Aug172015

A Little Reassurance

I recently finished reading Andy Weir‘s The Martian for a second time. Well, to be more precise, I finished it reading it aloud to my lovely Anne, who’d been listening to me rave about how good it is for weeks and finally asked me to read it to her as a bedtime story. (She just had PRK eye surgery, you see, and couldn’t read very well herself for the first little while, and… oh, hell, it’s a thing we do sometimes, okay? I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars to her last year… maybe one of these days, I’ll even do one that has nothing to do with Mars!)

Anyhow, the book is still effective even knowing what’s going to happen, and my thoughts on it remain mostly unchanged from my first experience with it. It’s a fantastic survival story and a real page-turner, populated by characters you genuinely like and care about, and I’m certain the movie version is going to kick all kinds of ass, too. But I realized on this go-round that there’s a broad steak of humanism flowing beneath all the surface-level technology and science and adventure, and I think that’s probably a big factor in why I like this novel so much. This is a book that likes people. There’s one passage in particular, from the very end (literally, it’s on the last page), that I found deeply moving and continue to think about even now, weeks after I last closed the cover. It’s especially been on my mind the past few days.

Last week wasn’t one of my better ones. I’ve entered another of those periodic cycles at work when it feels like I’m being ground into a very fine powder between two large, slow-moving stone wheels. One of those cycles when the workflow never slackens and my day ends up being nothing but proofreading and commuting. And then Friday morning, I found myself having one of those debates over minutiae that nobody seems to care about but me, debates that always end with me using words like “asinine” and making the Sideshow Bob mumblety-growl. (In other words, these are debates I lose, due to having very little actual authority in the scheme of things.) And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the Internet last week was thoroughly depressing as well. I came home Friday night feeling about as hollowed out and used up and fed up as I think anybody could. Between getting mowed down at work and the media’s obsession with that obnoxious blowhard Donald fracking Trump and his deliberately inflammatory bullshit statements, I was about ready to walk off into the woods and just forget the whole damn thing we laughingly call civilization because we’ve obviously hit peak asshole and there’s no where to go from here except into the recycle bin.

But then I remembered that passage from The Martian… and I’ll be darned if it didn’t actually lift my spirits. Because I believe those words, or at least I want to. And maybe that’s enough to hold a civilization — or even an individual — together… that desire to believe in something good.

I can’t imagine anyone not knowing how this book ends, how it has to end, but just in case anyone is concerned about spoilers, I’m going to post the passage I’m discussing below the fold:

Aug122015

TV Title Sequences: High Tide

My childhood guitar hero Rick Springfield (a.k.a. “my main man”) has been a busy guy lately. His memoir Late, Late at Night and his debut novel Magnificent Vibrations were both well reviewed and commercially successful; his collection of acoustic recordings, Stripped Down, was released in February and was pretty awesome; he’s also got an album of new material due later this year; and he’s currently on tour with two other classic acts of the 1980s, Loverboy and The Romantics, which I imagine would be an absolute blast of a concert. (Sadly, they’re not coming anywhere near Salt Lake City; well, they’re playing Vegas, which isn’t that far away, but the stars aren’t going to line up for me to go to this one.) And, oh yeah, if you haven’t heard, he’s co-starring alongside somebody named Meryl Streep in a new movie that opened last weekend. I saw it Saturday night and thought it was great; hopefully, I’ll find some time in the next couple days to write a review.

Ricki and the Flash is Rick’s first feature-film appearance since his somewhat, ahem, notorious 1984 big-screen debut, Hard to Hold, a movie I personally maintain doesn’t suck nearly as much as you’ve probably heard, but certainly isn’t anybody’s idea of a career highlight. (If nothing else, the film had a great soundtrack, which gave Rick two more hit singles for his discography. And of course there was that brief nude scene that’s provided him with years of between-song banter for his live concert appearances…) But while three decades have passed since we last saw him in a cinema, you can’t accuse him of being camera-shy during that time. During the ’90s, he starred in a string of TV movies, including the pilot for what became (with a different actor in the lead) the cult favorite vampire-cop series Forever Knight; he’s reprised his signature role of Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital several times; he’s taken a cue from William Shatner and appeared as a warped version of himself in the David Duchovny vehicle Californication; he did a funny and nicely self-deprecating episode of the sitcom Hot in Cleveland; and just recently he earned good reviews for his work on season two of True Detective (evidently, Rick’s work was the best thing about this season).

And then there was the series High Tide

What’s that? You’ve never heard of High Tide? Well, to be honest, neither had I until I ran across a mention of it a few days ago in a pre-Ricki and the Flash interview focusing on Rick’s acting work. I haven’t been able to find out too much about it, either, only that it ran for three seasons between 1994 and 1997; it was filmed on location in New Zealand; and it was about two surf-bum brothers who pay the bills with occasional private-investigator gigs. I’m assuming the series was syndicated, since this opening credit sequence from the first season looks like a blend of Baywatch and Lorenzo Lamas’ Renegade, with all the bikini babes, bright colors, awkward fight choreography, and eyepoppingly tacky clothes that entails:

Looks pretty awful, I know… but I have to confess, I kind of miss this sort of thing. The mid-90s syndicated actioners were crap, but they were reliably entertaining crap, and I used to watch a lot of them. Looking back at them now, they have a simplicity and, yes, even a sort of naive innocence that is sorely lacking in today’s grim-n-gritty pop cultural landscape. And they also prove a theory of mine, which is that decades aren’t as strictly compartmentalized as we tend to want to imagine them. The early ’80s looked a heckuva lot like the ’70s, for instance. And while this series may have been made in the ’90s, “two surf-bum brothers who work as PIs” is about as 1980s a premise as I’ve ever heard!

Needless to say, this series does not exist on officially sanctioned DVDs, but I think I’m going to do some poking around and see if I can find it somewhere. Because, awful or not, I really want to watch this… I have a feeling it’ll make me feel either young again or really damn old.

God help me.

Aug072015

Friday Evening Videos: “Better Be Good to Me”

When I was 15, I developed a mild obsession with the song featured in this week’s video; I recall a period of a several weeks when I listened to it every single morning as I got ready for school, doing the classic lip-sync-into-a-hairbrush routine. (The fact that I was ‘syncing a female vocalist didn’t matter in the slightest to me.)

“Better Be Good to Me” was the fourth single from Private Dancer, Tina Turner’s enormously successful album released in the epochal year 1984. With a tough, street-smart attitude underlying a polished pop-rock sound, the album was widely seen as Tina’s big professional comeback some eight years after the demise of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Songs like “I Might Have Been Queen,” “Show Some Respect,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “Steel Claw,” and the title track also led to Private Dancer being read as an ode to female empowerment, as well as Tina’s personal declaration of emancipation from Ike himself (even though their divorce was finalized in 1978).

Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time, or would have cared if I had been. All I knew was that the slinky, sexy voice of that woman with the million-dollar legs and wild hair did good things to me when it hit my ear canals. “Better Be Good” — which, honestly, I’ve always thought was a better song than Private Dancer‘s (and Tina Turner’s) biggest hit, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — especially appealed to me. I don’t have any particular reason for liking it, no association with an event or place or anything like that. I just like the song’s sonic profile: the slow, mysterious intro, the confident middle portion that rises to a big dramatic climax… it’s just cool.

I’ve owned Private Dancer in several different formats over the years, and I still listen to it fairly often, although apparently not recently, because it gave me a bit of a start, followed by a big smile, to hear “Better Be Good” this morning as I crossed the plaza below my office building on the way into work. I’ve been humming it all day.

I don’t recall ever seeing the video before this afternoon; it’s not anything remarkable, but it is representative of the era, and Tina looks damn fine in her leather ensemble:

Incidentally, the blond guy who comes out on stage toward the end is Cy Curnin, the lead singer of the band The Fixx, which scored a pretty massive hit of their own a year earlier with the song “One Thing Leads to Another.” He and The Fixx’s guitarist Jamie West-Oram (also seen in this video) performed on the Private Dancer album, a little factoid that probably would’ve blown my mind when I was 15 and insisting that the lines between rock and New Wave were very clear and impermeable… eh, what did I know?

Hope your weekend will be good to you, folks…

Aug052015

I’m Not Dead

In case anyone was wondering, based on the mountain of tumbleweeds that’s gathered in this space.

Blame the usual suspects: The assembly line at work has been running at double-speed, my summertime calendar is always overly crowded, my commute sucks, I have too little free time (or at least too little energy to put that time to use in a productive way)… you’ve heard it all before. And it’s all true. But lately I’ve been wondering if the real problem isn’t something more… internal. I’m worried that I’ve… lost my mojo.

I know, I know… you just heard that phrase in Austin Powers’ voice and you probably couldn’t help but chuckle. But I’m serious here. I don’t know how else to describe what’s going on lately. I’ve got something like 20 unfinished entries saved in my Drafts folder from this calendar year alone, but I can’t seem to summon the motivation to finish any of them, even the ones on topics that have been recurring hobbyhorses over the years, things I ought to be passionate about.

I don’t know. Maybe this blog has run its course and it’s time to find something else to do. Something else to write. Blogging in general isn’t what it used to be, and I sometimes wonder if I’ve overstayed my welcome. This has been such a rewarding activity for me over the years, a platform from which to share the things that excite me and sadden me, to gripe about the nonsense that frustrates me and the injustices that enrage me… but I’m really struggling with it right now. I feel like Simple Tricks hasn’t ever really come back to life since that long, unplanned hiatus in 2013, and I fight with a tremendous sense of futility every time I open up the dashboard and stare at the empty white space with its monstrous blinking cursor. I start to think about all the other things I could be doing, and probably ought to be doing, and suddenly I find myself quite unable to string three words together. I’ve self-identified as a writer for over 30 years now, since the bloody tenth grade, but these days… I feel like I don’t know how to do it anymore. And I can’t tell you how frustrating — how frightening — that is. It’s not hyperbole to compare it to impotence. Seriously. It’s exactly that same kind of sucker punch to the very core of one’s self-image and self-esteem, with all the horror and humiliation that goes along with it.

Yes, that’s it exactly. I feel like I can’t get it up for blogging anymore.

This isn’t a farewell announcement, by the way. I’m not shutting the place down, not yet. But I am wondering what I’ve got to do to reinvigorate this whole project… or if it’s worth the effort. A number of people of said to me lately that I ought to be using my talent to write a novel. Has this blog been preventing me from doing that? Maybe that’s why I’m having such a difficult time working on this: because somewhere deep inside, I feel like it’s a distraction from my “real” writing. Again, I don’t know… just thinking out loud, I guess.

Jul282015

Yakety Max

As my Loyal Readers no doubt recall, I wasn’t overly keen on Mad Max Fury Road, a position that put me at odds with many friends as well as much of the Internet in general. My biggest issue with the film — aside from my utter boredom with Tom Hardy in the title role — was that I found it too over the top compared to the (relative) plausibility of the original Max films starring Mel Gibson.

However, every film buff knows that music has a tremendous influence over how an audience responds to the images on the screen. The marriage of the visual with the proper musical selection can raise a lump in your throat, coax the tears from your eyes, chill you to your core, or lift your heart all the way to heaven. A good film score can make the mundane soar… or the outrageous seem entirely natural. For example, witness how much better Fury Road would’ve worked with a, ahem, somewhat different soundtrack:

Tip of the chrome-studded leather hat to HeavyMetal.com… yes, that Heavy Metal, or at least the magazine it was based on, now living online like all the other detritus from my misspent youth…

Jul202015

46th Anniversary

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

I still think this day ought to be a national holiday.

Jul132015

Another Time, Another World

Live Aid has been called my generation’s Woodstock — Joan Baez herself made the comparison when she took the stage in Philadelphia to kick off the U.S. half of the show — but I wonder if the globe-spanning charity concert really had that same level of cultural impact. I suspect the name “Woodstock” would still mean something to kids today, two generations removed from that epochal event, but would those same kids recognize the words “Live Aid?” I just don’t know. As big a deal as it was at the time, I haven’t heard much about it in the intervening years, at least not until today, its 30th anniversary.

Ah, but thirty years ago today, I was fifteen years old, and Live Aid was just about the coolest thing that I’d ever seen, aside from Star Wars and the space shuttle: a day-long concert taking place simultaneously in two separate venues on two different continents, broadcast live on multiple television networks to a globe-spanning audience of over a billion people, all in the name of charity. I didn’t watch all sixteen hours of it, of course. As I recall, the TV was on all day while I was in and out of the room, going about my lazy summertime routines, and I would stop from time to time when one act or another caught my attention. But even though I wasn’t giving it my full attention, just having the event playing in the background made me feel as if I were… connected… a participant in something of tremendous significance, something bigger than myself. I was a witness to history. Or so it seemed at the time. It could that I was just a 15-year-old music fan who was blown away by the line-up of stars marching across the stages in London and Philadelphia. You can see some of them in the poster above, although that’s not a comprehensive listing. Basically, anyone who was anyone was there, either at Wembley or JFK Stadium.

My main man Rick Springfield, for example:

And then there was Phil Collins, who appeared on both stages, thanks to a supersonic hop across the pond aboard the late, lamented Concorde:

Yes, the ’80s were a very different time, and a lot more things seemed possible then. Even a Led Zeppelin reunion, probably the highlight of the whole day for me:

The mighty Zep had disbanded only five years before Live Aid, but this reunion performance nevertheless felt like something that had been a long time coming, as if the gods of legend had returned briefly from Olympus long enough to remind we puny mortals that the Earth had once been theirs, before vanishing again into realms beyond our ken. The fact that their performance was widely panned by the critics, and even by the surviving band members themselves (who refused to allow its inclusion in the official DVD set released a while back because they’re embarrassed by it), didn’t change the momentous atmosphere that surrounded it.

And that, I suppose, is a handy metaphor for the entire event. Looking back at Live Aid across a chasm of thirty years, I honestly have no idea whether it ultimately mattered, or did anything to help the people it was supposed to help. But at the time, we believed it would help. We really did, all of us who watched. And that was what made Live Aid such a big deal. That simple, naive faith that the world could be united by music to do something good felt… momentous. Sadly, though, it was fleeting. I can’t imagine a similar event happening today, for a lot of different reasons, but mostly because people just don’t have the right attitudes anymore. It’s not that we no longer feel compassion, but rather because, as a society, we just don’t have the same optimism we did then. About anything. So in that regard, I guess I really was a part of a historic event… or at least, of history. Because while it’s difficult to believe 30 years have passed, that optimistic world of 1985 seems as remote to me now as the one where men wore powdered wigs and velvet breeches.

Oh, wait. They did that in the 1980s, didn’t they? Some of them, anyhow. Well, you know what I mean…

Jul092015

Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t generally enjoy so-called “hard” science fiction, i.e., that subcategory of SF that insists upon scientific accuracy and devotes a lot of time to talking about it. Not that I’m not interested in science, of course. But when it comes to fiction, I’m more of a “warp-drive-and-ray-guns” kind of guy. So I consider it quite a noteworthy accomplishment that Andy Weir’s debut novel, The Martian, not only makes descriptions of chemical processes and engineering problems integral to the plot, but downright gripping as well. Weir accomplishes this by telling the story mostly through the first-person voice of Mark Watney, an astronaut who’s been left behind on Mars after an accident that results in his crew mistakenly believing him to be dead. Watney’s a smart guy, but he’s also an incredible smart-ass, and his frequent wisecracks, childish vulgarity, and gallows humor leavens the logical puzzles he needs to work out in order to survive in a place that is utterly inhospitable to life.

This is an incredible adventure tale that reads like a dramatization of real events. But it’s also a richly human story that evokes the fear, wonder, loneliness, courage, nobility, and above all the danger of manned space exploration. And it’s frequently a very funny book as well… I literally laughed out loud a number of times while reading it. (I was especially amused by the running gag involving disco music.) The time setting is somewhat indeterminate — the book never specifies what year it takes place in, but it must be sometime relatively soon, because an important plot point involves the expertise of people who were operating Mars probes in the 1990s, and of course there is the enduring appeal of 1970s pop culture. Also, none of the technology described is terribly futuristic, all of which contributes to a sense that it could be happening right now. Indeed, the descriptions of how a Mars mission could actually, logistically, take place are so convincing that I don’t know why NASA isn’t already doing it as I type this. (Okay, I do know; my point is, the book is eminently plausible.)

Beyond the “gee whiz” factor and old-fashioned NASA can-do spirit, however, the thing that keeps you turning the pages at a breathless pace is Mark Watney himself. His victories and setbacks and the final, last-ditch, edge-of-your-seat attempt at a rescue mission are the stuff of an instant classic. And no doubt this story is going to make a great movie, too; it’s already in the can and coming soon to a theater near you, starring Matt Damon as Watney… a perfect choice, in my opinion…

View all my reviews

Jun272015

This Will Be a Day Long Remembered

I’ve been trying to think all day of what I can say about this morning’s historic Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalizes same-sex marriage across the nation, and frankly… I’ve got nothing. At least nothing that others haven’t already said, and probably said better than I would anyhow.

I know there are many people who are unhappy about the verdict. Many people I consider friends are among them, and maybe a few of them actually made it past the photo at the top of the entry and are reading these words. To you, my religious conservative friends, all I can say is that I understand your bewilderment, your frustration, and your anger… and I’m sorry you’ve had such a shitty day. Sincerely, I am. I’ve been there too with issues I care deeply about that haven’t gone the way I hoped. But I know in my heart and in my mind that history will view this as a good decision, and a good day. A day that reaffirmed the first and most basic tenet behind the founding of this nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

What is more central to the pursuit of happiness than the freedom to marry the person with whom you want to build a life, and to have that union recognized by the same laws that validate and protect any other person’s union? That’s what this whole issue is and always has been about… not forcing churches to perform ceremonies they don’t approve of, but to ensure that everyone enjoys the same privileges and protections under the law, no matter whom they love.

People who say this country is going to hell in a hand-basket are wrong. This country just took a big step toward fulfilling the promise of what it’s supposed to be.

Jun232015

Review: Star Trek: Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay

Star Trek: Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay by Harlan Ellison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is widely regarded as one of the best — if not the best — episode of the original Star Trek series. But as every Trekkie worth his replicator credits knows, the version that got filmed was substantially different from the teleplay that science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison turned in. The notoriously prickly Ellison didn’t take too kindly to being rewritten, and he’s griped for years about how Gene Roddenberry screwed him and his story over, and how much better his version was than the one that viewers saw. Now his original teleplay has been brought to life in a form that gives us an idea of how it might have looked on the small screen if it’d been made the way Ellison wrote it. This graphic novel adaptation, with scripting by brothers Scott and David Tipton and artwork by J.K. Woodward, is an impressive piece of work. Woodward’s art is particularly noteworthy, a highly realistic painted style that captures the likenesses of actors William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Joan Collins, and Grace Lee Whitney with eerie accuracy. And it’s fascinating to see both the parallels and departures from the more familiar television version of the story. There’s only one problem: I personally don’t think Ellison’s version of the story is better (or even as good as) the revised one.

Oh, his ideas were grander than the revision’s, to be certain. His Guardians of Forever would’ve been much cooler than the “stone donut” the TV producers came up with as a cost-saving substitute, and his story features some poignant moments and themes that arguably shouldn’t have been left out. But Ellison’s teleplay also includes some really hackneyed space pirates, a lot of unnecessary characters (which of course would’ve cost money in the form of additional actors who need to be paid), and some cringe-worthy “far-out” sci-fi jargon that sounds like it came straight out of the rocket-ship movies of the 1950s instead of the more naturalistic style Star Trek was going for in the 1960s.

Also, I was deeply troubled by Ellison’s misunderstanding of the familiar characters. While it was great to see Yeoman Rand do some butt-kicking instead of playing the helpless female she so often was in the TV series, Spock comes across as a condescending, peevish, frankly kind of bitchy antagonist to Kirk. To be fair, Ellison probably wrote this before the series had really nailed down Spock’s characterization, but with the benefit of hindsight, this version of Spock is just flat-out wrong… except in the final scene when he tries to console his heartbroken captain. That scene works beautifully. But in general, Ellison’s teleplay, while entertaining and emotionally effective, feels more like an episode of The Outer Limits (which Ellison also wrote for) than Star Trek. It’s not that it’s bad, because it’s not… it’s very good as a science-fiction story. It’s just not very good Star Trek, if that makes sense.

Still, this graphic novel is well worth checking out for the artwork and the glimpse of what might have been. It includes all the variant covers by Juan Ortiz and Paul Shipper from the single-issue comic run, as well as an afterword that reveals all the “Easter eggs” the writers and artist slipped in. (Watch for an appearance by Ellison himself as “Trooper,” a character I’m deeply ambivalent about, because I don’t think the story needed him — as Ellison has always claimed — but I do like him and his interactions with Kirk.)