butterfly dream

I've been waiting until the flist reactions came in because I was so afraid, given how massive a reboot really was needed, of all the things they might try to 'modernise' TOS. A mad villain with a perpetual deformed grin bent on undermining the Federation was the least of it.

But according to the reviews thus far, it's OK. They did make one huge change, of course, but apparently only to create an alternate timeline. Somewhere, somehow, there still exists an entire planet of people wearing zoot suits led by Vic Tayback. The reason I will probably end up paying good money to see this thing in-theatre is that the creators, judging by their film, seem to believe that too.

That they comprise most of the writing team from Transformers: The Movie surely doesn't hurt. As per that flick, nobody is under the impression that they're recreating the Big Bang - and with Trek, boy the temptation must've been there. Imagine, being handed the keys to one of the great pop-culture franchises - entities -  of the 20th-century and being told have at it. Being known as the people who saved Star Trek. Even I'm sitting here a little awed by the idea, and I have seen the ep where they turned Quark into a woman.

And, y'know, I think they just might have saved it for reals. Because from all reports, as per Transformers, they don't reboot so much as pay loving homage to what worked (like, obviously, Spock) and fix some of the stuff that didn't (like, obviously, the stupid Captain's Dog) and just generally get things back on track. Which is so cool. Because so much of TOS did work, and so much was still to be explored when it ended, and NextGen basically threw it all out in favour of All Hail the Noble Federation Rah Rah Rah.
Now, I loved NextGen for what it was, which at its best was a damn good action-adventure series, and I loved Patrick Stewart especially for forcing past Roddenberry's perfection of the average and making Picard believably noble. Everybody else...well, they hung out on a starship reminiscent of a Comfort Inn lobby for seven years and nobody so much as suggested a repaint. Something always a little off to me about a Trek where the main cast works best as a backdrop/facilitators for the really interesting stuff.

DS9 fixed most of that, and brilliantly in spots, but they had a much different story to tell. Voyager just sputtered along on reputation and technobabble, and Enterprise...best let it lie where it gently collapsed, I suppose.

I cringe a little, whenever I hear anybody going on about Trek's 'vision', and how sacred it is. Because really, very little about TOS was ever coherent in the way Babylon Five or Battlestar Galactica are. Gene Roddenberry had some decent ideas about where humankind was and where we needed to be going, but he also had a space cowboy riding the final frontier with a pretty girl at his side and his fists at the ready. The scripts were intelligent, erudite even, but the execution was sometimes unbearably campy. (Reading the James Blish novelisations - based off first-drafts - well before seeing the eps may give me a sensitivity to that particular phenomenon. Some of the most outre eps were once the most brilliant.)

But the incoherence is precisely why TOS not only worked but became iconic. It had no clear sense of what to be About, so it just went ahead and was about everything - like a certain race of two-legged mammals we all know far too well. Life, the Universe, whatever was on tap that week, Original Trek met it with cockeyed heroism and humour and willingness to throw itself into the philosophical breach. The sheer unbridled humanity of it all has probably never been matched in any dramatic series since.
It was, in short, a celebration of just how screwed up we actually are. The hope lay not in our perfectibility, but in our willingness to try. And at the centre of it all stood a tall, elegant, coolly unimpressed figure able to save us from ourselves whenever needed. Including when we needed to reassure ourselves that we really do matter, which is of course pretty much perpetually. Look! Can't even figure out emotions, the poor sod! Boy, good thing for the galaxy we're out here, huh? Yippy-kay-yay!

OK, yes, I'm one of those annoying Trekkers who can never quite shut up. Short version: There's this new movie. No dog. Lots of Spock. I grok.

OK, I am a trifle peeved about this whole Matt Smith thing. Because there I was, all set to leap into the Doctor Who experience, and I had figured that this impossibly crazy-sexy-cool Eleven everybody kept promising was going to be my jumping-in point, as it were. I would ride onto the TARDIS on a wave of general fun and excitement.

...Yeah. I don't automatically exclude gangly white dudes from coolness, but I do sort of expect them to at least have eyebrows.

Anyway, my enthusiasm for the revival series has been fading for other reasons. After a rigorous grounding course involving close reading of the show's TVTropes page over lunch, I figured it was time to move on to airdates here in Canada. Thusly over to the CBC, and ep synopses...uh, whoa. At the risk of sounding like I've regenerated one too many times myself, this is not the Doctor I remember.

I recall, as a nine-year-old or so, a lovely slice of low-key cheeze that aired on PBS-wannabe TVOntario. So low-key, I half-assumed it was made by TVO. It featured mildly trippy opening music and an amiable bug-eyed guy in a scarf. Note its appearance on this Classic TVOntario Children's Series tribute site; this is my Doctor. He had a robot dog. He did not have angst. Or Die Hard-level S/F/X, for that matter.

This is a recurring issue with me and most serial TV these days; I don't care about the angst, OK? Seriously. Enough with the self-absorbed whingeing. And while we're at it, down also with storylines so insanely convoluted and self-referential that I now hear people on subways planning to spend entire weekends 'catching up' on Lost. "I haven't gotten to it in ages," they say, with that sheepish 'caught me!' air that used to indicate never having read, say, Proust.

So it's pretty clear that not only will I have to sit through acres of the Doctor upset because being distracted by an ingrown toenail or something prevented him from saving a solar system, I'd have to go right back to the beginning ('Episode 1.01: The Doctor Notices a Certain Redness and Swelling') to appreciate it. Count me out.

Thus my new plan: to somehow, somewhere, get my mitts on the old-school Who DVDs I know must exist, and start from the beginning. Tinfoil Daleks forever!

[returns from checking Statcounter re: latest entry, looking slightly dazed]

So I guess I really am pretty much alone in this Bob & Ray obsession, huh? People insist on having exciting and interesting lives instead of hanging off my every post, eh?

Well, OK then. I will deal with this in a manner not unreminiscent of the greats of literature; all will become grist for my creative mill...Hey, it's either this or the youngest Shoesis' ongoing love life, a serial in umpty-squillion parts, tickets on sale now at a vaudeville stage near you. The rest of the family keeps urging me to write it up, claiming that it's my ticket to becoming the next Danielle Steel; unfortunately, I'm not yet convinced that even Steel fans would buy into it.

I could also put together a nice little comic setpiece about how Shoemom and I gave up cable this past spring because we were effectively only paying for a few channels...only for the growing realisation to dawn that those channels had a deep-rooted, integral part in our lives. For instance, it's pretty tough to be home sick and not have TreehouseTV for company. (Seriously...I'm not alone in this, right? When you're feeling exhausted and miserable, the soft cheery hum of preschool cartoonage is perfectly pitched to distract and amuse. Right? C'mon, guys? Bueller?)

There was also the thing where Shoemom got all misty-eyed reminiscing about 'sitting down to a cup of coffee and the Weather Network in the morning' but, anyway, long story short. We've decided to allow ourselves to be lured back by deep discounts, also the sheer ridiculous good nature of the twentysomethings who man the services desk at our local Rogers Communications.
These are the same people who charmed us into switching Net providers in their favour not long ago, and they remain just as smart and - the clincher - realistic about their products. This is such a sure ticket to my heart, the demonstration of concern for my needs as opposed to their bottom line, that I am really, really glad more customer service types haven't twigged to the concept. Shoe Central doesn't have that much space available.

...So the point of all this - no, really, go back and check - actually has its roots in the last post but one, in which I mentioned one of my favourite books...come to think of it, I'd been pondering the concept some while before that, back when I was ranting about fandom as a symptom of overexposure.
 

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So first of all I must mention the loverly little shout-out West of Bathurst creator Kari Maaren was kind enough to award me in return the other day. Given the bit about my being 'a good writer', I will go so far as to add that if she ever does install a forum, I will become a charter member.

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This is going to be a quick post. It's only that I have a strange compulsion to comment on the current TV scene; strange, because  I don't watch any of it, or for that matter have cable in the first place. I do however pass huge banks of posters for it every day to and from, which means they're working, I guess. I am starting to feel what I believe are 'vibes' from 'the buzz'. It's either about the new fall season or drinking all that Sprite at lunch, one of the two.

So...um...Heroes, huh? This Darkness thing, pretty, uh...dark. Yeah. Weeds, heh, a suburban mom selling dope! See, it's funny, 'cause it's so at odds with her fresh, wholesome image! What edgy concept will those whacky sitcom producers come up with next? Maybe a show about a suburban mom who's really a witch, or something!
Or - wait - a hit woman! Yeah, I'm offering that one for free right here. Called...Babes and Bullets, maybe. They could do an episode where she gets so wound up after a morning trapped indoors with a Dora the Explorer DVD that she finally snaps and empties her semiautomatic into the TV set, screaming "Repeat this, you little ___!" Insta-ratings smash, I guarantee it.

(Slightly) more seriously, there's this one Global ad - in the 'BIG' series, if it helps - that features this shot of a really hunky guy looking all ironically dark and brooding, that I wouldn't mind somebody naming him for me so my flippings through People at the grocery checkout can have some real purpose. The poster is captioned 'BIG Trouble'. If it helps.

Then I get on the subway, and because of the unwritten agreement among rush-hour passengers that we are so not making any eye contact we don't get paid for, I end up spending a lot of time staring at an overhead insert showing all the Desperate Housewives, reruns now on Bravo channel.
'Least, I think it's all of them. Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria and a couple blondes on the ends I don't recognise. They're all wearing frankly inexplicable wine-coloured cocktail dresses, and they're all doing their best to look like Women on the Verge. What scares me a bit is that they're succeeding. I thought this was all supposed to be lighthearted parody, but Teri there especially looks like they gave her a strand of pearls for the express purpose of breaking it with her teeth.

Also, Marcia Cross - whom I cannot for the life of me imagine just calling 'Marcia' - it occurs to me, staring at this thing, that I've never seen a pic of her looking straight on at the camera. She's always looking out at me with a knowing smile from under brows set in little arches of irony, with that great glowing Forehead looming over it all.
It could be a nifty little satirical comment on real female desperation in Hollywood - Behold, the Power of Botox! - but I'm pretty sure that's not what she's going for, and instead of being intimidated I start getting uncomfortable, the way you do when you're sitting and you're talking to someone who's standing. "Erm, Marcia Cro...Marcia? You can let your occipital lobes down now. No, please, really."

I know I ought to be updating more often lately, but honestly, even for the (inexplicably) dedicated readers this blog has, there's not much percentage in it that I can see. Life is just sort of puttering along - rather like the weather - here @ Shoe Central. Partly interesting, with a 40% chance of amusing overnight.

I did get my Bob & Ray CDs, but would imagine by now that even the most dedicated readers - say, the top one or two - don't want to sit through another ramble on that subject. Let us just say that I'm having a wonderful time, especially with the ep in which the guys take off on 'modern radio sales techniques' that sound rather alarmingly like, well, modern sales techniques.  ("Hello Dave! My, your hair looks so natural and un-patent-leathery!").