High School Meme

My Facebook pal R.A. McCandless (a.k.a. “RobRoy”) posted a pretty entertaining meme/quiz thing over at his blog this morning; as meme/quiz things are a quick ‘n’ painless way to crank out a post, and I am both a compulsive oversharer and hopelessly nostalgic, naturally I couldn’t resist playing along…

Here are the instructions: “Tell us about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be!”

(Like Rob, I don’t get why “longer ago” equates to “more fun,” but whatever. As much as it pains me to admit it, my senior year was pretty long ago, so this ought to be right off the edge of the fun meter. )

The year was: 1987

Did you know your spouse?

No. The lovely Anne was two years behind me in school, and although she swears we met on Yearbook Day of my senior year, I don’t remember becoming acquainted with her until a year later, when I dated her best friend. Curiously enough, however, her brother was in my high school class, and I did know him.

Did you car pool?

No way, man. After getting my driver’s license a year later than everyone else in my class (because I’m the youngest in the class, or at least one of the youngest), I couldn’t wait for the freedom of my own wheels, and I wasn’t going to give that up for anything.

What kind of car did you have?

Well, my dad has always had a fleet of cars sitting around, and I was pretty much free to use any of them so long as I asked first. I enjoyed showing off once in a while in our ’73 Mustang Mach One, and of course I had my ’63 Galaxie (the “Cruising Vessel”) for special occasions and weekend driving (I wasn’t about to leave it in the school parking lot all day!). But my usual “daily driver” was a brown 1970 T-Bird. I loved that car, with its leather upholstery, enormous wraparound back seat, and a ridiculously long nose that ended in a distinct “beak.” I loved it almost as much as the Cruising Vessel.

Friday night football?

Nah, Friday nights were either for working or watching Miami Vice. I have vague memories of going to one football game once, and spending most of it wandering around the stands looking for some girl…

What kind of job did you have?

I was a projectionist at a single-screen neighborhood movie house, running antiquated machines that dated back (roughly) to World War II and were (literally) held together with baling wire. I loved it.

Were you a party animal?

No, although somehow I acquired a reputation as one… I’m not sure quite how that worked.

Were you considered a jock?

Nope, not in the least. By senior year, I’d long since fulfilled my PE requirements and didn’t set foot in the gym all year.

Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?

No, but I did take a drama class, and there was a fair amount of overlap between drama kids and music kids, so I found myself on the fringes of that circle anyhow.

Were you a nerd?

Were the green Orion “animal women” irresistible to human males? Hell, yes, I was a nerd… although I didn’t really fit the stereotype, as you can see in this photo from the time:

Did you get suspended or expelled?

No, I was a good kid, reputation notwithstanding.

Can you sing the fight song?

Not a word. Although — true story! — the gentleman who wrote it was my neighbor when I was a kid.

Where did you eat lunch?

Hm. It seems like I had a regular table in the cafeteria, but I honestly don’t recall. I occasionally went out, too, either for nachos from the 7-Eleven down the street, or sometimes a burger from this little drive-in whose name escapes me. The thing I mostly remember about that place was the time the girl at the drive-through (I knew her) wanted me to taste the Coke she had stashed under the counter, and it was spiked with something that had a high enough octane to run my T-Bird without the engine pinging.

What was your full school name?

Bingham High School.

What was your school mascot?

The Miners, after the hard-working denizens of the canyon the school was named for.

If you could go back and do it again would you?

Yeah, I think I would. I know many people, maybe even most people, think of high school as a terrible period of life that they wouldn’t relive if you paid them, but I remember it as a mostly happy time, my senior year especially. (Middle school was my difficult period.) I’d do some things differently, of course, and if I could face it with the level of self-confidence I have now vs. then, all the better. Even so, I remember feeling a lot of optimism about the world then, and excitement at discovering what lay ahead instead of the existential dread that wakes me up at night now. The truth is, I think I had a much better grasp on how to live in 1987 than 2016.

Did you have fun at senior prom?

I didn’t go, which is one of those things I’d do differently. Especially since my reasons for not going were pretty asinine.

Do you still talk to the person you went to prom with?

I occasionally talk with the person I should have gone to the prom with.

Are you planning on going to your next high school reunion?

Well, that’s an interesting question… if it happens, yes, I will be there.

Are you still in contact with people from high school?

Yes, with quite a few of them, actually. Mostly through Facebook, but there are several friends I’ve stayed in touch with even before that incredible time sink was invented. In fact, I just got home from a vacation to the East Coast, during which I connected with two old high school friends.

Interesting Trivia from 1987: Nerds celebrated the tenth anniversary of Star Wars; new TV shows that year included Star Trek: The Next Generation, Married… with Children, and 21 Jump Street; Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra affair ran throughout the year; televangelist Jim Bakker was forced to resign after his affair with Jessica Hahn was revealed; presidential hopeful Gary Hart was forced to abandon his campaign after his affair with Donna Rice was revealed; the nation was riveted by the rescue of “Baby Jessica,” a toddler who fell down a well in Midland, Texas; The Legend of Zelda was released for the NES platform; the world’s population reached 5 billion; and Prozac debuted in the United States.

Top Music of 1987: “Walk Like An Egyptian” (The Bangles); “Alone” (Heart); “Shake You Down” (Gregory Abbott); “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” (Whitney Houston); “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (Starship); “C’est La Vie” (Robbie Nevil); “Here I Go Again” (Whitesnake); “The Way It Is” (Bruce Hornsby and the Range); “Shakedown” (Bob Seger); “Livin’ on a Prayer” (Bon Jovi)

Top Movies of 1987: Three Men and a Baby; Fatal Attraction; Beverly Hills Cop II; Good Morning, Vietnam; Moonstruck; The Untouchables; The Secret of My Success; Stakeout; Lethal Weapon; The Witches of Eastwick

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Oct102016

Nevermore

It’s a beautiful afternoon in the SLC, warm again after a week that seemed to promise an early start to a long, gloomy winter. Even though I know it’ll cool off again by the end of the month, and possibly even snow, today’s conditions represent my ideal October moment: mellow sunshine, no jacket needed, and the trees burnished with golden leaves that have yet to drop. Halloween is coming… and what better way to get in the mood than a visit from a certain black bird? No, not that black bird… this one:

My thanks to Cemetery Dance for scaring up this clip!

Sep082016

Why I Still Love Star Trek, Even After 50 Years

[Ed. Note: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek. A condensed form of this entry also appears as part of a group tribute at Echo Base.]

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan of Star Trek… and by “Star Trek,” I mean the original series, TOS, 1966-69, Shatner and Nimoy, velour shirts and styrofoam rocks, the first and still, as far as I’m concerned, the best of all the myriad Trek-related properties. To my eye, every subsequent iteration since the original has been a mere spin-off, derivative by definition, while the rebooted film series that began in 2009 is nothing more than a caricature…. and not a very good one at that.

The show actually ended three months before I was born, but it continued to air in syndicated re-runs more or less constantly during my childhood and early teens. According to my mother, she liked watching it while she did the household chores and I just soaked it in from my playpen. But while I may have begun as a captive audience, I had become a full-blown convert by the time I reached school age. Consider:

One of the first conversations I remember having with someone of the opposite sex was the time I told a little girl in my kindergarten class all about this cool cat named Spock. (Weirdly enough, we’re still friends…)
Our kitchen floor was covered in ancient linoleum that featured good-sized circles as part of the pattern. I used to stand on those circles, make a buzzing noise, and then run to a different spot of the house or out into the yard where I would freeze and “rematerialize,” as if I was being beamed there by Scotty.
Of course I played with the Mego action figures of the day, as well as various other tie-in toys—I still have ’em all, too!—but my favorite Star Trek toy was a little tin case that held tiny files for cleaning my dad’s acetylene torch. He spotted me one day flipping the case open and shut while saying, “Kirk to Enterprise,” so he took the cleaners out and gave me the case. I carried it in my back pocket for years, even after I’d outgrown pretending to “call my ship.”
On Saturday mornings, I’d prepare to watch the cartoon adventures of the Enterprise crew—voiced by the original live-action cast, so it felt like “real” Star Trek to me—by setting up Lego bricks on a TV tray to create my own “helm console,” which I “operated” all during the show.
My bedroom walls were plastered with Star Trek posters — this was one of them — from elementary school until well after I started developing, ahem, other interests.
And I fueled my young imagination by reading and re-reading the novelizations by James Blish and the utterly insane comic book series published by Gold Key. The characters and even the Enterprise were all off-model, the stories often felt like they came from some other series altogether, but in those days, we took whatever Star Trek we could get, and we liked it!

This was all during the early ’70s. My focus changed a bit with the coming of that other well-known space franchise in 1977, and Star Trek itself changed a lot when the crew made the leap to the big screen in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and then again in 1987 when The Next Generation turned the whole thing into a franchise. I loved those, too, and a lot of other sci-fi and fantasy properties as well. But my first love, the touchstone that I have returned to again and again throughout my life, has always been TOS.

When I was a kid, I was simply drawn to the action, the bright color scheme and occasionally wacky cinematography, the swashbuckling characters, and the eerie atmosphere. (In terms of tone, TOS has a lot more in common with The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits than it does with the Treks that followed; space used to be weird and kind of scary. None of the other iterations of Star Trek has gotten that quite right, which is a shame.) But as I grew older, I came to realize how much Star Trek had shaped my personal morality, as well as my understanding of human nature and what we ought to be striving for. Not some perfect utopia where there is no interpersonal conflict and humanity is free to smugly muse about what animals we used to be back in the bad old days of the 20th century (cough-TNG-cough), but rather a better society than the one we have now, in which human beings are as flawed and fragile as ever, but they’re at least trying to improve. And more importantly, they have the potential to improve, and in fact are improving.

I’m not in denial about the fact that Star Trek is a 50-year-old TV show with all the dated production values that suggests. I know that most people today, especially younger people, look at an episode like “Arena” and see only a guy in a primitive rubber suit with a zipper up the back. I see that too, and I’m not incapable of chuckling about it (in a laughing-with-them-not-at-them kind of way, of course). But I also see much more than that. I see an immensely optimistic parable in which Captain Kirk, cast in the role of an Everyman representing all of humanity, comes right up to the brink of killing a defeated opponent… and then stops himself. He realizes “the other,” the bad guy, had his reasons, too, for doing what he did… that in someone else’s story, the reptilian Gorn is the hero. And in that moment, Kirk makes the conscious, enlightened choice to spare his enemy. To rise above his own reptilian-brained nature. And in so doing, creates an opportunity for a more peaceful future instead of merely “winning.”

Star Trek, the original, true Star Trek, wasn’t what people today think it was. It wasn’t all “Fire phasers!” and stuff-blows-up and nookie with the green woman of the week. And it irritates the hell out of me that the show has been largely reduced to that in the public consciousness (as evidenced by those reboot movies I mentioned, which superficially resemble TOS but miss the deeper philosophies of the original). If I had to choose an episode that best exemplifies to me what Star Trek was really all about, “Arena” is a good one. A better example is called “Devil in the Dark.” In this one, miners living deep underground on an alien world find themselves being stalked and murdered by some kind of creature that burrows through solid rock and burns its victims to a crisp. Unable to defend themselves from this threat, the miners call for help, and the Enterprise responds. In the course of hunting for the creature, Kirk finds himself alone, face to face with the completely inhuman thing. His instincts — and his orders — are to kill it on sight, but his intellect tells him there’s something more going on than it appears. So he has Spock make telepathic contact with the beast… and learns that it isn’t some mindlessly evil killer; it’s intelligent and sensitive, but desperate, a mother who’s been protecting a horde of eggs that the miners, in their ignorance, have been destroying. With that epiphany, negotiations are made, and in the end, both species learn to coexist, to each other’s mutual benefit. In a nutshell, that is Star Trek… a classic monster-of-the-week set-up that subverts your expectations and ends on a positive note about empathy, diversity, acceptance, and finding a way other than killing… when you can. The monster costume may be cheesy, the dialog might be melodramatic, but these things don’t matter to me so much as the message of the story.

That message, indeed all the messages found in this old television show about exploring the human condition through stories about exploring space, are as relevant and as necessary to hear now in the awful 2000s as they were in the turbulent 1960s. When the headlines are filled with human beings behaving at their very worst, their most selfish, their most barbaric, or their most ignorant, I cling to what Star Trek taught me: that society and people in general not only can but will get better. That’s powerful stuff, and it’s a rarity on today’s pop-cultural landscape, which tends to be dominated by grimly nihilistic “realism” that may make for fine drama, but is ultimately — to me — depressing and enervating.

Star Trek isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia for me; it’s my gospel. It gives me hope when I need it the most.

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Aug162016

Just for Fun…

Many years ago… before the dark times… before the Special Editions… my lovely lady Anne and I attended an all-night marathon screening of the original Star Wars trilogy. I made it through the first two films without too much difficulty, but I found myself fading by the time Return of the Jedi got under way. Not surprising, as it must’ve been going on 4 AM by that time, and even my awesome levels of nerdish enthusiasm weren’t enough to keep me going around the clock. I very clearly remember seeing the rebel star fleet, led by Lando Calrissian aboard the Millennium Falcon, going to lightspeed… and then opening my eyes again just as the fleet came out of lightspeed. I’d dropped off and missed all of the mucking about with the Ewoks on Endor, probably a half-hour or so of the film. I laughed for a long time about that…

(My affection and/or tolerance for the Ewoks has waxed and waned over the years, and at the time I was in a low point toward them. These days, I’m not quite so down on them as I was then; besides, I’d also missed the speeder bikes during my nap, and that could never be anything but a shame.)

Anyhow, I just ran across a video clip that edits the film’s climatic space battle together pretty much exactly how I remember it from that screening. Enjoy!

Aug092016

“Treat Them Too”

I’ve now lived long enough to see just about everything that ever meant anything to me, pop-culturally speaking, get hollowed out, recycled, subverted, and/or exploited by cynical beings who make their money by feeding off a generation’s nostalgia, like one of those emotional-parasite energy creatures that occasionally turned up on the old Star Trek series. And yes, I am kinda bitter about the whole deal. You may have noticed.

But every once in awhile, one of these exercises in crass commercialism comes along that is so disarmingly silly, and so affectionate toward the material it’s aping, that even I can’t help but smile at it. Case in point: a new advertisement that perfectly recreates the look of a music video circa 1985, from the film-noir-inspired lighting and shadows to the editing montages, garish fashions, and cheapo compositing effects. Everything about this feels authentic, right down to the occasional VCR tracking glitch. But there’s one important difference between this and an actual vintage MTV clip… in this video, the band is composed of cats.

Such an obvious mashup of the two most enormous forces on the Internet — nostalgia and funny cat videos — could easily have come across as being too calculated and crashed under its own weight. Execution is everything, though, and this piece is, in my humble opinion, pure marketing genius. If I must be sold cat treats using a parody of one of my all-time favorite songs, well, this is the way you do it.

I understand there’s also a 30-second broadcast version, so I imagine we’ll be seeing “The Electric Furs” on our TVs very soon…

Aug012016

A New Book That Is Relevant to My Interests

Confession time: I’ve long had this odd little fascination for… brothels.

Oh, stop! I don’t mean it like that. My interest is purely academic. Well… mostly academic. When you grow up in strait-laced Utah, you can’t help but feel some attraction to the seedier side of things, especially when the notorious flesh-pots of Nevada are only a few hours away. (The Mustang Ranch outside of Reno had a near-legendary quality among my peers when I was in my early twenties; I remember much discussion of taking a little road trip… of course, it never happened, but the idea occupied a large patch of real-estate in our imaginations for a time.)

Seriously, though, youthful rebelliousness and licentiousness aside, I really am interested in the history and sociology of the whole phenomenon, especially in the context of how puritanical American culture tends to be, generally speaking. Basically, there are certain underground economies that flaunt traditional morality and that flourish in spite of — or maybe because of? — the country’s surface-level propriety, and these never really go away despite periodic attempts to stamp them out. I’m intrigued by that dichotomy, and by the hypocrisy of a society that’s unwilling to legitimize these economies even while so many individual Americans privately embrace them. So naturally a new book by Jayme Lynn Blaschke called Inside the Texas Chicken Ranch, which is just out today, has been on my radar for some time.

The Chicken Ranch (I don’t know why these places are always “ranches,” but that’s the way of things) is probably the best-known brothel in America, thanks to its being immortalized in the stage musical and Dolly Parton/Burt Reynolds film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, as well as that staple of classic-rock radio, ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” Jayme himself is a native of the La Grange area who grew up hearing tales of the infamous “home on the range,” and spent years researching the real story behind the legend, followed by further years trying to find a publisher for his book. I’m really delighted for him that he’s finally succeeded. Here’s the book’s official promo:

As I said, Inside the Chicken Ranch is on the market as of today, available from all the usual outlets, including Amazon and direct from the publisher. Congratulations, Jayme, I can’t wait to read it!

Jul282016

In Memoriam: Jerry Doyle

Back in the mid-90s, just after I finished with college and was still struggling with the question of what I was supposed to do with my life, I spent a lot more time watching syndicated TV than I probably should have. Most of it was disposable junk that’s thankfully faded into the mists of my increasingly fuzzy memories. But there was, amidst all the low-budget, filmed-in-Vancouver cop shows, a couple series that stood out for me. Highlander was one. Another was a science-fiction epic set on a space station, a sort of intergalactic crossroads, a freeport where species of all descriptions could mingle, trade, and intrigue in relative peace, even as ancient cosmic powers manipulated events toward a war that would engulf them all.

No, I’m not talking about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, although you’re forgiven for thinking so, considering the similarities between the two. I refer instead to Babylon 5, a show that always stood in the shadows of its higher-profile rival, much to the frustration of B5’s hardcore fans.

For the record, I wasn’t one of those people. Oh, I liked the show, as I already mentioned, and I remember thinking the parallels with DS9 were mighty fishy. (A full recounting of that is beyond the scope of this post, but briefly, there’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that the suits at Paramount ripped off B5’s creator, J. Michael Straczynski, who was shopping his concept around well before DS9 was ever thought of.) But I was, at best, a casual fan of B5. I didn’t watch faithfully every week. I watched it pretty often, though, often enough that when I recently sat down to view the series’ entire run, I found I remembered the overall story arc a lot better than I thought I would.

And I watched often enough that this morning’s news about the death of one of the show’s stars, Jerry Doyle, has hit me like a punch in the gut.

Doyle played Security Chief Michael Garibaldi, probably my favorite character among the large ensemble cast. Depicted as a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, Garibaldi loved Daffy Duck cartoons, formed unlikely friendships with alien diplomats, and once rebuilt an antique motorcycle and rode it up and down the corridors of the station (a 23rd century O’Neill cylinder). In a show populated by flawed human beings (and aliens with a lot of human flaws), Garibaldi was perhaps the most flawed of them all; he struggled with a failed marriage, booze, conflicted loyalties, and PTSD. And that was before an evil telepath messed around with his mind. And yet, he was a hero in the same quiet, stolid way that so many ordinary people are heroes: because he just kept getting up and going to work in the morning. A lot of viewers related to that; I know I did, during those aimless years when I was working the wrong jobs and trying to figure out where exactly everything had gone wrong for me.

In the years after Babylon 5, Jerry Doyle became the host of a talk-radio program that bore his name. His politics were… not mine. And yet every account of personal encounters with the man that I’ve seen today suggests it would’ve been a bigger problem for me than for him. On social media, his B5 castmates are expressing shock, grief, and far deeper pain than you might expect someone to feel for a man they briefly worked with 20 years ago. That says a lot, I think. And it suggests that an awful lot of Garibaldi’s character was in fact Doyle’s character too.

I never had the chance to meet Jerry Doyle at a convention, and I regret that. He was only 60 years old.

One final thought: I don’t know what it is about Babylon 5, but the show seems to be suffering from an unusually high rate of attrition. Doyle is the fifth member of the principal cast to pass away in recent years, following Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin), Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar), Michael O’Hare (Commander Sinclair), and Jeff Conaway (Zack Allan). Granted, the show is 20 years old, but that’s not really all that long…

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Jul202016

Forty-Seven Years Ago Today…

Somebody tell me again why this isn’t a national holiday?

Oh yeah, because nobody cares about history, or because it’s too depressing to think about how we haven’t gone back in nearly half a century, or because too many people don’t believe we went at all and think it was all a lie perpetrated by Stanley Kubrick and the CIA. (Bullshit. Anyone who honestly thinks that… well, let’s just say I find your cynicism utterly baffling.)

And so it goes…

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Jul082016

“The Mindless Menace of Violence in America”

On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet, Senator Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of the late John F. Kennedy and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in that year’s election, delivered a speech at the City Club of Cleveland. The night before, he’d given a beautiful, heartfelt, improvised statement about Dr. King’s death that is sometimes credited with helping to keep the peace in Indiananopolis, even as some 60 other American cities were wracked by riots. With his Cleveland speech, he expanded on the themes he’d spoken of the night before.

How sad that every single word he said is still perfectly applicable on this day, July 8, 2016… the morning after five police officers were killed by snipers at a peaceful protest against the police killings of two black men earlier this week… only a month after the 48th anniversary of RFK’s own death by an assassin’s bullet.

I remain stubbornly convinced that humanity will evolve — is evolving — beyond our savage nature, just as I learned from all those musty old Star Trek re-runs when I was a kid. But goddamn, the road is long. And it’s so very hard to be patient.

The words of Robert F. Kennedy:

[This is a time of shame] and a time of sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity — my only event of today — to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It’s not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one — no matter where he lives or what he does — can be certain whom next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily — whether it is done in the name of the law or in defiance of the law, by one man or by a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence — whenever we tear at the fabric of our lives which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children — whenever we do this, then the whole nation is degraded. “Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and we call it entertainment. We make it easier for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition that they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force. Too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of other human beings. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of rioting, and inciting riots, have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats; others look for conspiracies. But this much is clear: violence breeds violence; repression breeds retaliation; and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions — indifference, inaction, and decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books, and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man amongst other men.

And this too afflicts us all. For when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies — to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and to be mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as alien, alien men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in a common effort. We learn to share only a common fear — only a common desire to retreat from each other — only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.

For all this there are no final answers for those of us who are American citizens. Yet we know what we must do, and that is to achieve true justice among all of our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions, the false distinctions among men, and learn to find our own advancement in search for the advancement of all. We must admit to ourselves that our children’s future cannot be built on the misfortune of another’s. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or by revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great, to let this spirit flourish any longer in this land of ours. Of course we cannot banish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember — if only for a time — that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life, that they seek — as do we — nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment that they can.

Surely this bond of common fate, surely this bond of common goals, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at the least, to look around at those of us, of our fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Tennyson wrote in Ulysses:

…that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Thank you, very much.

Jun172016

Friday Evening Videos: “Turning Japanese” (Kisten Dunst edition)

I wasn’t going to post a music video this week because… well, what would be the point, you know? It’s been a hell of a week, with the tragic Pulse nightclub shootings followed by the same damn gun-control debate we have every time there’s a mass shooting — and isn’t that a pathetic horror story in itself, that these things are so bloody commonplace the after-argument has become boring? — and that poor little kid getting hauled off by an alligator, and all the political bullshit and the generally toxic atmosphere that prevails on social media these days. I’ve been struggling lately anyhow with that recurring feeling of ennui I get every so often, like I’m running in place, constantly active but never really getting anywhere. I’m tired, in a way that’s difficult to explain. Not just physical fatigue, but something inside… emotional, spiritual, I don’t know. And then you add in all that other stuff… Under those conditions, why bother with my stupid little music-video thing? It’s not like anyone really cares, right?

But then a friend posted something today on my Facebook wall, and it’s so silly and charming and sexy and dorky and just plain weird that I couldn’t help but smile, in spite of all the gunge I’ve been feeling. And I think I really need to pass it along, because maybe it’ll do the same for someone else out there who also needs a little sexy silly weirdness after this long, long week…

Yes, that is the actress Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig flouncing around Tokyo’s famously nerdy Akihabara district while singing a an old chestnut from the Awesome ’80s. If this clip seems familiar to my three Loyal Readers, it’s likely because I’ve posted it before, about six years ago. Here’s what I wrote about it back then:

I’ve found in my online wanderings that Kirsten is something of a binary proposition: people seem to either really like her or they really do not. Her detractors tend to become especially fixated on her uneven teeth, for some reason. Personally, I think she’s adorable, teeth and all. Not conventionally pretty, perhaps, but she’s got something that works for me. I especially like that sultry eyebrow-lifting thing she does sometimes — you can see it in this video at about the 2:37 mark. Is that TMI? Probably… [The video I posted six years ago — which is now dead — must’ve had slightly different timing, because there is no eyebrow thing at 2:37 in this version. Alas.]

Anyhow, as you saw in the opening title card, this video was directed by McG, the guy responsible for [Terminator: Salvation] as well as those two Charlie’s Angels movies a few years ago; the producer, Takashi Murakami, is a Japanese artist who works in a variety of media. My understanding is that the video was played on an endless loop at the entrance to Murakami’s recent “Pop Life” exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. [My understanding was correct. Details about this project and the art exhibition here.]

Now, you may wonder what the heck a mid-list starlet in a blue wig singing a 30-year-old one-hit-wonder has to do with an art exhibition. I’ve read that it supposedly articulates the cliche’d Japan of Western imagination, i.e., Murakami’s notion of Anglo-American stereotypes about his native country’s pop culture. Or some damn thing. The really important point is that it gives us an excuse to see Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig and a really short skirt singing one of the most terminally catchy tunes of the ’80s, The Vapors’ “Turning Japanese.” Which is really not about masturbation, as the old urban legend we all heard in middle school claimed. At least, The Vapors say it’s not about that, and they oughta know, right?

Damn, she’s got long legs… and there’s that eyebrow thing again…

I still think she’s adorable. And I’d like to go to Japan. For whatever those two factoids are worth…

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Friday Evening Videos: “Turning Japanese” (Kisten Dunst edition)

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