This is a comic book convention

And this is, sort of, what it looks like. A blur of people, and storm troopers, and a few too many very obese young men. "Gamers," I'm told. Thousands of artworks for sale, most of them on pirated themes which I am sure Disney, DC, or Marvel could sue about, only it's not worth their while to pursue small-bore artistic license and capitalism run amok. Much of the art very, very good -- which leads me to ask, what could be produced by these same men, if they lived in another time and drew and painted Renaissance-style original commissions, rather than endless dragons, glorious cumulus clouds, Batmans, and buxom young women with impossible thighs?

After several hours, the crowd becomes so thick that there is nothing for anyone to do but keep on circulating, keep on shuffling around booths of art and trinkets whose wares go unadmired and unbought because no one can step out of the herd to look, judge, and spend. A scientist with a camera poised far above the hall could probably look down and record all the people moving as a single unit, obeying properties of physics involving mass and volume and waves.

And who knew that tonight's fun culminates in a Masquerade Ball -- Zombie Edition, the drinks and the dancing lasting from 8 p.m. to midnight? Perhaps we two single ladies left too soon.  

My ten best Star Trek episodes (TOS)

Mirror, Mirror (takes place almost entirely on board the Enterprise)
Terrific, evil twin fantasy. And Kirk gets a "Captain's woman," whose role in this universe is very frankly displayed.

Journey to Babel (ditto)
Kirk was never more heroic than when piloting the Enterprise through an alien suicide attack while nursing a stab wound in the lung.

The Corbomite Maneuver (ditto)
Bluffing our way out of disaster; in the depths of the crisis Mr. Spock almost says "I'm sorry," but manages to restrain himself.

Wink of an Eye (ditto)
Another sheer fun fantasy -- imagine if you lived at another speed than everybody else. And this time Kirk's woman gets to tell a jealous rival, "Allow me the dignity of liking the man I select." A rare gem from the otherwise notorious third season.

Balance of Terror (ditto)
We meet the Romulans, and see the Enterprise and crew functioning in a purely military situation. Refreshing.

Charlie X (ditto)
Kirk as father to a telekinetic teen spaceman. Only he could pull off (so to speak) the red tights.

The Galileo Seven
Spock gets most of the camera time, Kirk comes close to crying -- don't miss it.

City on the Edge of Forever
Great story, but Spock actually has the more interesting role.

Amok Time
The friendship of the three main characters is shown at its best. And you get to meet T'pau, the grand old lady we all want to be. Heck, T'pring is the grand young lady we all want to be.

Court Martial
Another great story -- how on earth are they going to disprove the evidence of the damning tape? -- in which Spock's role, again, is the most interesting.

Errand of Mercy (okay, let's make it eleven)
Kirk ends up embarrassed at his eagerness for a good war with the Klingons, though of course he is in the right -- and you have the fun of spotting the actor who played the valet to Maurice Chevalier's Uncle Honore in Gigi.

The Menagerie (it'll have to be an even twelve)
For sheer ingenuity, this one is hard to beat. Once more, Spock's role -- his total loyalty to two captains -- is the crux of the story.

Honorable mention: Plato's Stepchildren. Though painful to watch, nevertheless it does make you marvel. For one thing, maybe leisured life in ancient Greece was pretty grotesque in some ways. For another, these guys, as actors, had guts and they earned their pay. For this one they pretended to be puppets on strings -- they danced jigs -- Shatner had to crawl on all fours and whinny like a horse. And the script writers, to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps were thinking it was high time the heroes of the Enterprise acted heroic in some other way than the physical. There is a heroism, after all, in submitting to humiliation and remaining human, disciplined, and civilized in spite of it. The only flaw in the rendering of the characters' reactions lies in Spock's devastation at what he is put through. To be logical would have been to accept that the treatment meted out him to is not his doing and is therefore not to be agonized over.

Analysis?



Image from Memory Alpha

Riverside, Iowa: future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk

We're going to Iowa!



It had rained the night before.



At the Great Sauk Trail rest area -- so this is still an Illinois bug.



I-80, westbound.



Will it look the same in the 23rd century?



Summer farm fields.



Not too far across the river (there's only one) is this sign.



Westbound toward Iowa City, take the exit going south on Route 218. Drive a while. After driving a while, we weren't sure whether we had missed the turnoff for Riverside, and so we pulled into a general store in Hills, Iowa, to ask directions. There is a purple marten house in the parking lot. These are them.



Ah hah. (Riverside is another five miles south of Hills.)



Park here. Say, you could rent space in the very same building.



Once you park, the Enterprise -- excuse me, the Riverside -- is just to your left. It's on a trailer because they have parades, and it's in them.



The entrance is next to the American flag. At the far left, notice the shuttlecraft.



You have entered the portal. There are maps of the U.S. and the world, filled with pins marking where the Trekkers come from. We added ours to the thickly filled Chicago to Riverside corridor.



Why yes, that's a tricorder and a communicator, behind glass. Don't laugh -- doesn't it look like your cell phone?



Sixties space fashions. In only one episode, "Where no man has gone before," did the women wear slacks and shirts, and plain hairstyles. Remember Sally Kellerman? She was the main girl.



Oh yes. You've arrived. What are all those messages written on the sign?



Here's one of them. The rest of us can't add any -- the sign is behind a velvet rope and under glass.



And you can't sit in Mr. Shatner's chair, either. It's behind a velvet rope, too.



Look closely and you'll see that Himself has been here, once.



When you re-emerge, you see the shuttlecraft, just near a rather pretty neighboring garden.



You've got to get one last picture, to give you an idea of the scale of the thing.

There is more to see in Riverside -- the sign outside town, announcing this is "Where the trek begins," another marker, in a bucolic park area, that looks unsettlingly grave-like -- but when you are on your way to a family reunion, sometimes you hurry on. Besides, you can revisit next year. Trekfest always takes place on the last Saturday in June. My local cousins say Route 218 southbound is backed up for a mile then.

Besides, you've got your souvenirs.



Your new mouse pad.



Your "Kirk dirt" -- actual soil from Riverside. The nice elderly lady who sold me this for $3.00 was a one-day volunteer, replacing a regular volunteer who was ill. She kind of made a disbelieving noise as she took the package out of the display case, but I didn't care. No, je ne regrette rien.

And you've got your memories.
July 31, 2009

Road trip

The road to Iowa: Queen Anne's lace, corn, and sky





Yes, this is Riverside, Iowa, future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. An enterprising (!ha ha) city councilman, in 1985, had the bright idea of asking the series' creator, Gene Roddenberry, whether Riverside couldn't call itself the "small town in Iowa" loosely designated as Kirk's birthplace. Roddenberry agreed because he felt "the first town that had volunteered ought to have it." Judging by the pace of events outlined on the Certificate of Authenticity which comes with every vial of "Kirk dirt" -- actual Riverside soil -- one may purchase at the Riverside Historical Center, approval came swiftly. The city councilman made the motion on March 25th, Roddenberry replied on the 28th and the city council passed the appropriate resolution on April 8th.



And when people come to visit, the nice volunteers ask them to put a pin in the map to show where they are from. The map of the United States is most thickly crowded with pins along a sort of Chicago-to-Riverside corridor. And the map of the world has its share. As my niece (who loathes William Shatner, for some obscure reason) put it when she saw this photo -- "holy crap."



The point of our trip, really: visiting with relatives.



A walk in the woods, Hickory Hills Park, Iowa City. "Here are the species remembered from the picnic ground, schoolhouse grove, the woodlot -- the forest preserve. Through the Northeast, across the Midwest, deciduous forest is where the people are -- or where they spent their childhood." Robert O. Petty, Deciduous Forest, 1974.



Eastbound, route 74, approaching the Mississippi. Called, always and only, the River.



That truck stop again. I-80, eastbound.



I keep waiting for the day when I am totally cool and comfortable driving the expressway. Some people actually get sleepy. I don't. If it's true that a society's greatest madness seems sane to itself, then I wonder if someday people will look back and gasp that we all considered it normal, that we made it necessary for modern life, to sit inside and maneuver large steel machines at terrifically high speeds simultaneously but orderly-like, on often crowded roads, in order to go from point A to point B in as short a time as possible. It's an exercise in sheer faith, trust in one's fellow man, that future historians will perhaps judge as far more cementing (!ha ha) to the whole society than any lessons in civics or any traditional political activity.

Physically, it's the sense of entrapment that bothers me. Next rest area, 68 miles. No way out, but more speed.



Going home.



... and say it was good.

Shatner's Star Trek cameo (if only they had consulted me)

Okay. I saw the movie. It was good. The time travel/double reality plot struck me as a little bit weak (is Spock's mother dead or isn't she?), and the snow planet monsters a little bit gratuitous. But it was a lot of fun, and the young folks playing the classic characters acquitted themselves well. One thing though -- why couldn't they give the kid playing Kirk brown contact lenses? Not that anyone asked me.

I do wish they had asked me, about that, and about other things. Why no tribbles, for example? And I'm glad Kirk at least ate an apple during the Kobyashi Maru training session, but that didn't seem quite sufficient a tribute to the fact that one of the charms of the old series was that these people were people who were, after all, at work, and who took breaks, had leisure pursuits, and ate actual food. Remember the old episode where Kirk's yeoman -- a girl -- serves him greens because he is on a diet?

And then there's the question of the movie's cameo appearance. Leonard Nimoy's "Spock Prime" was all right, but too extensive for a cameo. I recall reading somewhere recently that the producers wanted to work William Shatner into the story line in a cameo also, but just couldn't do it. Perhaps that's a polite way of saying "the dude wanted millions." If, on the other hand, they just couldn't think of a way to work him in -- well. That's ridiculous. Of course they could. They should have thought harder. If only they had consulted me.

I'm assuming, of course, that they could have written him into the script as an actor playing anybody, not necessarily playing "Kirk Prime" from the future. Why not? Shatner would have been huge fun as a janitor at Starfleet. As an instructor. As an ambassador.

Or this. To beef up the weakest section of the film, in which the preteen Kirk drives a car, really fast, as far as he can down an Iowa road and that's all.

*************

Iowa, ca. 2240. A blazing hot summer day.

A preteen blond boy races an antique 20th century red sports car at 80 m.p.h. along a dusty road. He is scolded by a furious voice coming over the car's intercom system, shuts it off and keeps racing.

A police officer on a personal motorcycle/hovercraft catches up with him and orders him to pull him over. While the boy is distracted, a vintage 20th century pickup truck approaches his path from a farm in the distance. The boy and the cop both swerve and stop at the last minute to avoid a crash.

The dust settles. Doors slam as the three drivers emerge from their vehicles. The driver of the pickup is a good-looking woman in her mid fifties. She takes in the situation.

Woman: Well, at least you're in one piece. And so is the car.

Officer: You know him, ma'am?

Woman: A little better than I'd care to, sometimes, officer. Of course he was speeding?

Officer: Excessively. Driving far under age. In a stolen vehicle, I assume.

Woman: Not stolen. Borrowed, sir. That should get him some time off, almost like for good behavior (she glares at the boy).

Officer: What's his name?

Boy (quickly): James Kirk.

Woman: My nephew. My sister could never handle him.

Officer (to Kirk): You got a license and registrations, kid?

Kirk: What's registration?

Officer (reading a hand held computer): According to this, the owner is --

Woman: If you'll allow him to drive, you can both follow me back to my property and see that he stays there until my sister comes to get him and claims the car. (Quietly) She's had a rough time, officer. If we could get back before her husband -- before the car owner knows it's gone, that would be good.

Officer (hesitates, glances at the distance, then at his computer. Hands the computer to the woman): Punch in your name, address, and sign it. When I file the report, you will be on record as the responsible party. That's an expensive antique, ma'am. And I don't know your brother-in- law.

Woman (smiling, works the computer and hands it back): Actually you probably do. Apples don't fall far from trees. But I can handle him. Thank you, sir.

The policeman roars off in a cloud of dust. Kirk and the woman face each other.

Kirk: Why did you do that?

Woman: I think it's kind of stupid to drive off cliffs. How about you? And because ... you remind me of someone. (Businesslike.) Get in the car and follow me.

Kirk: Why should I? (Woman whirls on him.) Okay, okay.

They drive to a farm, get out of their cars, and Kirk follows the woman across a dusty open space, rutted with tire tracks, to a stables.

Woman (peering in): Hey?

In the shadows and shafts of light, an old but imposing looking man is brushing a horse.

Man (still working): You're back early.

Woman: Have we got a spare charger?

Man: The device, or the animal?

Woman: The device. I met a ... motorist in distress.

Man (turning slowly to face the woman and Kirk. Does he recognize the young son of the dead hero, George Kirk of the USS Kelvin? Possibly. Do we recognize William Shatner? Definitely): He's a little young to be a motorist, isn't he?

Kirk: That's why I'm in distress. (Glances at the woman.) The cops caught me.

Man: Evidently not.

Kirk: I mean, they did until ... she .... (Turning to the woman.) Thank you.

Man (still working): I see. That's better.

Woman: I kind of signed off for him -- on his good behavior, the car, everything. It's all going to be in the nice officer's report.

Man: Is it.

Woman: I thought you could look over his vehicle. It's a real antique. You'd have a lot to talk about. And then you could see that he gets home? I've got some things to do.

Man: I can do that.

Kirk: It's okay. I mean, I'm not that far from my house. I don't need any help. Thanks.

Man (putting down his brushes): I'm not sure you'll get too far in Starfleet with that attitude, sir.

Kirk: What do you know about Starfleet?

The camera lingers on lifetimes of experience in the old man's face. Who is he? We don't know. The next time we see the preteen Kirk, he'll be the young man in the bar ten years on.

***********

Now I ask you. A brief cameo, a thrilling mystic jolt for the audience, no time-travel "Kirk Prime" problems, and surely no jillion-dollar fee for these few minutes for Shatner. I even throw in a good looking woman as a reference to, well, all Kirk's good looking women. Is she daughter, niece, wife? I throw in horses as a nod to the actor's hobby.

Now I ask you. Couldn't this have been fun? Why in the world didn't they consult me?

If they make Kirk a frat boy ...

Tomorrow the new Star Trek movie premieres, the prequel of all prequels, in which the crew of the original series are seen in youth and all played by new young actors. I have seen the trailers on television and I'm concerned. Of course the special effects look good, but that was never the point of the show. And the young man playing Kirk seems to do a lot of jumping and screaming.

Please no. I quote my text. Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk discuss, briefly, his time at Starfleet in the episode "Shore Leave."

McCoy: ... and you were a serious young cadet.
Kirk: Serious? Bones, I was positively grim.

There. Let us, please, see the young Kirk as a slowly evolving, almost monkish martinet, talented, proud, and yes grim, as young heroes are. They soften with maturity, and are able to crack a smile perhaps by their mid-thirties, just when they're out exploring the universe with the responsibility of a starship crew of 430 on their shoulders.

Let us not, please, see him as what I suspect the scriptwriters have already created. Barracks frat boy suddenly sobered up by -- let me guess -- some unexpected tragedy or betrayal which he sees as "his fault." No, no, no. In fiction heroes really are born (hello, Riverside, Iowa!), not transformed into such by some after-school-special plot twist.

... please. I'll be upset. And no one wants that.


(Photo, New York Post blog)

Rediscovering Star Trek

"The Tholian Web." "The Gamesters of Triskelion." "Amok Time."

Star Trek first aired when I was a toddler, so I missed it then, but I know I grew up with the famed reruns saturating the very air around me, because episode titles like the ones above are as familiar to me as -- well, as a lot of other, more dignified things probably should be. Things like great poetry recited at the family hearth, or memories of how to churn butter or harvest crops, or something. I know my older brother loved Star Trek as he loved almost any science fiction, so I am sure he was the reason why the TV was tuned in to that station when I was seven or eight, and too young to make the choice myself. By the time I was in high school, I had long enjoyed the show so heartily that I only half-jokingly scolded my friends what a pity it was that their jobs forced them to work Saturday afternoons, whereby they would miss Star Trek. They sort of laughed.

Nowadays my husband, never a science fiction person and never one to have much patience with "cheesiness," has discovered the show -- the old show of course, with original, cardboard sets and less than full-throttle acting gloriously included -- on FanCast. He started out with "Elaan of Troyius." Some days later he invited me into the computer room to watch another ("The Tholian Web") and now after decades, I'm hooked again. Our older daughter has also caught the bug. Our younger daughter and our son have so far remained immune. They go into other rooms, or shade their eyes and mutter "nerds" whenever we three rhapsodize about plots, or begin planning our next, lame-o Family Fun night.

But they did have fair warning that this little TV-land bacillus might erupt among us with a vengeance. They knew I liked it. Before exploring the treasures of FanCast, we had watched the two best Star Trek movies together on DVD, as a concession to my childhood tastes. These would be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Return to Earth. The children's childhoods' having been much devoted to the juggernaut that is Star Wars, I found these two latter movies, viewed when the younglings had all reached and safely passed the age of reason, most refreshing. I couldn't help but lecture the family on why. "Star Wars," I wagged a finger at them all, "is nothing but fighting total, galactic eee-vill all day. Nobody even eats. (Except for the pear floating between Anakin and Padme, and the blue milk that Aunt Beroo makes in a blender way back on the farm.) There's no story.

"Star Trek is different." I grew expansive. "There are always two and sometimes three plots going on in every episode. There's a problem with whatever alien society the Enterprise encounters, and then there's a character conflict on board ship, and often there is some other problem -- damage to the ship, impossible orders from the Federation, or yes, galactic evil on the march. And it all gets wrapped up in fifty minutes and eighteen seconds (I never knew, but FanCast tells you so). Even the movies are like that. Look at the plots. They have to prevent Khan from getting his hands on the Genesis device. They have to save the whales. There's a story."

And of course the children huff that Star Wars has stories too. Or else they shade their eyes and mutter "nerd." My husband the peacemaker simply says "It's all good."

And so it is, but there are a few more ways in which Star Trek is better and more interesting than its later, special effects-laden rival. The literate references from an era of better-educated scriptwriters stand out. "Daniel, as I recall, had only his faith," Spock said to Dr. McCoy (last night) in "The Gamesters of Triskelion." Quick -- reference, please? Then there are episodes that very casually mention D'Artagnan, and episodes in which the crew meet an alien who has original manuscripts of Brahms in his possession. Spock suffers an alien-induced convulsion which forces him to quote William Blake. Khan quietly asks Kirk whether he has read his Milton. One show is devoted to the crew meeting the Greek gods.

And goddesses. Which brings us to the women -- "Kirk's women," as the accompanying booklet to the Star Trek II DVD forthrightly describes them. Yes, a few too many green-haired alien girls in silver lame bikinis spend their time swooning at the captain's feet, but often enough these women also at least have other problems to face besides him, and even have a share of intelligent lines to speak. Remember Joan Collins playing the no-nonsense, Depression era soup kitchen lady in "The City on the Edge of Forever"? And no, as a matter of fact, he didn't save her from anything.


(Photo from space debris dot com.)

You don't get all this in the Star Wars franchise. Padme is a queen and a senator and she has to save her peeople, but otherwise you get a lot of kids fighting monsters. To be fair, it's simply a different franchise entertaining people in a different way. And scripted by a younger generation who don't know their Milton. But in the end, I think what makes Star Trek simply so much more fun is that asset which I suppose the curmudgeon, or the stickler for all things Shakespearian, could call a flaw: the character, care, and feeding of Himself, Captain James T. Kirk.

Really. He is ever so much more fun than poor little Luke Skywalker. It's 1966, for one thing: the camera lingers on William Shatner's young face, and well it should. But Kirk is also such an entirely different character than the Skywalkers, Solos, Obi-wans, and Anakins of that other franchise. (Solo comes close.) Where they are buffetted, humorless, and loftily angry, he is competent, cocksure, but also brave, decent, and disciplined. He'll take a whipping on a crewwoman's behalf; he'll ruin his career to bring Spock to Vulcan for a mating ritual (no kidding); he'll keep an eye on an unsteady crewman while feeding lies to a terrifying alien about "corbomite" and arguing with the good doctor regarding why that unsteady crewman was ever promoted in the first place. He is interesting every time because, every time, you want to see how this take-charge guy is going to take charge of this.

You might say any hero is the same -- Sir Lancelot, Dr. House, CSI's Grissom. But Kirk still outdazzles them. I suppose it's because the background to the stories is an organized military and so he has no superiors and almost no peers. Or because, a curmudgeon might grouse, he is written and played just a tad one-dimensional. Maybe that appeals to something in human nature, which likes to relax from time to time and watch an almost-perfect hero in action. But when the Klingon commander in "The Trouble with Tribbles" reels off all Kirk's flaws -- to Mr. Scott, who repeats it to his face -- in enough detail to satisfy any critic, that dressing down is lots of fun, too. You really must go to FanCast and watch it. In that episode, note the half-sentient flower-creature in Sulu's garden, which gets all upset at an intruder but looks suspiciously like a human hand in a pink fur glove.

For good or ill it must be an almost incomprehensible experience to become what William Shatner has become, an internationally recognized cultural icon, for decades. He is something other than a mere movie star who plays roles. "Get a life," he famously scolded "fans" during a Saturday Night Live skit about a Trekker convention. He has a life. I know this, at thirdhand, because it so happens my sister owns a couple of horses, an American Saddlebred and a hackney pony whom she takes to competitions around the midwest through the summer months, which are the horse show season. Since Saddlebreds are also the actor's little hobby, it so happens that she has crossed paths with him in small ways at one or two of these shows. She and her pony won a competition one year, the prize for which was a "Shatner Award" belt buckle.

One afternoon at a show in Kentucky, she saw him walking about the stable areas like anybody else. Of course she nearly swallowed her tongue, as we all do at sight of a celebrity. "It's like seeing a tornado," my brother explained after he collided with his own hero, Jack Nicklaus, emerging from the clubhouse at the Western Open. "You feel it right through to your spine." That's true. I remember once standing admiring a painting in a small room at the Art Institute of Chicago. Next to me was a slight, middle-aged gentleman escorting an aged woman. He pointed to another painting and spoke to her. "I wore a costume like that," he began, and I forget the rest because I was thunderstuck by the voice. There was no mistaking Charlton Heston.

Anyway, there was my sister trying not to goggle at a septuagenarian Captain Kirk in a bright, sunny, summer stable yard in Kentucky. She gripped a friend's arm. "Turn around go back go back," she hissed. "It's him."

Her friend reluctantly turned around and they very casually went back to enter and then pass through the icon's presence. Already they noticed two or three young blondes casually leaning over a paddock fence within his line of sight. But my sister's friend has been around horse shows longer and she knows the rules. "All right," she told her. "But don't talk to him. Nobody talks to Bill. He doesn't like it."

That was that. They left the presence, and carried on with their lives. So did he. Horse show season has begun again. And I have returned in a small way to my childhood tastes, sailing through the universe with that commanding hero who punches the intercom console in a temper and then controls himself and politely asks some subordinate to please come to the bridge. And makes you think -- hey. He's all right. We're in good hands.

Now I have a life too, but if I can wangle an invitation to a horse show this summer, if I can offer to make myself useful just casually mucking out stalls or something, why I might have much more eyewitness things to report. But I'll remember the rules. I promise I won't talk to Bill.