Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Trek. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2015
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Broke Trek - a Star Trek Brokeback Mountain parody
Can't seem to get enough of these good ol' Star Trek Brokeback Mountain parodies! I have a feeling this was pirated from an earlier video called Gay Trek or some-such. I think it's funny, but I don't think it insults my gay friends, or if it does, come on, guys! It's Kirk and Spock. They're funny whether they're gay or not. And we all knew they had a love that dared not speak its name, unless they were speaking in Klingon.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner: the memory of all that
A delightfully goofy interview with two cultural icons. Poignantly, Nimoy's breathing is so laboured you can sometimes hear it, and Shatner protectively puts his arm across his shoulders. The rest of it is just plain hilarious - they manage to avoid answering a single question. Even with illness and frailness, Nimoy was full of joie de vivre, with that marvelous un-Spock-like goofy grin.
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Friday, October 24, 2014
The Bill and Lenny Show: bring on the comic relief!
This has, somehow, been a very strange week, and it's even stranger that it would end this way: sitting in my office at midnight trying to stifle guffaws so my husband won't wake up.
This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. These guys are like two bratty little boys with very high IQs. They answer the questions (sort of) before they're even asked, or don't answer them at all but go off on bizarre tangents. You know of course that I have a thing for Shatner, which is odd because when the series was originally on, I was a Spock fanatic and nearly kvelled in that episode where he had his shirt off. (Who knew? His body was about a gazillion times sexier than Kirk's.)
But now things swing around, and it's hard to believe these two guys are almost exactly the same age, only a few days apart in fact. Shatner has decided not to age, and has this spooky thing where, behind that ruddy outdoorsmen's face, the much younger Shatner can peer out at you with those invincible, exotic wolf eyes. It's unnerving. Nimoy has become extremely thin and has not enjoyed good health, but he is sharp and cranky and funny as hell. Very Jewish, of course, but he also brings out Shatner's Jewishness (which some people are surprised to hear about - he was born and raised in Montreal).
This is partly an artful dodge because this week has been so difficult. It has passed in a sort of dream. Terrorism has knocked down the front door in this country, and though it has not yet entered the building, it has now suddenly become "thinkable". The threat came from within, which is especially sickening: lost, confused, vulnerable, drug-addled and/or mentally ill young people are being coerced and seduced by pure evil. This complete absence of a moral compass scares me. It also scares me that, while we revile these people and rejoice when they are shot dead, we never think about their parents, their siblings, their friends, the people who loved them and may have tried to help.
If I even mentioned this on Facebook, I'd likely be slaughtered. This man was evil, therefore his parents must be evil! His siblings must be evil. Anyone who loved, or tried to love this broken human being is evil, and we know this for a fact so there will be no more discussion about it, ever.
I am also hearing, over and over again, variations on "he converted to Islam AND. . ." (began murdering people, blowing things up, etc.) In my mind, "he converted to Islam BUT" would make more sense, or "he WAS converted to a distorted, perverted, sick and twisted form of indoctrination which has co-opted the symbolism of Islam to its own vile purposes." Or words to that effect.
So what is all this doing under a hilarious, tear-wiping, even ridiculous ten-minute sit-down routine by two of our best-known cultural icons? I have no idea, except that I needed something to get that bad taste out of my mouth. I don't ever want Shatner to die because he just keeps going on and on without even changing very much year to year, just indomitable, somewhat tank-like to be sure, but with the same vitality he had 30 or 40 years ago. I want someone to remind me that it is possible to not only keep going, but to keep projects going in every direction without slowing down, with no seeming ill effects. Some people say he's an arrogant asshole, but he doesn't care and neither do I.
So I have to go to bed now, still feeling disoriented, and now wondering about the parents and loved ones of that man who fell dead after committing such an atrocity. I'm not much of a praying person any more because I grew tired of the futility of it, but if I DID pray I would. And maybe I still will.
Friday, July 4, 2014
William Shatner: deal with the devil
William Shatner kicks off the Calgary Stampede
Throngs of fans jostled to catch a glimpse of the actor, who is serving as this year’s Calgary Stampede parade grand marshal
The Canadian Press
July 4, 2014
Jeff McIntosh/CP
CALGARY – William Shatner got an out-of-this-world welcome Friday as throngs of fans jostled to catch a glimpse of the Canadian-born actor, who is serving as this year’s Calgary Stampede parade grand marshal.
Even before the parade began, some people were yelling “bring out William Shatner,” who played Capt. James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” TV series and subsequent films.
A crowd gathered as Shatner and his wife Elizabeth prepared to make their way down the parade route in the back of a light blue antique convertible. Fans snapped pictures on cellphones and clamoured for autographs.
“I’m excited that they’re excited,” said Shatner, who donned a white cowboy hat.
He said with a laugh that he’s looking forward to the end of the parade.
Shatner intends to stay in Cowtown for a while to take in the rodeo and other attractions.
“I’m going to be part of the experience,” he said. “That’s why we’re here, actually. We’re rodeo fans.”
About 250,000 people lined up early on downtown Calgary streets to get the best vantage point.
Rae Thorogood, who said she is a big fan of the actor, got up at 5 a.m. to stake out a prime spot.
“We barely slept. We were so excited,” she said.
Vern Neiley said he has never been able to make it out to the annual parade because he’s always had to work. Now that he’s retired, he said he couldn’t pass up a chance to attend this year.
“The big draw, I guess, was William Shatner. I’ve been a fan of his for a lot of years — ‘Star Trek’ and all the other stuff that goes with it.”
For Neiley’s wife, Sandy, it was a similar story.
“William Shatner is one of my favourites as well too and he’s my big draw too,” she said.
“This is fabulous for Calgary and I think this is wonderful that we get so many people every year for the Stampede parade.”
Before the parade began Jean Cornell sat on a curb with her 18-month-old grandson squirming in her arms, while his siblings played nearby on a blanket.
She said seeing Shatner would be a treat. But for her the main attraction would be “watching these guys’ faces light up.”
On hand to watch the parade were Prime Minister Stephen Harper and federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
The Stampede runs through July 13.
OHHHHHH. . . kay.
This I have trouble with.
I've been unofficially following Shatner since his Trek days. There's something admirable about someone who can send himself up in such a good-natured way, and besides, the man's a dynamo, with a finger in every showbiz pie. He keeps popping up here, there, everywhere. He hosted a show I LOVED called Weird or What?, a sort of digest of the paranormal interspersed with Shatnerian clowning, and another one called Raw Nerve, in which he did in-depth interviews with people like Whoopi Goldberg and Jerry Springer and (yes!) Leonard Nimoy himself. As a matter of fact - and this can't be true, it really can't - I seem to remember him interviewing Carol Burnett. Unfortunately, these watchworthy enterprises (!) lasted only a couple of seasons.
But something's off here, or at least weird.
He isn't ageing.
He isn't.
He just. . . isn't.
The man looks to be hovering somewhere between 60 and 65, and STAYING THERE. He just looks like he always does, not Botoxed, not frozen-faced or Asian-eyed from brow lifts. He just looks like himself, comfortably overweight (and somehow he makes chunkiness look healthy and good), slightly ruddy of complexion, not the fox he was when young (and God, was he a fox when he was young), but still quite good-looking, well-settled in himself, a rare trait in Hollywood (or anywhere, for that matter).
The photo at the top of this post was taken 54 years ago. William Shatner is 83 years old.
There was a Star Trek episode in the first series, I think it was called Requiem for Methuselah, in which it becomes apparent that the title character had lived for so many centuries that he had stood in for all the famous men in history, Galileo, Rembrandt, Brahms, and a bunch of others I don't want to look up. But you get the gist. The guy couldn't die. I don't know exactly what I am talking about here, except that I do, somehow.
I talked to my husband recently about quantum physics. It's something he knows about. He is the antithesis of the woo-woo types who believe in reincarnation and astrology and that sort of jazz. So in a jocular, I'm-kidding-of-course manner, I asked him, "Now is it true what I read somewhere, that you can be in two places at the same time?"
My husband, whom I have known and loved for forty years, and just about the smartest man I've ever encountered, deeply oriented in science for a lifetime, said, casually but with conviction, "Yes."
He said yes.
"Theoretically, it's possible," he explained, and then told me how, as I sat there like Bugs Bunny after he has been run over by a truck: "Duhhhh. . . duhhhh. . . duhhhh. . ."
You can be in two places at the same time. Fine. So what about that other thing I've always wondered about? "So is time travel possible?" This time I really expected a sneer.
"Yes. According to Einstein's theories, it's possible, because time and space do not exist in a straight line." His hand described an elegant curve that somehow gave me the shivers. Then he reminded me that if an astronaut remained in space for long enough and then returned to earth, he would be younger than when he left. Reverse ageing - oh, a simple enough concept! He also went on for some time about wormholes, something I had thought was invented by the writers of The Next Generation.
I was getting frightened.
I have had moments, just moments mind you, when I have felt complete disorientation, as if I am about to "phase", to enter or overlap with another reality completely. Not in another time, but OUTSIDE time. The usual rules, for a second, appear to slip sideways. Physics falls away, leaving a bizarrely beautiful, indescribable otherness.
"Things as they are," goes a very beautiful line of poetry, "are changed upon the blue guitar." Changed, changed utterly.
And for some reason I remember a line in Tom Robbins' wacky masterpiece Jitterbug Perfume, uttered by the brilliantly insane immortalist Wiggs Dannyboy: "The universe doesn't have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken."
I don't know about deals with the devil or people looking younger than they perhaps should, eerily reversing the dial of time. I don't know about Shatner's lifelong association with science fiction - a happy accident, after all - but hey, wait a minute, before Star Trek, didn't he used to appear on The Twilight Zone? The episode I'm thinking of, besides that iconic monster-on-the-wing scene on the airplane (where he cracks up at the end as only the Shat Man can) is about a man sitting in a small-town cafe who becomes obsessed with a fortune-telling gizmo topped by a devil's head. It's beginning to look like a theme, or at least too many things to be mere coincidence. He claimed Weird or What? was just an interesting concept for a show, not something he necessarily believed in. But the evidence is beginning to pile up. Isn't it?
There are two Shatners (at least), the hammy Trekkian "no blah-blah-blah!" Kirk-figure who became so famous he could never quite live down that histrionic style, and the serious Shakespearian actor who cut his teeth at Ontario's Stratford Festival in the 1950s. I have found a video of him doing Hamlet's Soliloquy on the Mike Douglas Show, and it's a solid, almost low-key, thoughtful interpretation of the most worn-out of actorly cliches. In other words, he is a real actor, not a cliche, and can do whatever he wants and do it well. But what does this have to do with being out of phase, of entering another reality where time, perhaps, goes backwards instead of forwards, where the usual laws of ageing just sort of. . . stop?
I keep thinking I want to meet him, hoping something will rub off, perhaps. It's just so odd. His friend and colleague Leonard Nimoy is shrivelled-up and fragile as an old burned matchstick, and yet they are almost exactly the same age. If you believe in astrology, their destinies are so similar as to be almost identical.
Yes, you could say that remaining active keeps you young, etc., etc., and that all his many business and professional concerns (especially the horses, which would keep anybody young) have somehow frozen the clock at around sixty-five. But it just doesn't happen that way. Every time I see a picture of him - and years can go by in between - he either looks the same, or better. More ruddy and healthy, without wrinkles or the caving-in that feels inevitable as flesh falls away from bone. This goes way beyond his bluff physical appearance to a kind of age-proof animus, some spirit that mysteriously refuses to get older, or perhaps can't.
What universe does he inhabit? Where can I get a piece of this action? Do people sidle up to him and try to make a deal? WAS this a deal of sorts, and with whom? Star Trek posited many versions of reality, and sometimes they overlapped or even blended together. Cornball as the show seems now, it was cutting-edge for its time, and many of the underlying hypotheses about time and space are still intriguing and even (theoretically!) possible. Or so we have come to believe.
But the rest of the Enterprise crew didn't end up this. . . ageless. It has to exceed genetics. Then WHAT? It's driving me crazy. I wondered at the fact he won't be riding a horse in the parade, but then when I thought about it: an 83-year-old man sitting on an unfamiliar horse for four or five hours - ? He's not that crazy. Not crazy at all, in fact, and obviously knows way more than the rest of us do, not just about survival but thriving, and not falling into the supposedly inevitable pit of mortality.
It would be even more eerie if he made it to 100, then suddenly keeled over dead, looking the same way he does now. Quick, get out the surgical instruments! You know, the ones they used for that alien autopsy.
(P. S. You Trek fans out there - do you remember that episode where the Enterprise crew was afflicted by a strange disease that caused rapid ageing? Not long ago I saw it, and it was laughable. Shatner looked like his own grandfather.)
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Saturday, September 14, 2013
Whatever became of the wildwood flower?
In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."
Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.
Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.
I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.
At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.
At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.
There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.
At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.
It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.
That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.
Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"
The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?
Friday, September 13, 2013
Sheldon Cooper's worst nightmare
This has been a Gorn sort of week. Oh, it started out OK. Next week will be better, I promise myself.
When things like this show up, your only hope is that a stunt double will take the fall for you. But that seldom happens outside of science fiction.
Sometimes, things just come atcha. And you can't do nothin' but wait for the commercial.
The Gorn roars loudly, and carries a very big stick. Run, Kirk. . . RUN!!
"No. . . no Gorn!" Poor Sheldon Cooper finds the Gorn almost as terrifying as Goofy. Worse, though, the Gorn is taking up sacred space. "That's where I sit!"
But wait, there's more! If you take advantage of this special TV offer,
we'll send you TWO monsters for the price of one!
Yes! This is the amazing MUGATU, who jumps out of the bushes and harasses Captain Kirk for no reason! The Mugatu, who only looks like a man in an albino gorilla suit adapted with dinosaur spikes and a rhino horn! The Mugatu, who seems to have taken lessons from Ernie Kovacs' Nairobi Trio! The Mugatu, who. . . but let's cut Desilu some slack here. Desi Arnaz probably used up all the budget screwing expensive hookers.
It's gratifying to see McCoy blast this guy with the zipper in his back. It's one of the better special effects of early Trek. But who knows when the Mugatu will return?
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Mugatu 2: Renaissance monster
For those of you who think the Mugatu was just some weird conglomeration of King Kong, Godzilla and Bigfoot, let it be known that he was a creature of many manifestations/talents.
As witness the Mugatu action figure. I can't find out how tall he was, but. . . wouldn't you like to have one?
(Look OUT, Captain Kirk!)
Here he is, still in the unopened box. Calling eBay!
This is, presumably, Lego Mugatu. Note the ferocious look on his face.
Rockin' Mugatu. Perhaps left over from an early Star Trek convention. The color one would make a great banner.
Just a closer walk with He.
The softer side of Mugatu. Who knew he could be that cute?
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