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

The ballet

Catherine and Grace attended the ballet for the first time on a January night at the local university, to see a Russian dance company perform Swan Lake. It was Catherine’s idea. The university’s theater guild had sent out advertising brochures about it to the local libraries as well as to their own subscribers, and Catherine had seen a copy on the circulation desk as she checked out books. The brochure claimed the Russians were much renowned, and it included quotes from reputable big-city newspapers' rave reviews. And this was the only ballet, Catherine frankly reasoned, she was ever likely to bother to go see.

So she bought a ticket for herself and her mother, and they wound their way to Matteson, past the neat small suburban houses amid their stiff, bristle-brush, brown winter trees, along the acutely angled darkening winter streets whose layout probably reflected haphazard pioneer trails of a century and a half before. They wound their way around that new supermarket with its parking lot and the nearby, newer houses plunked just in the middle of the old trail-streets but otherwise nowhere in particular, and then they drove up and over small rises and hollows in the old farmlands until they reached the big, open, prairie campus. Once on the school's premises, the road turned broad and beautifully paved. They passed the obligatory large, ugly public art sculptures, giant copper two-by-fours assembled any which way and left standing -- after the honor of their being chosen, when, twenty, thirty years before? -- in pointless anonymity. When they pulled into the parking lot the night was fully black, and cold. The school buildings stood all around them, large, floodlit brown brick boxes. Inside them was the hush of scholarship perhaps, but also the hush of emptiness and money.

The theater was small, and so Catherine and Grace and everyone else had excellent seats. Catherine looked carefully at the stage. There was no orchestra pit. Where was the music to come from? She looked around at the audience, and remarked in a whisper to Grace at all the well dressed Oriental people taking their seats. She was accustomed to a most “diverse” world filled with blacks, whites, Mexicans, a new influx of Poles and Lithuanians, the occasional Arab, but not to soignee, suddenly mysteriously abundant Chinese or Japanese. She settled back, glad she had worn her lime green silk sweater, and her brightest green sparkling earrings.

The lights dimmed and the audience listened to a tedious speech given at center stage by the director of the theater’s board, an excited lady who wanted to acknowledge the family whose generous donation had made this performance possible. Everyone applauded. Then a hissing spurted from two large black speakers embedded in the walls high up at either side of the stage. So the music was to be canned, and the dancers would have to dance to that. Did they suffer this as amateurish, needlessly difficult, un-Russian? The curtains parted, and the ballet began.

As Catherine watched she had the new experience of understanding an artwork slowly, grasping a story slowly, without words. Words came to her sometimes, but when they did they surprised her by their presence and their aptness. It was as if someone else really was speaking inside her head. The main male dancer was lost in one scene, for example, amid the women’s tutus dipping and fluttering, amid a running flurry of white swans. Catherine thought, or the observing voice spoke: she’s there somewhere, but he can’t find her. At other scenes she thought: she’s lost, or he’s tired. She thought, I must love ballet.

About halfway through the production, during a long crowd scene with many dancers onstage, one particular ballerina came to the front and danced. She began to turn about on one pointed foot over and over again. Catherine concentrated on this, and as the ballerina turned, and turned, and seemed never to stop turning but finally stopped, she thought: that must have been over thirty turns. She said as much, in a tiny whisper, to Grace, who agreed.

Later she would do some hunting at the library and find out, in books on ballet, that these were the famous fouettes en tournant which all ballerinas dancing Odile must do, because Pierina Legnani did them at the 1895 premiere choreographed by Petipa, where they caused such a sensation. Indeed there are thirty-two of them.

For the moment, she relaxed in her seat while the applause died down. She watched the rest of the ballet. More words came to her head. The nation happened to be at war. And there had been a documentary on television the week before, full of horrible film clips of old suffering, in fact of Russian suffering. Imprisoned men fighting over bread. She watched the silent dance, watched its fluttering costumes and colors on the golden-lit stage, remembered the ballerina turning. And she thought, or the observant voice spoke: this is why God permits the world to go on existing.

"...and clear ice grew dense..."

"The northwind dropped, and night came black and wintry. A fine sleet descending whitened the cane like hoarfrost, and clear ice grew dense upon our shields."

Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIV

ee-sah-teest

Spelled Ysatis. Pronounced ee-sah-teest. The magazine ad looked like this, in 1984:



The scent was so divine I pulled the sniffy-card, or whatever they call them, out of the magazine and kept it in a drawer for, I do believe, years. In those days I was a firm virtuous person who would never dream of spending money on the actual perfume. Besides, I was a product of the Seventies. Everybody was natural then, or scoffed at engineered feminine capitalist self-definition, or both.

Then a couple of years ago I began subscribing to Bazaar, and then to Vogue. Once again I met the perfume industry's sniffy-cards. I try them all. Last year, for my birthday, I gave myself a treat, and bought a bottle of Miss Dior. It's heavy on the orange, but delicious.

And then what with one thing and another, today I decided to buy myself an early birthday present. Why not try -- could it be possible they still make -- Ysatis?



In fact, Givenchy (jzhee-vahn-shee) still makes it. In a delightful blog maintained for three years, from October 2005 to October 2008, Scentzilla says of it:

Nothing better exemplifies the balls out, over the top glamor of the 80s than Ysatis. Ysatis was introduced by Givenchy in 1984. Ystais [sic] was created by Dominique Ropion, who went on to make a number of other perfumes for Givenchy, as well as some other rather infamously bold fragrances like Carnal Flower (F. Malle) and Angel (T. Mugler.)

This fragrance heaves thick floral notes of mandarine, orange blossom, iris, carnation, and narcissus over a fantastically fecund base. And for me, that base is the key to its charm. The combination of vetiver, oakmoss, patchouli, civet and (likely) castoreum in Ysatis is both terrible and wonderful to behold. The whole thing is smoothed over by a heady rush of vanilla and amber, creating a smokey sultry perfume overall.

"Very strong and not for everyone," she concludes. Heaven knows I can't detect all those wonderful things on my wrist, but I do find clove, possibly, and something like a memory of church incense there.

The universe of perfume is absolutely extraordinary, and that alone is a trite thing to say. Better, perhaps, to note that it's absolutely extraordinary there should even be a universe of perfume. It seems so un-Seventies, so un-earnest, when the world has such problems. But there it is. Scentzilla was not, and is not, the only one recording her passions and her knowledge. "Why would anyone collect perfumes?" she asks in her FAQs. And she answers, "Why would anyone collect CDs, movies, or those suspiciously adorable Hummel figurines? We all have different interests, and what catches the fancy of one person may not appeal to someone else." So true. When you finish learning all you can from her archives, you may go on to 1001 Fragrances, written by Paris based fragrance historian yes-there-is-such-a-thing Octavian Coifan. And then to Anya's Garden, Perfume Critic, to a makeup site brilliantly named Eyeshadow Government (complete with blunt motto, "Everyone needs makeup, especially you"), and then don't forget to stop off at Basenotes, where you'll learn -- alas, too late! -- about the Sniffapalooza fragrance, wine, and chocolate event held in New York City this past Saturday, February 6th.

These people, as a man in my house often comments when something is happening, are having way too much fun. May I, too, be a "balls out" perfume critic, just for tonight? Because you see, I have never much liked that most famous fragrance, Chanel No. 5. It strikes me as resembling Johnson's Baby Powder. Could a century of brilliant marketing account for its reputation? The current ad for it is divinely beautiful.

Hands, lips

I've just come back from the movies, and I swear I don't know how they do it, but I am sure they are trained to do it.



Image from Al tejo, October 2006

It's the hands and the lips. Actors, and especially actresses -- in this alone, in the hands and the lips, there is a difference, so the new affectation of calling women "actors" is peculiarly dishonest -- actresses must be trained to handle their hands and lips in a certain, arresting way, in a way that looks sweetly self-conscious but also seductive, busy, lovely. They don't gnaw or bite or purse their lips as real people do. Actresses' faces are never disfigured by their little gracious tics, but they also never stay still. Their lips are always animated, under their control but always moving, trembling, nearly smiling, half opened, half closing, half finishing a swallow, readying for or recovering from a hesitation in speech, or a chew. Always an attractive, discreet, perfect one.

People don't do this in real life. It's trained. Take up a digital camera some afternoon, and at a party or family gathering, quietly snap candid shots. You'll be surprised by the number of pictures you have to erase, because the photos are so unflattering, and why? Because in normal life, people hold their faces so awkwardly. Even when they keep their faces as active as actresses do, it's never in a nice way to look at. Ordinary people are either eating, or unconsciously scowling, or unconsciously maneuvering their tongues or jutting out their chins in some ugly way. For whole minutes at a stretch.

And the hands. Actresses are trained to use their hands, too. They must be. Even if she has rather beefy, gnarled hands -- Meryl Streep in It's Complicated -- she poses them beautifully. Her hands always look warm and blunt, alive and capable, open and softly poised for action but never aggressive or clawlike. Never stiff. When she pats her hair or gathers up her robe around her collarbone, her hands are like living, pulsing sculptures, looking as if she could speak to them and tell them what to do and they would think, and then obey her. Ordinary people's hands are cold joints, and sagging chilly skin. Of course, in the movies a manicure helps, as do, in today's movie, the choice of thick, tall gold and silver rings for her fine thick strong fingers. Perhaps the rings alone just shout "personality," which little in an ordinary woman's wardrobe ever does. Most women, trying to wear the rings Meryl Streep's character wore in the movie, would suffer the problem a famed fashion designer once rather cattily described when observing a woman too chic-ly dressed: the rings would wear her.



Try, for even an hour, to hold your lips and hands as actresses do. Be aware of them, without seeming to, and without seeming, what? Theatrical, kittenish. Fidgety. Actressy.

And then wonder. Who trains them to know this? And by the way, how long does it take to perfect?

Boy in a garden

He's standing before his -- or his mother's? -- prize hollyhocks. Are those giant mallows, too, to the right, or more hollyhock leaves? And what is the building? It looks industrial, not home-like.

The date? Judging by his pants and haircut, 1940s.

Spot the black kitten, marching busily past.

Pearls and Roses, chapter 14

Pearls and Roses, chapter 13

“Wow. We need to get her calmed down,” Trish said to the other three members of the Board that evening, after the meeting had officially broken up and Alice had been the first to leave, still on good terms with at least Mill and Lily, she imagined.

“What’s with her being so by-the-book all of a sudden?” Mill asked.
“I have no idea,” Trish said. “I am so hurt. I am so hurt.”

“Well, it’s nothing we can’t handle,” Pat said easily. “Is she still on the list to go to France with us, is the question? Do we want to listen to that for a whole week in some itty-bitty jerkwater hotel?”

“If she feels that strongly about the bylaws, then she shouldn’t go at all,” Lily said.

“I agree,” Pat replied, “but how much do you want to bet she’ll still go? Wouldn’t you? To France?”
“Can we disinvite her?”
“I don’t know,” Trish said dismissively, busy gathering up her things. “I’m just incredibly hurt. Nothing has to be like this. It’s not worth it. I have other things to do.” They said good night and departed, the joy and the food of their normal meetings spoiled.

Alice kept on researching her views. That night and for some weeks afterward, she called and wrote other non-profit organizations and even wrote Monique Boyd herself. She said nothing about her work to most of her fellow employees, not wanting to frighten or bore them. She never revealed to anyone that she had contacted Monique, for she had only recently learned about the exclusive birthday parties at her apartment in Chicago and she knew that Trish especially, already upset, considered Monique her own property. Alice only wanted to know, privately, if she was right, because evidently they had no intention of listening to her for her merits.

What she learned made her feel marvelous. “Absolutely, this is wrong,” Monique wrote her back in November. “You have my total support. This has always been my baby, Alice, and I’m going to rock it.” When she read those words, Alice put the letter back in its envelope elated, determined that the next time they spoke on the phone – for they had done that, too – she would ask Mrs. Boyd gently why then she had vetted so many trips to Europe and Canada and Mexico in the past. Why did the rules matter now? And what of France now?

And she would feel marvelous, too, after hanging up the phone with a secretary of the hundred-million-dollar-a-year Cooper Foundation, or the three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year Steele Foundation. A secretary’s charming anonymous voice, usually young, would ring in her ears. “Wow!” it would exclaim. “You operate like that? That’s weird. No, that’s not normal. Aren’t you afraid of the IRS?”

“I am,” Alice would laugh, feeling like a character in a science fiction movie who has finally made long-distance contact with a real person from a telephone booth in a town being taken over by space pods. “But no one else seems to be.”

"Well, good luck,” the voice would say from a high silver office building in New York or Boston or Los Angeles, and Alice would return to the pods in Naperville armed with everything – and with nothing they were prepared to care about. She tried to make her case to Pat with all these massed statistics and earwitness affidavits, and Pat summed up, hard, “Well, I don’t know that that’s true.” Emphasis on two words, as needed: I don’t know that that’s true, or I don’t know that that’s true. In either case, I, Pat, am who matter, and my knowledge is what matters. I represent outrage, and I shall be unsatisfied, because all is well and we are good. You shall not make us feel other than we do.

As a matter of fact, though, Trish and Pat were shaken enough to double-check Alice’s research. They called Monique Boyd, each in turn, and they called the same billion-dollar non-profit corporations that Alice had. And they learned the same things. They called each other then, and compared notes. “Most of them I think we can just discount, they were so rude,” Trish complained. “People like that don’t even belong dealing with the public. But even Monique was kind of clipped with me.”

“Well, you saw the way she looked at her party this spring. And can you imagine being pestered by Alice since then? Who, I think, never said Boo to her since the day she was hired? I’d be clipped, too,” and Pat laughed the whooping, wheezy laugh.

“That’s true. Yeah. We really need to calm her down.”

Peter’s experience that autumn at Fontevrault, working all unbeknownst to them, was different. He was a man, a scholar, an expert, a professional. His reputation was such that he had been asked to perform a task of awesome importance and delicacy, asked by a nation-state. He had been invited to cross borders and put his hands upon, alter, save, history. He too dealt with committees under laws. Though he had a rough time of it, sometimes, convincing committees that his advice was sensible, and sometimes he failed, his kind of debates were at least conducted on a sensible level. They dealt with soils and water tables, not the validity of women’s souls. Once he had proved his point and found support through a show of hands, the project, any project, was his and he was obeyed – by men – as if he were a general. In this case, for instance, there was no question but that the saving of the lovely old abbey, Eleanor’s abbey, trumped all petty emotional quarrels. A man who had lost the vote – who believed that Peter’s way of saving the abbey would lead to its collapse – had no recourse except to fume, to talk, to write angry letters, and to wait and watch the work, more than half hoping it would all fall down and he would be proved tragically correct to no avail. But he could hardly actually stop it.

Meanwhile Peter paced the city’s archives, alone, he attended meetings at which he wore headphones because he couldn’t understand the language perfectly, but everyone still knew full well that he was in charge. He walked the city’s streets, knowing full well that probably some of the passersby recognized who he was and with what he had been entrusted. In between his trips to Chinon he returned home to his career and his wife. He and Elaine had been married twenty-one years. It was 1998. He was sixty.

Throughout these weeks of conflict, while she told her tales to brother, son, father, friend, Bethany gentlemen – and sisters-in-law, who were surprisingly sympathetic – Alice had always to endure other people’s ruefully rubbing their chins and remarking that it was difficult to deal with the strong. The few times she talked about the situation to the men on the staff, to Charlie or Ted, they would say, “You know, if it were a bunch of guys, we’d just say ‘Fuck you, let’s vote,’ and that’d be it.” And Alice would laugh and answer, “Yes, but these are women, Ted. Voting isn’t good enough.” She would grip his forearm, mocking but really angry. “They want to be emotionally understood.” And she would let him go and he would laugh and go home.

Always it was Trish and Pat who got to be strong, never herself. Even her wizened little friend Abigail, with her Bible and her attractive gray curls, hissed gently and said, “Ooh. You’ve got some powerful women to confront there. I guess you have to decide if a power struggle is worth it. Worth it spiritually, to you.” Alice gathered from all her interlocutors that defeat was pre-ordained and that really only a very dull soul – a horse in need of a sedative, of “calming down” – would not see that. Well, perhaps it was true. They certainly got their way and Alice had never, since playground days, encountered people who were so determined to get their way. And how ironic after all that they were supposed to go and film Fontevrault, an abbey, once a great mother-house of order, of downright religious work, everyone in it equal and divinely tasked. She had no weapons but the ten-year-old’s thrill in joining a club, and maybe in being an abbess, too.

So Alice’s first defeat (“I wouldn’t worry about it”) was really the only one necessary. She kept on trying little things. She resurrected the twice-monthly Business Meetings during office hours, in Room 4, and tried to introduce the barest note of formality into them. “Well, ladies, let’s get started,” she would say to perhaps six good little people at ten-thirty on the allotted Tuesday mornings, when she and everyone else knew full well that there had been another productive and very gossipy Pie Night the night before, with many decisions taken there. “Baby steps,” she told herself, “it took us years to get into a mess like this and it will take us years to get out. Baby steps.”

Baby steps. She determined to give up writing the newsletter after the first of the year. Then, miraculously, Trish and Pat began to come to the official on-the-clock meetings, and Alice thought that was a triumph. But they immediately used this concession to legitimacy to trump her anyway. The first thing they did, in early November, was to bring in a sign-up sheet for the Fontevrault trip and lay it on the table. Stupid Alice was thunderstruck. She had imagined the trip was still open for Executive Board discussion, newly private and newly formal discussion. It was not. Nor did anyone, executive or not, care.

"Aren’t you supposed to post this kind of thing on the tech board for a couple of weeks, so that everyone gets a chance to see it?” she groped in front of the six good little Tuesday souls. That had always been the way, the improper way. She thought desperately that in appealing to traditions Pat and Trish had always liked, she would gain time and fend off her growing reputation for being a misery – a horse.

"No,” they both said together. Pat turned on her the full effect of her big, clanking-rod body, and Trish of her flaxen hair and open, puzzled expression. “The business meetings are where everything should be done, and besides, we need to do this now,” Pat said. Trish went on, “The checks you and Mill and I signed in August are still outstanding, and we’re going to pay some hefty fees if we don’t follow through on this.”

Good Lord, was this what that money had been for? August, a million years ago. Yes it was. So now they had caught her in responsibility for previous actions, dangerous ones involving the company’s money, that she had undertaken before she suddenly cared about all her horsy technicalities. Rule-flouters had good memories and they knew how to take care of people, not rules but people. And they were now pretending to care about business meetings, in front of witnesses. Maybe it all evened out. Baby steps.

She bit her lip and signed up to go to Fontevrault. Pat and Trish exchanged looks. Oh, yes, they had invited her and they were not going to get away from her and have a Pie Night every night in Europe at her expense. Perhaps it would soothe them, appear less threatening, for her to be a hypocrite than an enemy and a martyr. She imagined herself on the plane, smiling and relaxed, assuring people merely by her presence that she was not such an ogre as to put a stop to this project which Mr. Boyd had wanted to do, even though legally they were all out on a limb and she hoped their jobs were not too much in jeopardy because if it.

Yes, she would go. She was not horrible. There was nothing to be afraid of. Besides, she wanted to see this old medieval abbey, and maybe she wanted to meet this Englishman for whom they were all, even at this distance, frankly agog. My goodness, yes – she was the only one of them unmarried, wasn’t she? Maybe for a change they would all have to be circumspect.

Pearls and Roses, chapter 15