'm talking about a game that went on for thirty-three innings.  It lasted for eight hours.

It began on April 18, 1981.  (Yes, began on.)  The teams were the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings.  The PawSox are the AAA minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, or otherwise known as the most direct development feeder for the team.  (Incidentally Maine got the AA affiliate, the Portland Sea Dogs, a while back.  Hadlock Field was subsequently retrofitted as a miniature Fenway Park, complete with a Green Monster.)   The Red Wings were at the time an affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles (though currently doing the honors for the Minnesota Twins).

Now, half the reason I'm telling you any of this at all is because a few of the players involved went on to prominent major league careers.  The most famous of them would be Cal Ripkin, Jr., playing for the Red Wings.  He had thirteen at-bats.  (Thirteen!)  Of course, he only got two hits, no runs.  The final score, by the way, was 3-2 PawSox.  There was also Wade Boggs, playing for Pawtucket.  A couple of other names Red Sox fans would recognize are Marty Barrett and Bruce Hurst.  Boggs went on to become one of the best hitters in baseball.  In twelve at-bats he had four hits, one of the best totals in the game, naturally.

The MLB was apparently in the midst of a strike at the time, which was why a lot of reporters were paying attention to this game in the first place, but surely not the reason they wrote about it later.  Normally seven reporters covered PawSox games, but this one drew one hundred seventy-one passes.

The Red Wings scored the first run, in the seven inning.  The PawSox struck back in the bottom of the ninth.  And as you know, no other run was registered until the twenty-first, when both teams reached home once each.  And then it was a long wait until the bottom of the thirty-third.

The Red Wings utilized sixteen fielders, six pitchers (their starter went over eight innings, another went about the same, and then there was one who went ten).  The PawSox were more conservative, sticking to eleven fielders, but eight hurlers, none of whom went for as long as any of the Rochester set, the starter lasting only the first six frames.

The Red Wings had thirty hitters left on base during the game, Pawtucket twenty-three.  PawSox manager Joe Morgan was ejected in the unlucky twenty-first inning.

I'm sure it was a heck of a game to see live, although I'm sure more than a few observers opted out of baseball for at least a few days afterward.  Baseball is oftentimes a game of momentum.  When one team is doing well on the field, it saps the resolve of the other.  And then sometimes it's all about a true showdown (no wonder it was arguably at its most popular when people also loved to watch westerns).  Some people call the game boring, but to me it's packed with dramatic moments, an infinite amount of suspense.  You just never know what's going to happen.

In a game like this one, that was never more true.

#608. The 2013 PWI 500

Pro Wrestling Illustrated, as the title suggests, is the Sports Illustrated of professional wrestling magazines.  Since 1991, it has annually compiled a list of the top 500 competitors in the world, so that makes this year's edition the 23rd ranking.

And for most of the past decade, I've been providing a commentary on the results.  Normally I haven't been too happy.  Sometimes PWI makes baffling decisions for the number one slot.  The whole point of lists like this is to spark debate, but sometimes it's seemed as if the magazine has taken a perverse pleasure in selecting the least likely candidate for the slot.  I've found myself thinking that there was a far more obvious prospect.

PWI is an independent entity.  It exists outside the auspices of WWE or any other wrestling promotion.  Still, the top slot often seems to go with whoever WWE has most heavily promoted in the last year, or failing that whoever else has most impressed its editors.  The grading period is roughly midpoint of the year to midpoint of the year.  Since WWE's WrestleMania takes place in the second half of this grading period, most of my frustrations have tended to stem from the fact that anyone who had at least as good or better a first half of this grading period as the star who shined in the second can never seem to overcome this handicap.  They didn't do their best work in the period PWI most values.

Now, PWI is objective to a point.  Famously, it presents the majority of its material from a kayfabe perspective.  "Kayfabe" is when you take professional wrestling at face value.  You believe the competition is real and accept that the way promoters book their talent is basically the only way to evaluate them.  In that sense, the success of a given wrestler's year is based on how they were booked.  PWI most notably breaks kayfabe when its analyzes a wrestler's specific performance, how they present themselves regardless of how they're booked, or in other words what they do with what they're given.

The problem with the PWI 500 is that it has always been driven by kayfabe.  In rare (and some of the key baffling ones) exceptions, the top slot went to someone based on PWI's ability to look beyond kayfabe.  However, since I'm focusing primarily on this year's ranking, I won't reiterate too explicitly on past grievances.

All of this is to say that I've been conflicted over this year's winner of the top slot, John Cena.  Cena had the WrestleMania push.  He won the Royal Rumble and defeated The Rock in the main event of WrestleMania 29, and as of the end of the grading period (but not what has developed since) reigned as WWE champion.  That's action from the second half of the grading period.  In the first half, he had perhaps one of the worst periods of his entire main event career.  He did win a Money in the Bank contract, but became the first person ever to fail in capturing a title after cashing it in.  He also lost time while he rested from injuries.  In the second half of 2012, Cena was not the man.  It was the necessary second act from his heroic efforts in the first part of that year to rebound from losing to The Rock at the previous WrestleMania.

Certainly this year was a triumphant comeback.  But that's only been half the year, and half the grading period.  No, the man who arguably deserved the top spot in ranking came in at the second slot.  He won the top slot last year.  I'm talking about CM Punk.

Punk held the WWE championship for 434 consecutive days, a reign that ended at the start of the second half of the grading period.  It's the longest reign with the title in decades.  True, he did lose two matches to The Rock, and then lost again at WrestleMania to the Undertaker, after which he took some time off, making his second half not nearly as impressive as Cena's, and if anything comparable to Cena's first half, but it's a more than fair argument that Punk's first half was better than Cena's second.  Punk's momentum was better in defeat than Cena's was toward triumph.

By the rules of kayfabe, Cena probably deserves that top slot.  The rematch with The Rock was excellent, and it did more than their first match to put Cena in the same league as The Rock.  It's been weird for me to have to argue that Cena deserves to be in consideration for the title of WWE legend, because I was among his earliest supporters.  I long ago saw that this was a possibility, and the improvements he needed to make he did.  And yet here we are now in 2013 and I'm wondering if PWI should have made that unprecedented move.  Sitting atop this year's ranking gives Cena three such wins in the history of the PWI 500.  This distances him from Bret Hart, Steve Austin, and Triple H, who were also two-time top slot winners.  True, he's been in a position to be a more consistent main event talent for WWE than those guys, but isn't it weird to think he might be considered better than Austin, much less The Rock, who never had such an honor even once to begin with?

Yes, I'm taking all of this pretty seriously.  I'm buying into the kayfabe.  Had Punk gotten the honor, he would have joined Cena and the others among the PWI 500 elite.  And PWI itself would have been more than happy in a lot of other years to have done exactly that.

Does it matter?  I'm asking myself that, on top of a lot of other things I've been asking myself lately.  I've been at a crossroads in my life for what sometimes seems all my life, only moreso lately.  It's fair to say I've been in crisis mode at least for the past two years, reaping what I've sown, learning the results of all my failures to accomplish what anyone else might have taken for granted years ago.  And I look at something like the PWI 500 and debating with myself yet again whether Wrestler A should have been placed above Wrestler B, much less where other familiar and favorite names fell in the ranking, and I wonder if I've been throwing my life away on trivialities.

I wonder, because my whole life I've been working on interests that in a lot of ways have dovetailed very beautifully with each other.  I'm happiest with what I've done with my life when I think about how it has affected the writing I do.  And yet I'm conflicted because even with all the happiness I have with my writing, I've struggled in every other aspect of my life.  I am deep in the heart of the 99%.  Financially, I've always been a kind of mess, but now I'm in a whole heap of trouble, especially considering what I've been mired in for the last few years.

I'm not complaining for sympathy.  A lot of my troubles stem from the natural kind of alienation I bring on myself.  I'm talking about wrestling again even though I know none of my readers particularly cares about it.  In efforts to attract more interest to my blogging, I only alienate myself more.  I can never be the happy little soldier.  In a lot of ways, I isolate myself at least as much by the culmination and expression of my interests as by the instinct to set myself apart, to focus on what makes me different rather than what makes me a part of the community.

I'm a snob.  It seems as if my whole being points in that direction.  I rate myself on my own merits as much as how I compare myself to others.  I'm angry and jealous at the success of others.  What comes easy to them is a constant struggle for me.  And through all of this I know that life doesn't work that way.  Success is arbitrary.

People most appreciate people who don't alienate them.  They gravitate toward those who make them feel good.  In PWI speak, it's easier to root for Cena, who acts the part of the good guy, than for Punk, who spent the whole grading period as a villain.  Am I a villain?  Am I selfish and condescending?

I guess and hope that next time I talk about this, I will have an answer.

#607. The emerging Star Trek Into Darkness Khan-troversy

There've been a lot of clues lately, but yeah, I've now realized that Star Trek Into Darkness is not especially popular.

It clicked for me when Entertainment Weekly devoted the debut of a new column to the phenomenon.  You can read it here.  The article outlines some of the obvious symptoms, like the convention survey that inexplicably ranked it as the worst of the twelve Star Trek movies, or the spate of defensive comments from its creators.  The whole thing is starting to reek of Superman Returns.

(And incidentally, I remain a passionate fan of Superman Returns, so I never understood that, either.)

I suspect the whole thing has to do with the second great story Star Trek fans love to tell themselves.  The first great story is the initial three seasons and cancellation that did not after all prove the end of Gene Roddenberry's vision.  The second great story is how Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the Greatest Star Trek Movie Ever.

I will give those fans the benefit of the doubt.  Without Wrath of Khan, it's very possible that the franchise as we know it today wouldn't exist.  The Motion Picture brought Star Trek back from the dead, but most fans today consider it a boring snorefest.  (And perhaps as a further sign of my cultish incompetence, I've always loved The Motion Picture.)  Everything changed with Wrath of Khan.  The costumes, for one.  And Ricardo Montalban became a true franchise icon.  He made his first appearance as Khan in the episode "Space Seed," but I'm pretty sure if both of them had only appeared then, we wouldn't speak so much about either today.

No, Wrath of Khan became an immediate touchstone.  There are plenty of elements that stopped resonating after a while, but Khan remained.  Kirk's solution to the Kobayashi Maru  test became so iconic that it was featured in the first J.J. Abrams flick.  (That alone should have told fans how much Abrams himself admired Wrath of Khan's importance to Star Trek lore.)

Fans established the odd movie curse in response to it.  They didn't so much like the first one.  They loved this one.  They were less enthusiastic about the third one.  The Voyage Home was the one with the whales.  You know about that one.  The fifth one was the next much-discussed misfire.  And the sixth one was the farewell of the original cast.  And so on.

It was Abrams who broke the curse.  His Star Trek was an odd movie, the eleventh in the series.  (Perhaps this was also because Star Trek Nemesis was an even movie, the tenth, and was such a box office disaster that it helped put the whole franchise in a coma.  Although I love Star Trek Nemesis.  Go figure.)

This one was also the biggest box office success of all the Star Trek films.  Of course, some fans were already grumbling.  The most generous comments suggested that he had made a Star Wars film (years before he accepted the assignment to succeed George Lucas in that franchise).

Abrams rebooted the Star Trek mythos with his film, opting for an origin story in the style that had become popular with movies at the time.  That just happened to mean that Khan, who had been off the board since Wrath of Khan, was back in play.

And why not?  Wrath of Khan established the character as integral to the whole franchise.  Star Trek usually defines itself more by social messages and its lead characters.  Khan's presence just so happened to result in a whole trilogy of linked films, thanks to Spock's death and resurrection (and whales).  His story began and ended, essentially, in the one film, but it was a combination of everything hitting the right marks, and how it helped the fans embrace the new material, and even that it made Star Trek a little like Star Wars, the whole reason Star Trek returned in the first place, that made Wrath of Khan so consistently memorable.

For some people, and not just Star Trek fans, "consistently memorable" is a parallel concept to unquestionable greatness.  Most critics who compile the greatest films ever made operate in this way.  They hit all the milestones like pieces of a puzzle.  To Star Trek fans, the first and most important piece will always be Wrath of Khan.

This is how something like the backlash to Star Trek Into Darkness happens.  Because in bringing back Khan and deliberately echoing Wrath of Khan, Abrams has threatened the legacy of this treasured memory.  Has he made a better version, a better film?  For many fans, this is unthinkable.  Rather than consider this possibility, they will reject the new film outright.

Star Trek has faced this challenge before, in 1987 when The Next Generation debuted in syndication.  This was the start of a new era, too, the beginning of a whole new cast's legacy.  Tellingly, Captain Picard's place in franchise lore was not solidified until he faced the Borg, which is kind of like his version of Wrath of Khan (making the eighth film, First Contact, all the more appropriate, and its own allusions to the second film all the more resonant).

Fans who are rebelling against Star Trek Into Darkness won't admit it, but this is old hat for them.  They rebelled against Deep Space Nine successfully.  There are many passionate fans of DS9, who stand by the opinion that it is the best of the Star Trek series.  Voyager hasn't been so lucky.  Neither has Enterprise.  Fans who try and stick with the simplest version of their devotion, who incidentally will never admit this, split opinions so successfully after Captain Kirk's death in Star Trek Generations that they helped bring the franchise to a standstill less than ten years later.  There were more episodes and more films in that period than at any other point in Star Trek history, but all the while the fans were actually struggling against them rather than embracing this boon period.

And then Abrams brought things back to Kirk, and audiences who weren't as concerned with the purity of it all finally admitted that Star Trek had become an iconic cultural institution, and that's how we got ourselves such a widely embraced film.

And then Star Trek Into Darkness, which dared to storm once more unto the breach.  And thus the backlash.  Terribly inevitable, really.

That's what fans can do.  They can embrace and they can reject.  Star Wars knows a thing or two about that, too.  (Incidentally, I love the prequels.)

And incidentally, I love Star Trek Into Darkness.  I guess I should have seen this backlash coming.  Everyone seemed to love the wild goose chase before the film was released, confirming what the filmmakers kept trying to deny, that Khan was in this movie.  I guess when everyone finally learned the truth, it was not as much fun as the chase.

Fans who thought Abrams didn't bring enough social commentary to his Star Trek don't have nearly as much to complain about in that regard with this one.  While carrying on the spirit of the extreme focus on the character of Captain Kirk that was featured in the first one, the sequel also makes ample room to meditate on the nature of war as we've known it this century, and even as we're dealing with it now, in the time of Syria.

And yet the controversy brews.  You'll pardon me if when I think about it that's not the first thing that comes to mind.  Star Trek Into Darkness joined, for me, the ranks of the elite in the franchise's film series.  And perhaps is one more reason why I can put Wrath of Khan, if anything, further behind.  Or perhaps further ahead.

#606. Write...Edit...Publish: Moving On

The Armchair Squid seems determined to involve me in the blogging community.  He's already got the Cephalopod Coffeehouse I've been enjoying for months now, and now he's alerted me to this writing bloghop, Write...Edit...Publish (WEP).  This month's theme is moving on.  In a roundabout way, the following story follows it.  See if you can tell me how in the comments.  (814 words.)

Bessie

The cow who was not a cow, more like an extrapolation on the concept, sat there mooing.  

The cow's name was Bessie.  She was looking at a statue that reminded her a great deal of herself. 

This was appropriate because the statue was after all fashioned as a tribute to her.  The thing was, Bessie had a lousy memory.  Her contemporaries forgave her because they adored her.  It should be noted that the statue was not a religious totem, and that Bessie herself was never intended to see it.  There was an idea at one point that it would be unveiled at a surprise party with Bessie as the guest of honor, but then the goat who would one day become the Golden Goat, who was sometimes called Dillon, was recognized as an idiot, and those plans fell apart. 

Bessie had recently returned home after a long exile.  The fact of the exile was not peculiar to her, but rather a dictate of the...Dictator of the Galaxy, who was an extrapolation of a dog.  When the Dictator realized that many of the subjects of his great realm closely resembled creatures on an insignificant planet known as Earth, he'd ordered a large sampling of them to visit.  Such are the whimsies of fate that the Dictator himself ended up becoming an exile there, too.  Some blame Bessie, others the common mischief of Boo.  It is not wise to question matters of that regard. 

Standing not far away from Bessie was a human, an old farmer by the name of Kentucky Joe.  "Kentucky Joe" was not his real name, and is not even close to it.  He never even lived in Kentucky, but rather somewhere deep in Camden County, Missouri.  And speaking of the whimsies of fate, Kentucky Joe had never had a cow on his farm until he acquired Bessie. 

(As to how that occurred, this was the result of a bet the cow lost to Boo.) 

The old farmer was still having a difficult time adjusting to his new surroundings.  So far he had been forced to ride an absurd progression of animals, the last of which and most alarming was a horny toad, or so he called it.  The horny toad was in fact a tree frog, who had in turn lost a bet to a turtle.  The Dictator does not concern himself with gambling, because he himself has a weakness for roulette and the number 23. 

When she noticed Kentucky Joe looking at the statue, Bessie let a sigh loose.  Sooner or later she'd have to tell him something.  There were so few humans here.  Even the ones who visited usually left on some ridiculous quest dreamed up by the Dictator, who had the attention span of a gnat.  She wasn't at all concerned that Kentucky Joe would be drawn up in something like that, though.  As far as she could tell, the only thing he was capable of doing was initiating riding all kinds of weird creatures (as everyone knows, only horses and seahorses are supposed to be treated like that) and working on increasingly feverish projects.  Taken off his farm, the old farmer was just out of place, which is not what Bessie would ever say about herself.   

She was at home anywhere.  Except here.  Staring at her statue.  It was unnerving.  And Kentucky Joe only made it worse.  He kept looking back and forth between them, even though it was plainly evident that they were exactly alike.  The Dictator had a thing for statues.  She suspected that he was trying to send her a message, manipulating everyone into this exact moment.  Since she couldn't remember anything else about it, that seemed to be the logical assumption.  Maybe she was just being paranoid. 

The old farmer somehow came up with an idea to fashion a small scale replica of the statue.  He found some goat milk that had come from Dillon, and set about the task.  Except he soon had the idea to make it bigger, and began to bargain with the goat for more milk, which the goat did not appreciate.  Goats most appreciate leafy greens, and least appreciate when you stop giving leafy greens to them.  If you want your kids to eat leafy greens, have them visit a petting zoo, or a farm.  Kentucky Joe's farm is free for the taking, by the way, and it has goats, one of which is Dillon's kid (no kidding). 

Bessie was not beset with the appallingly lunatic spectacle of watching the old farmer carve a statue of a statue that was in her likeness, and she was no closer to learning why the original had been made in the first place.  Typically, the Dictator was on yet another of his mindless excursions. 

This was why, even though cows don't moo anywhere but on Earth, she did exactly that.  Again.

#605. The Star Wars from 1974!

Dark Horse has been publishing Star Wars comics for twenty years.  There's nothing much to say about a new title from them, then, right?

Except with this one, there's plenty.  I'm talking about The Star Wars, the new eight-issue mini-series that adapts George Lucas's original screenplay, the one he developed before his vision became a phenomenon.  Plenty of names and concepts remain familiar, but they all seem to be playing from a different set of rules.  And best of all, Dark Horse made sure it reads as brilliantly as the idea of releasing it in the first place.

J. W. Rinzler is in charge of adapting the script.  He's previously made a name for himself as the chief archivist for books about the creation and world of Star Wars.  If anyone knows the saga backwards and forwards, it's this guy, which makes him the ideal candidate to interpret and translate a completely different version.

The artist is Mike Mayhew (not related to Peter), who has been active in comics for years, but may have found his defining project here.  His stuff is breathtaking, and integral to pulling the whole thing off.  The characters all look unique (except for one who looks like a pint-sized version of Luke Skywalker from A New Hope), while certain ships and locations evoke familiar images from the films, as is acknowledged in accompanying concept sketches.

The opening issue makes it clear that George Lucas extrapolated a lot of what became the later six film saga from the original effort.  There are strong traces of The Phantom Menace (specifically the politics of Naboo), in case you're still wondering how much of the prequel trilogy came from the formative development of the Star Wars universe.  The central ideas of the Jedi and the Empire are here, as well as many names and personalities, all of them shifted just to the side.

It will be intriguing to read the whole thing, and I'm willing to bet that the resulting trade collection will become a staple for all true Star Wars aficionados.

This sort of thing has almost happened for fans before.  Timothy Zahn's original Thrawn trilogy, the books that launched the entire expanded universe outside of Dark Horse's initial efforts, for instance, or Shadow of the Empire.  I still hold to the idea that Lucas remains the heart of the whole thing, and that it's not really, or not enough, Star Wars without a Skywalker at the center worrying about their place in the universe.

With new films on the horizon from people other than George Lucas, this may be the first test of how well that will actually work.  If the films are anything like this, I think we're good.

#604. Warrior Orphans, Scarlet Knights, Storms

Continuing with the book talk, I'm officially announcing here at Scouring Monk the release of the Complete Yoshimi, published as The Whole Bloody Affair.  This is half of what I spent this past April's A-to-Z (now helpfully archived in the tabs above) talking about.  I've previously released the first volume separately, and now you have the option for the whole thing.  I've got the Kindle edition listed on the side and here, and the paperback copy will follow [EDIT -- It's here!].  It's the longest book I've yet released!

And because I'm so magnanimous, here's some talk about other people's books, too!

Pat Dilloway has been a blogger buddy for a few years now, and one of his major projects has been the release of his Scarlet Knight series.  He's had ebooks available for a while, but recently completed the paperback editions.  Here's a helpful listing for all!

• A Hero's Journey
• Time Enough to Say Goodbye
• The Hazards of Love
• Change of Heart
• Betrayal Begets Blood
• Future Shocks
• Living Sacrifice
• The Heart of Emma Earl

I've only read Hero's Journey so far.  It's fair to say that Pat and I have different ideas on how to write a superhero novel (he hated my own, Cloak of Shrouded Men), but his Scarlet Knight rings true to the classic Adam West Batman (now with less camp!), and I grew up watching that stuff (and even Batman's publisher, DC, is getting in on the nostalgia of that TV series, with a new comic book dedicated to its legacy).  Pat has shifted it into an obviously more ambitious and expansive experience.  Word to the wise: his favorite is the concluding volume, Heart of Emma Earl.

And like everyone else is doing, I'm also taking a moment today to celebrate the release of Alex Cavanaugh's conclusion of his space opera trilogy!  You can find CassaStorm here!  I've read this book, thanks to an advanced reader from Good Reads (where you can find my full review), and can give a generally positive review, thanks to Alex's ambitious concepts and his ability to tie up loose ends the author didn't even realize were left dangling by previous volumes.  You don't need me to tell you about this one, though.  The ninja captain is the patron saint of this blogging community, after all!

#603. How to Read Safely in a Science Fictional Book

Another major aspect of my recent road trip was reading books (which should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been reading this blog recently).

Now, I'm not stepping on the toes of Armchair Squid's Cephalopod Coffeehouse, because September's topic will be one of my all-time favorite writers, Roberto Bolano.  Instead I'll talk briefly about one of the books I read on the road trip.

That would be Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

It's genius, it really is.  It's the literary version for me of Tarsem's masterful film The Fall.  If you've read my thoughts on this movie before, you may be aware that I associate it as the next level of The Princess Bride, something a little more intricate and perhaps emotionally resonant.  It's become far and away one of my favorite films.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, or HTLSIASFU (which doesn't make it any less of a mouthful!), is likewise analogous to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Yes, the Douglas Adams cult favorite.

I became a fan of H2G in high school, when it spread like a rash as something everyone had to read (which was a mood that swept through successive generations, because there was a locker forever emblazoned with someone's dedication to Milliways).  (I really need to read the whole series again.)  I'm one of the few people who fell immediately and deeply in love with the 2005 Hammer and Tongs film.  And I continue to add to my Douglas Adams experience to this day because of it.

Chances are I don't need to explain too much about what H2G is.  HL2SFU (which will be my abbreviation of the abbreviation of the album of of the soundtrack of the film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I mean the Charles Yu book) needs a little more introduction, however.

HL2SFU is brilliant.  It's a metatextual book (which makes it a little like a Grant Morrison comic in prose), so there's a certain amount of geekery involved (Han Solo is discussed) on any number of levels.  There are clever secondary characters who are real characters, eve if most of them are imaginary or are otherwise not really there.  The title book is also a book within the book, which is one reason why I make the H2G comparison.

But the real reason I make the comparison to my analysis of The Fall is that HL2SFU is really about the main character's efforts to reunite with his father.  Forget the metatextual elements.  The whole thing becomes a giant metaphor about trying to find a way to reconcile with one's past.  It's a lot like the best emotional moments from Futurama, really.

I couldn't recommend Yu's book enough.  I love H2G, but I think I've found my new favorite version of that story.

#602. Slightly More from Road Tripping

(Aside from some edits to the original piece that I will hopefully make to look less cosmetically pathetic, here are thoughts inexplicably left out, including a really obvious bit.)

My nerdy windmill obsession is derived, of course, from Don Quixote.  I explained to my sister all about "tilting at windmills," and the two layers of the famous scene featuring the would-be knight and the topic of that day.  Good stuff.

I didn't mention a single dog!  And there were lots!

The first and foremost was Jack.  Jack is a goofy German short-haired pointer.  He's pretty awesome (although he can sometimes be a handful, and by "sometimes" I mean nearly all the time he is awake).  He made the whole trip with us.

In Stoutland there were a few more dogs!  I had a chance to reunite with Jill, a wonderful little beagle (not lost in a transporter accident by Scotty) who loves to kiss kiss kiss (and lap-snuggle), and Chewy, a black Lab who was a wee puppy when I last saw him.  Not so small anymore!  And slightly less bitey!  When he was small he had the habit of taking his name very literally, and he took to this talent very liberally.  Now in mature mode, he does that only playfully, and I imagine he's great fun to have around on a regular basis, very companionable.

Jilly Bean!

(That's our nickname for her!)

(Chewy doesn't require anything more.)

There were a few more dogs, including Fiona (a running mate of Chewy's) and a neighbor's dog who spends more time there than at home.

But for a time, I was in doggy heaven.  Now with more goats!

#601. Road Tripping

(Before we begin, I should acknowledge that the road trip couldn't have happened without a very long prelude.  Things happened, items were consolidated, other journeys came to an end, and I ate some cake that was technically meant for someone else's going away party but pretended it was meant for me.)

Then we came to the beginning.

Day 1 (8/30/13, a Friday)

This was the day I left Colorado Springs behind.  I originally arrived there on 10/31/07, arriving on Jet Boo, I mean Jet Blue (Boo is the name of the Best Cat in the World, but the airline had jokingly renamed itself for Halloween that year, or perhaps every year?).  This time it was a departure in a car, my sister's Etta, I mean Jetta (the "j" fell off at some point), following her husband's convoy of truck-pulling-5th-wheel-pulling-small-trailer.

It did not take long, surprisingly, to leave the Rocky Mountains behind.  I used to call them the Ladies (a twist on one of the early Dave Barry touches in the Starcatchers books).  Some days I thought I appreciated them enough, others I took them for granted.  They were a fantastic backdrop.

We reached Kansas soon enough (we left somewhere around 10:30, and were there by the afternoon).  For years I heard incredulous tales of Flat Kansas.  I wrote a whole poem about Flat Kansas in the early days of this blog because of this.  But the truth is, it's not so flat.  More like Wavy Kansas.  But it's really not much more boring than anything else we saw on the trip.  It may be that we managed to see all the most generic gigantic open...tracks of land in America (but I don't want that!).  I don't know.

We saw plenty of oil derricks (but very few Oil Derek Lowes, much less Oil Can Boyds) on this stretch.  Saw a few dust devils, the last of them the most spectacular.  I saw buffalo.  And cows!  Lots of cows!  (And signs repeatedly advertising the freakish five-legged steer of someone's dubious livestock collection!)

(By the way, Dubious Livestock would make a great name for a rock band.)

And corn.  And windmills!  I explained to my sister the nerdy significance windmills have for me.  To her, they're boring, especially as they become more ubiquitous in this particular region.  They occupy whole windmill fields.  They're like a mechanical plague!  Beware the windmill apocalypse!

She also said how impressive they are when you see them in pieces.  Not because my sister revels in blowing them up.  It's because you don't appreciate how big they are until you see their component parts up-close.  And it's true.  One blade looks like a whale's fin.  Ahoy!  Avast!  There be blubber in Kansas!

Day 2 (8/31/13, a Saturday)

We arrived at our first destination, the home of my sister's in-laws, her husband's folks.  This was in Stoutland, in Camden County (Earl was nowhere to be found, alas), just outside Lebanon, Kansas.

Before this, however, we drove through one of the few signs of active civilization on the drive, Lawrence, KS, home of Kansas University.  We were too early for a lot of college babes, alas.

We started counting FedEx double trailers (the highest count came Day 7, I believe, some 90 of them).  You can go crazy on a road trip.

We passed the Lake of the Ozarks.

And we arrived in Stoutland.  Here I was introduced to the goats George and Ginger, and for expediency's sake (and not much exaggeration) we'll say that this was my primary amusement for Days 3 and 4, which were all spent there.

Goats are awesome!

Day 5 (9/3/13, a Tuesday)

We passed the Mark Twain National Forest.  I had no idea he was so closely associated with dry land.  (And dry enough that at least in my late home territory of Colorado Springs the summer was once again festooned with news of raging fires in just such a setting, but with far fewer iconic writers associated with it, apart from myself.)

We also passed the Mississippi River, which for some reason is not known as the Mark Twain River.

We reached Tennessee!  We saw lots of corn!

We passed signs denoting many historical attractions (either in TN or elsewhere, including landmarks for dead presidents like Eisenhower and Truman, because apparently the years following WWII were a good time to have been born in this part of the country and having the hope to attain the highest seat of office).  Anyway, there was also Shiloh, famous for the site of a famous battle in the Civil War.  There was the Tennessee River.  And Nashville.  (Now with more glow-in-the-dark pyramid action!)

Day 6 (9/4/13, a Wednesday)

We reached another Lebanon.  But still not the actual Lebanon.  (Although it's always funny to see places named after more famous destinations that are clearly not in that geographic location.  Think Pluto [Not a Planet Anymore], but located somewhere that has banjo music.)

Anyway, we reached Virginia, our target state!  The Appalachian Mountains!  Tobacco fields!  Apparently, the Misty Mountain (nowhere near Middle Earth).  We visited a Wilco (not the band), which featured Stuckey's (but not Stuckeybowl, much less featuring a practicing lawyer named Ed [but not the talking horse]).  (The day before we stopped at a Casey's and enjoyed a much-ballyhooed fried steak sandwich, which was good, especially with my trademark toppings of banana peppers and honey mustard dressing.)

Day 7 (9/5/13, a Thursday)

We passed through Crozet, Virginia, one of several area locations famous in the Rita Mae Brown cat mystery books.  This pleased my sister's mother-in-law to no end.

Everyone obsessed over the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

And we arrived in Williamsburg, our initial destination in VA.  Williamsburg is part of the Historic Triangle tourist trap in the area, which also boasts Jamestown and Yorktown (and now Bootown).  You should know plenty about Jamestown (John Smith, Pocahontas, Colin Farrell).  Yorktown is the site of the end of the American Revolution (besides the tailgate in Hamilton's backyard).  Williamsburg is...really old.

Day 8 (9/6/13, a Friday)

We reached our temporary permanent destination in the Anvil campground.  I would have made more references to Jim Neidhart, Bret Hart's tag team partner in the Hart Foundation, but sometimes a joke only you get isn't really worth it.  But I kept thinking it the whole time we were there anyway.

Day 9 (9/7/13, a Saturday)

I took my first independent excursion of the trip, to a used bookstore, where I found Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy and a Jerome Charyn mystery featuring Isaac Sidel (the latter of which is nearly impossible to do in an actual bookstore).  I was sorely tempted to buy both of them, but I'm just coming off a period where I eliminated a considerable percentage of my things, including many books.  It's hard to jump into buying more.  But I really wanted to.  Ackroyd is a favorite.  He's the measuring stick I hold to judge every bookstore.  If he's in it, it's a good bookstore.  Charyn, he's another favorite, and he's even more scarce.  And as I've suggested, the Isaac Sidel books are especially scarce.  And I have yet to read any of them.  I really should have gotten them both.  (And readers of this blog with some memory know how I also obsess over Troy.  Seems like the whole of 2011 was devoted to it.)

Day 10 (9/8/13, a Sunday)

My birthday.  We hit spots in Jamestown and Yorktown, but avoided being too touristy.

Day 11 (9/9/13, a Monday)

Reached actual final destination at Langley FamCamp.  (The whole point of the road trip was to relocate my sister from the Air Force Academy to Langley AFB; I piggybacked for a relocation of my own.)  I took my second independent excursion of the trip, running across a graveyard and memorial to the Battle of Big Bethel, which was apparently the first fight of the Civil War.  And I dangled my feet at the end of a small dock.

Day 12 (9/10/13, a Tuesday)

This was the end for me.  Two fairly brief plane rides finally landed me in Maine, which is where I am and will be for the foreseeable future.  Yay!

And yesterday was 9/11.  For the first half dozen years or so after it, I wrote a poem in commemoration.  After I lost some of them to a computer crash, I guess I kind of fell out of the habit, or at least the original fervor.  But here goes, for the day after:

When the World Came Tumbling In

we will never forget
a day like none other,
when the world came tumbling in

mad scrambling
and recriminations,
when the world came tumbling in

the heroes and the villains
and the flags waving,
when the world came tumbling in

it's hard to remember
except in images,
when the world came tumbling in

what do we say
except that it happened,
when the world came tumbling in?