The Shat

He's so the man, profiled in this week's New York Times Magazine, in the Kentucky horse world he loves so dearly, with stuff like this:

What makes him content, besides the money, is the adulation he gets from his fans. People thank him for the years. Six-year-olds, 20-something bloggers, old ladies. “Bloggers think I’m cool,” he said. “I wish I knew what it was about me that was cool so I can repeat it. I’ve been in front of people their entire life. Oh, there are so many iterations of William Shatner.”

Nice accompanying video as well:

Love. That. Shat.

Bill Genius

There's much to write about at this critical moment in the development of a moral healthcare system in the U.S. There's the Senate possibly dropping the public option for their Republican and (in the house) Democratic health insurance donors, with Sen. Max Baucus's bad, bad math. There's freshman Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) kicking ass with his statement as he voted to approve Judge Sonya Sotomayor from Judiciary Committee to Senate floor vote.

And there's my resistance to giving any more Internet ink to the quitter from Wasilla. But William Shatner is just too good to resist:



His certifiably terrible spoken-singing albums from the early 70's have paid off.

Fanfic

At 9:01pm on September 15, 1967, flipped the channels around to watch a show coming back from commercial with several unusually clad men of the future materializing with an eerie whine on a craggy landscape I would soon learn was the planet Vulcan. In my Friday night boredom I had accidentally run across the Second Season Premiere Episode of Star Trek, "Amok Time." By 9:30pm, having witnessed the death of Captain James Tiberius Kirk at the hands of his First Officer and pointy-eared best friend, Spock, due to the primal mating fever of "pon farr," and then Kirk's miraculous resurrection thanks to the death-mimicking drug administered mid-battle by Dr. Leonard McCoy, I was a fan.

In the years to follow I was a loyal fan, a Trekkie, sure, but one who was more interested in science fiction as a whole genre, with Star Trek being the only 99% credible television version for decades to come -- I might argue until the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, although I'm sure many Next Generation and Babylon 5 fans would argue that point. I attended Star Trek conventions at the Commodore Hotel in NYC, stood awkwardly before Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhuru) as she signed a poster from her record album for me and the next year trailed her in full diva, tight red spangly suit and furry little dog as she made her way through the hotel hallway with what was geek press at the time in tow. I watched classic episodes on the big screen late at night -- nothing like watching McCoy leap through the misty Portal to Forever projected large above your head as you recline on the convention hall floor.

I say this not to call attention to my Star Trek cred in either praising or criticizing the newest incarnation, the feature film reboot called, simply, Star Trek, which I had the pleasure of taking my family to this weekend. I had indoctrinated my two boys a few years ago when G4 ran the uncut original episodes, all running over an hour thanks to the growth in commercial time since they originally aired. Even my wife attended, and if there's one thing she hates, it's sci-fi. The movie is praiseworthy for how well it connects our (my?) forty-years back emotional allegiance to the characters to this new cast, so that we can enjoy Kirk's brashness, Spock's logic, McCoy's irascibility all over again. The biggest success, among many, of J.J. Abrams and crew is that they've successfully refreshed the show's original character constellation, sense of optimism for the future (making me wonder how Terminator Salvation with fare in a week -- zeitgeist disconnect?) and, to a large enough degree, sense of cosmic scale. Nitpicks might include giving Scotty a cute Yoda-meets-Dobby sidekick and overuse of handheld camera in late-innings battle scenes. But what I was struck by after the new movie's rapidly churning events settled in my cerebral cortex was the memory of something from those dark Seventies when the push to revive Trek seemed all so in vain: fan fiction.

Back in the heyday of fan-generated Star Trek literature, reflecting a fandom desperate for new material beyond the mere 79 episodes that existed once the show was finally cancelled for good in 1969 after three seasons (the first 1.75 seasons generally being far superior to almost all that followed). There were mimeographed fanzines distributed by hand or by mail, the first of which, Spockanalia, appeared in the same year I saw my first episode.

Fan fiction was a way for viewers who had connected to the unique and imaginative vision of the show in, let's say, a profound way to create their own stories where NBC was unwilling to create any more. While a very few fanfic writers later made it to the "big leagues" years later with paperback deals for approved Star Trek novels, most of the work was amateurish, if enthusiastic and occasionally credible.

One of the subgenres of fan fiction, however, was a kind of sexual compensation for what might have been latent but never, of course, explicated on the show. Why not show what happens with Science Officer Spock and the eternally pining Nurse Chapel behind closed doors when pon farr's in bloom. Or maybe Spock can't get the feral love he needs from the fair nurse, and instead there's a new crew member, a young woman who's highly intelligent but somewhat shy, of a hidden literary bent just waiting for the right Vulcan to remove her thick plastic spectacles...


Some SPOILERS ahead.





Then there's other unexplored crew matings. Why not Kirk and Uhuru following up on that turgid kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren" with some real black-on-white erotics. Or Uhuru and Spock. (If you've seen the movie, you see where I'm going with this.) And why stop there, what about exploring the depths of the emotional bond between the good Captain and his First Officer when it's just plain Jim, a sub-subgenre known as slash fiction. A heated dissection of whether Kirk and Spock could actually have an encounter appeared in a then-groundbreaking "letters zine" called The Halkan Council way the heck back in 1975.

The other key aspect of fanfic is that it is all, by it's very unlicensed nature, alternative universe (or "AU"). It's not the creator, or even the writers sitting in the room after the creator's been fired or moved on. The best thing about AU is that it allows you to take the characters wherever you want, freed from any formulaic restraints, the mind unfettered with new possibilities since it all off-canon. Maybe some writers aspire to canon, but the writing so very rarely cuts it. One of the main reasons the first couple seasons of the original series are still so great to watch is that so many of those early episodes were written by real science fiction writers with serious sci-fi cred: Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Jerome Bixby, Harlen Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Jerry Sohl.

The bummer about AU fanfic is that...it's off-canon. Who gives a rats ass what happens in any of those stories -- it doesn't count.

So what's interesting to me about the new movie is that it not only has a fantasy coupling off the original series, it also turns on a Lost-like (I am told) time-travel plot where we get Leonard Nimoy elevating the feature film reboot to canon, at the cost of an AU continuity solution. From this point forward, whatever happens with this Pine-led crew, isn't the story of the Shatner crew, so all bets are off. History will be written differently, historical events will be referenced for old fans to enjoys but entering in ways unaccountable to what's been filmed before. On one hand, it's a lazy way out for screenwriters not willing to do the voluminous -- endless -- research. On the other hand, why should we be forcing our 2009 screenwriters to stick to every script fix invention wedged into the canon by a fellow guild member sometime over the past forty years. What this movie proves is that you just have to get the heart(s) of the story bible right.

For all the Spock focus in the movie (very balanced, fascinatingly enough), my favorite addition to the mythos is a Kirk's. The filmmakers have him hanging by his fingertips three times in the story, the first as a young boy over a canyon, the second over Vulcan, the third in the Romulan spacecraft. The Abrahms/Pine Kirk is the embodiment of "cliffhanger" which is a lynchpin of cinema going waaay back to the silent serials. While I've heard criticism that the new movie plays like a high-budget pilot, I actually think one of the unsung reasons for it's success is that it is pretty visual, with a clever Scotty-in-tube throwaway slapstick gag, a recasting of the dino-on-dino surprise, and a Romulan bridge phaser firefight that feels surprisingly O.K. Corral.

So I have to give this to screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Krutzman. They have written what may be the single greatest piece of fanfic ever, the professionalization of a suspect genre, and sealed it with the real Spock himself, the flesh and blood actor the movie's biggest special effect. Since Vulcans live an average of 300 years longer than humans, they have the time to gain so much more wisdom, and Nimoy plays his oldest Spock (his 78 human years maybe 234 in Vulcan?) with an almost Buddhist purity of wisdom, 100% free of ego, clear and forgiving.

One other thing the movie gets right. I've heard it said that "this ain't your mama's Captain Kirk" and sure, this one's rock & roll. But he surely evokes Kirk's mental acuity and fluidity -- just like Shatner's Kirk, Pine's is completely read up but can make decisions on a dime when even the better read can't. He knows his stuff but he also knows how to lead, boldly. This young Kirk's boldness start being all about himself -- his joyride, his sudden jumping into service, his risk-taking to get on the Enterprise. His great feats of physical courage and action -- his cliffhanging. And finally he makes the bold decisions as captain necessary to finish the story satisfactorily, although I'll bet they can make a better movie now that they're past the origin(s).

AU, okay. But they remembered to honor the opening words of the show every week, the closing words of this movie, the inspiring thing.

"To boldly go..."

Zeitgeist?

Bye-Bye BSG

Just a quick note on the grand finale of Battlestar Galactica since there's other stuff written that goes into detail here and here, and a fabulous interview with chief creative officer Ron Moore here. And lots more out there if you've got the Google. I'll try to avoid SPOILERS but probably won't.

So there's a lot of fan comments against the ending, as if one could expect anything else, and I think they're all wrong. While I was watching the finale and the huge battle, the biggest since the rescue on New Caprica several seasons ago, I realized they were going for the title of "Best Science Fiction Television Show Ever" in a big balls-out way. Not only were the climactic battles huge and reminiscent of the best science fiction book covers from the 1970's, with scale like Larry Niven's Ringworld, but thematically the capper took in maybe 155,000 years of history, give or take a few, and successfully consummated the marriage of docudrama science fiction (think Outland) with the mindbending sci-fi tradition, the kind that keeps you thinking and discussing and even arguing long after the show or book or movie is over.

The character closures were tremendously satisfying -- Baltar becoming a pivotal agent of good, the end of Roslyn's journey and Adama's grief so realistically and bravely captured by Edward James Olmos, Tory's evil act suddenly returning like the repressed always does and with such disastrous consequences, Athena thanking Boomer for delivering Hera with a round of bullets, Lee staking claim as the nearly mythological adventurer and Starbuck realizing her true nature with tremendous peace.

If there's a character who could carry on it would be Starbuck, but while it might be spectacular to follow her travels (the Route 66 of science fiction shows?) there'd have to be some invented drama to make her character interesting now that she's so clear.

And I loved the cameo by Ron Moore, perhaps aluding to the moment where he gets the idea for the series?

The previous Best Science Fiction Television Show of All Time was the first two seasons of the original Star Trek series. No other show had so consistently delivered on the promise of sci-fi literature, even as it had been building for decades. The Twilight Zone was the previous master, and The Outer Limits had its moments, but the combination of heady concepts and pulse-racing moments has never been bested until now, and what makes it so interesting is that BSG is so very different -- more sociological, with the biggest "supernatural" elements being saved for the resolution, focused more singularly yet more grandly in the overall arc, as ultimately revealed.

The conceit that this show happens not in the present nor the future is the biggest part of the reveal. The godlike force is the one that plays in the imagination -- is it science, perhaps, by another name?

A finale like this means the series will have a huge life post-initial broadcast. Not only will audiences pore over it for clues to the ending, but the reputation it'll develop for having ended so well (despite the more hardcore fans who might try a little fanfic if they can't handle the creator's own vision) will drive interest.

As for me, I missed the second half of the first season and all of the second, including the Pegasus arc featuring the always excellent Michelle Forbes.

So I've got something to live for.

So say we all.

Perfectly Logical

The #1 Vulcan of all time is also a noted photographer, and he's making art news now with a rather large subject. Here's The New York Times:

He knows that he is an unlikely champion for the size-acceptance movement; body image is a topic he never really thought about before. But for the last eight years, Mr. Nimoy, who is 76 and an established photographer, has been snapping pictures of plus-size women in all their naked glory.

He has a show of photographs of obese women on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June; a larger show at the gallery is scheduled to coincide with the November publication of his book on the subject, “The Full Body Project,” from Five Ties Publishing. The Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have acquired a few images from the project.

Recently my older son (who dressed up as Spock last Halloween) and I got to see Leonard Nimoy and his wife in a video they made for a portion of Griffith Observatory that they had endowed, and while it's a little freaky to see Mr. Spock in his 70's and comfortable with himself, he's certainly earned it. I used to get the sense he wasn't, especially back on Mission: Impossible in the early post-Star Trek years.

You can see a sample of his new nudes, the "Full Body Project", on his own website. They're certainly bold, and from this sample it looks like he's generally gone more frank and enthusiastic than arty and formal.

Some of his other photography seems to go the opposite way, like his previous newsmaking "Shekhina Project", which took on Jewish orthodoxy by shooting nude models wearing sacred garments.

And for a combination of both tendencies, there's this self-portrait, where the tension of Nimoy's celebrity plays against an almost too simple depiction of an aging man and his erotic memory.

It's a far cry from his musical efforts, and I don't mean to slag a hero who brought Judaism to the most successful science fiction television show of all time. Even if he did sing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins". It seems that his latest project is right in line with the "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" philosophy of the original TV series. At the gallery:

The responses have ranged from joy to horror. One formerly obese woman said the photos terrified her; she said they recalled a picture she kept in her wallet as a reminder of her former self. Other women have thanked Richard Michelson, the Northampton gallery owner, for displaying the images, and even asked if Mr. Nimoy wanted to photograph them.

“I am actually amazed at how little negative reaction there has been,” said Mr. Michelson. “I attribute this in part to the gallery setting, and the fact that Northampton, Massachusetts, is perhaps the most liberal city in the most liberal state in the nation.”

“We do overhear some reductive ‘Is Nimoy into fat chicks’ comments when the gallery room is first entered,” he continued, “but in fact the fun nature of the work and the quality seem to shut people up by the time they leave. I’ve had a few crank e-mails with snide remarks, but not a one from gallery visitors.”

Don't forget, it was Kirk and Spock who originally brought sexy back.