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May042008

This Makes Me Happy

You may have noticed that I’m not always the world’s cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:

If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you’ll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn’t see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now… maybe it’s just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol’ grin every time I watch it… and I’ve watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I’m ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go…

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May032008

A Good Question

SamuraiFrog poses a real head-scratcher:

Why is it that in a presidential race against a former First Lady and an admiral’s son who married into a beer fortune, it’s the black guy with almost no political presence who has to prove he’s not an elitist?

This started me thinking: What does “elite” really mean, anyway, and how does one become “elitist?” Is it a factor of education or wealth? If it’s a question of intelligence or accomplishment, what’s gone so wrong in our society that a term that once meant simply “the best” has acquired such a negative connotation? What’s wrong with being the best at whatever it is you do?

Why is it that our current president, a New England blue-blood by birth who only plays at being a working man on his ranch in Texas, is seen as a “good old boy” and therefore not elitist, but our previous president — who started life as poor Arkansas trailer trash — was often accused of elitism? Is it perhaps more a reflection of the person calling someone elitist than the person being accused of it? Bill Clinton has a tendency to come off as the smartest guy in the room — worse, as someone who knows he’s the smartest guy in the room — and perhaps he makes some people feel insecure because of that, or his detractors mistake his intellectual confidence for an air of superiority, so they call him an elitist. Here’s the funny thing: smart people don’t bother me, personally; the ones who I see as having an air of superiority are the wealthy, especially the children of the wealthy. For me, money and privilege are far greater indicators of “elitism” than brains. But that’s probably just my own personal insecurity and prejudice; other people’s issues may vary.

I think what’s really going on is that “elitist” has taken the place of many other words that political correctness and a societal trend to not want to debate race and class no longer allow us to say. Where once you could call someone a nasty name or, in the case of a woman or a black candidate who rub one’s prejudices the wrong way, uppity, our modern social mores now dictate you have to express yourself some other way than with the, ahem, traditional epithets. You have to call them something else, find a word that’s less loaded than the one you’d probably really like to use. At the core of it, you don’t like the thought of women or black people or smart people or rich people being superior to your own pathetic self (whatever your definition of superiority may be), so you call them “elitist.” Really, all the word means these days is “other.” By calling someone an elitist, you’re saying, “this person isn’t like me, he (or she) isn’t one of my kind, so therefore, I dislike this person.”

But that’s just my Saturday morning theory…

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May022008

Friday Afternoon Tidbits

Just checking my various news feeds here as I while away the last few minutes of a long work week…

I see that Roger Bergendoff, the crackpot who was making ricin only a stone’s throw from my house, has pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing a biological toxin and various weapons. That’s interested, considering his Vegas hotel room was full of nasty little toys. Maybe his logic is that he was in the hospital at the time those things were discovered, so he technically wasn’t in possession of them. Or something.

Meanwhile, in a related story, Thomas Tholen, owner of the Riverton home where Bergendorff was brewing his poisonous crap, threw Bergendorff out after he figured out what his cousin was doing down in the basement because he “feared for his family’s safety,” but he didn’t report Bergendorff to the authorities because he didn’t want to get in trouble himself for the guns and explosives that were stored on his property. Real heroic there, Tom. He faces charges for “falsely telling federal agents he knew nothing about his cousin’s production of ricin.”

Sticking with local news, a new report from the American Lung Association places Salt Lake and Logan, Utah, in its list of the top-ten most polluted cities in the country (at least when you’re talking about short-term particle pollution). Another Utah city, Provo, shows up at number 12. You know, when three of your state’s four or five biggest cities are in the top 15 most polluted cities nationwide… well, it makes a guy proud.

The problem is the Wasatch Front’s infamous “inversions,” the cold-weather phenomenon that occurs when high-pressure zones in the upper atmosphere trap stagnant air at the bottom of our mountain valleys… which, of course, are where all the cities are located. We’ve always had cruddy air in the wintertime because of those damned inversions, but it’s gotten much, much worse in the last couple of decades, a direct result of the booming population along the Wasatch. (Briefly, for my online friends who’ve never been here, just about all of Utah’s population clusters in a line that runs north-south through the middle of the state, snuggled up nice and cozy against the Wasatch Mountains, hence “Wasatch Front.”) I have a lot of reasons for hating all the development in the Salt Lake Valley that has transformed the rural pasturelands of my youth into a wall-to-wall (literally, since we’re surrounded by mountains) subdivision, but the fact that we can’t even see our beautiful mountains for a good chunk of the year now because the air is so filthy is right up there at the top of the list. If I could only turn back the world like Superman…

Finally, a Japanese company called Cyberdine has prototyped a robotic exoskeleton called HAL which is intended to help augment human strength or move paralyzed limbs. According to this article, the thing can even operate autonomously based on data stored in an on-board computer. That all sounds really cool… unless you’re a sci-fi fan, of course. Then you can’t help but think about that other Cyberdyne and HAL and it all becomes rather ominous, doesn’t it? Hell, the exoskeleton even looks vaguely like stormtrooper armor, complete with some glowing bits like in Tron! How can an autonomous exoskeleton that looks like a stormtrooper, is built by the creators of Skynet, and is named after a murdering AI not lead to some kind of trouble?

On these happy notes, have a good Friday, everyone…

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May012008

What Would You Take With You?

Via SF Signal, here’s an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew’s off-duty entertainment. It’s quite a nice little library that covers a pretty wide range of topics, genres, and quality levels (i.e., “hammock reading” versus Literature-with-a-capital-L).

Titles that caught my eye among the books were The Brothers Karamazov, Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Da Vinci Code (of course — is there anywhere you can’t find a copy of that one?), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, amusingly enough, several years-old issues of both Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction. (How weird would it be to read science fiction while floating weightlessly in a tin can that whips around the planet once every 90 minutes? But wait… it gets weirder…)

Continue Reading…

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Apr302008

In Memoriam: John Berkey

John Berkey's cover art for the novelization of Star Wars

I just learned from the blog of Irene Gallo, the art director for Tor Books, that the illustrative artist John Berkey has died. Irene mentions something about him being in poor health in recent years, but so far, I haven’t been able to find any further details about his age or cause of death.

Berkey is probably best known for painting some of the very earliest pieces of promotional art associated with Star Wars — the image above was a poster concept for the movie, which ended up instead becoming the iconic cover of the film’s novelization — but his work was pretty commonly seen on all kinds of books and posters in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and it was a big influence on my developing sense of aesthetics. Several of his paintings still live in my memory; when I read of his death, I instantly recalled an image of his that appeared on Navy recruitment posters throughout my high school and early college years, and also this painting,which was the cover of a National Geographic coffee-table book called Our Universe. A friend of mine owned a copy of that book; as I recall, I borrowed it several times, but about all I remember about it now was that awesome cover painting.

Berkey’s work was more impressionistic than realistic, but one of the things it always conveyed was a true sense of mass. His starships and ocean-going craft and floating cities always felt huge and immensely powerful. It was a perfect style for the time of its greatest popularity, when Star Wars, with its mile-long Star Destroyers and moon-sized Death Star, set the tone for so much science fiction.

I don’t recall seeing any new work from Berkey in years, and I don’t know if that’s because he’s been ill or otherwise not working, or if his stuff just fell out of fashion. I rediscovered him a few years ago when I ran across a used art book at Sammy’s, and I spent several days marveling at how many of his paintings were familiar, and how much I still like them. That Star Wars piece above, for the record, is one of my favorites out of the hundreds of Original Trilogy-related paintings produced over the years; this companion piece is, too, even if it inaccurately depicts several Corellian YT-1300 light freighters at the Battle of Yavin, rather than just the one we all know actually was there…

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Apr282008

The ’08 Summer Season: I’m Already Saying “Meh”

The first summer I worked at that movie theater job I’m always yammering on about was amazing. It was amazing for a lot of reasons: I had my first “real” job, I was positively goofy about this particular girl I happened to know, and I was making friendships with a posse of guys I’m still friendly with nearly 20 years later… it was simply one of the best times of my life. But one of the biggest reasons the summer of ’89 was so great was that the movies that were running in the background of all those coming-of-age moments were great, too. I’ve never done the research, so this is entirely subjective on my part, but I can’t think of any other summertime movie season that has been so chock-full of flicks that were both (a) immensely successful and (b) so damn good (or at least so really damn enjoyable, which isn’t necessarily the same thing). The line-up for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day period that year included: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Dead Poets Society, The Abyss, License to Kill, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, When Harry Met Sally…, and probably a dozen more I’m not remembering right now. There were just so many titles coming out that summer that caught my — and everybody else’s — attention, and we at the theater were all so aware of what was coming up. I miss being so plugged in to the scene. Or to any scene, really. Every weekend brought some new wonder, some new zap of electric anticipation for both us theater-drones and the patrons queuing up in the lobby. It was an exciting time to be working in the movie industry, and to be a movie fan.

However, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon who’s always going on about how much better things were back in his day, it’s been one long, slow downward slope ever since. I still reflexively get excited at the approach of the summer season, but year by year, summer by summer, the ratio of disappointment to awesomeness has been creeping upwards. Worse, it’s getting to the point where the upcoming releases aren’t even that interesting to begin with. (Of course, this problem isn’t confined to just the summer months; The Girlfriend and I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and sometimes two or three times, but over the last couple of years we’ve scaled back to about once a month. And it’s not because we’re all that busy — although we are — it’s mostly a function of how few flicks are coming out that we really want to see…)

Let’s examine this summer’s schedule (which officially kicks off this Friday with the release of Iron Man) and see what catches our eye, shall we?

Continue Reading…

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Apr272008

Running with the Shadows

Coming home tonight after a late evening out, I was thinking about this song:

That’s Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night,” if you don’t know it. I’ve always liked this one; it’s probably my favorite Benatar tune, even though it was one of her lesser hits and seems to be somewhat unknown these days (at least, I rarely hear it out there in the world; whenever the oldies station — sigh — plays a Benatar song, it’s almost invariably either “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” or “Love Is a Battlefield”). I groove on its combination of romantic melody and rock ‘n’ roll bombast, I guess. I vaguely remembered the video showed her in a cockpit singing into an old-fashioned microphone, but wow, it turns out to be quite the little epic, doesn’t it?

A couple of thoughts:

  • I don’t know what kind of planes are featured in Pat’s daydream, but they’re not P-51 Mustangs, as shown on that poster she’s looking at in the framing scenes.
  • This was made in 1982, the year after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. Could the Nazi theme have possibly been inspired by Raiders‘ success? It seem like there were a lot of Nazis and 1930s/1940s things in pop culture around that time, but did Raiders begin that or was it merely another example of the same zeitgeist?
  • Did you catch Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton as the pilot in the red cap and the Nazi radio operator, respectively?
  • And finally, is it just me or are women in 1940s-style flying gear damn sexy? Maybe it’s me…
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Apr262008

Benefit Concert for One of the Old Gang

I grew up in a place — Riverton, Utah — that, up until the late ’80s or so, was very much like the stereotypical small town you see in movies and old TV sitcoms. I lived on a pleasant road lined (at that time) with big shade trees; there was a single grocery store whose staff knew my mother by name; and my dad did a lot of barter work with the neighbors, trading his mechanical knowledge for labor to help build our barn, among other things. But even then, Riverton’s small-town atmosphere was something of a fading illusion — traffic along that tree-lined road grew heavier with each passing year, and tract houses were quietly springing up like mushrooms after the rain.

The community to the south of Riverton, however, a place called Bluffdale… well, that really was a small town. Bluffdale didn’t even have its own grocery store, or a school for its children, or much of anything really except alfalfa fields and cows and pick-up trucks. Bluffdale old-timers still refer to driving the three miles over to Riverton for groceries as “going to town,” as if they were trekking in from the Outback to the Big City. This is where my lovely Anne, a.k.a. The Girlfriend, grew up, playing with the neighbor kids that were her age, babysitting the ones that were younger, being watched over herself by the ones that were older.

It was the sort of upbringing that leaves deep and lasting roots. Many of Anne’s “old gang” still live right there in the old neighborhood, and the ones who have moved on in search of greener pastures — or any kind of pastures, considering that Bluffdale is now “developing” just like its big brother Riverton — seem to keep in better touch with their childhood friends than most. When something bad happens to one of them, the word gets around. And people do what they can to help.

A while back, Anne got the word that something very bad indeed had happened to one of the old gang. A guy named Nate Pemberton lost his wife Jenni and their unborn fourth child to something called an “amniotic embolism,” a rare and not-very-well-understood complication of pregnancy that kills nearly 80 percent of the women it afflicts. Just to make things more interesting, the couple didn’t have any health insurance. So now, in addition to trying to deal with his grief and raise their other three kids alone, Nate has to find a way, somehow, to cover a bundle of very large medical bills.

To try to help Nate, the old gang and the larger community of Bluffdale old-timers have set up a fund in the name of Jennifer M. Pemberton at Zions Bank to collect donations. (If you live out of state, there’s also a PayPal account that will feed into the same fund). More impressively, they’re mounting a benefit concert headlined by local country-western performer J. Marc Bailey. Now, I’m not a big fan of country music, but I have seen Marc perform — I’ve also met him via a mutual acquaintance — and I can attest that he puts on a good show. He’s had some rock ‘n’ roll influences and his music isn’t strictly country. This ought to be a decent night’s entertainment, and of course it’s for a good cause. If you’re interested either in contributing or attending the concert, you can find the details on this memorial blog or e-mail me and I’ll make sure you get the facts you need.

I have to confess that I don’t actually know Nate. I knew who the Pembertons were back in the day, but due to a quirk of timing they were all either ahead of me or behind me in school, so I never actually got acquainted with them. However, Anne knows them and the news about Nate’s troubles shook her. Shook me a little, too, to be honest. The word “tragedy” gets thrown around pretty easily these days, but if this story doesn’t qualify as a genuine tragedy, I don’t know what would. I don’t want to taint this noble cause with politics, but it seems to me the story of Jenni and Nate Pemberton is a damn good example of why we need to get serious about renovating our healthcare system in this country. It’s absolute nonsense that a country that calls itself the “richest nation on Earth” can’t set up something so good working people from small towns don’t have to worry about bill collectors pounding on their doors during the worst year of their lives. Stories like Nate’s are pretty common, and the injustice of them always makes me angry. The Europeans consider access to healthcare a basic human right, and they never have to worry about losing their homes when something unexpected happens. So why can’t we Americans, who used to lead the world in just about every way you can think of but lately seem to be sitting on the sidelines, say the same thing?

Forgive the mini-rant. As I said, these stories get my dander up. Anyway, if anyone reading this knows the Pembertons or lives in the Salt Lake/Provo area and wants to see a good concert, or even if you’re a total stranger who’s just looking for a way to spend some of that free money George W. is sending to us this month, please check out that blog I mentioned and throw a couple of dollars into the hat. It’s a good cause. And it’s a way to keep that small-town atmosphere alive just a little while longer…

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