First, one of my favorite Beastie Boys tunes, and one of my all-time favorite videos:
I wasn’t blogging last week when MCA (a/k/a Adam Yauch) passed away, and I don’t think I would have said much about him had I been: The Beastie Boys were never a big influence for me, and despite being a teen in the early 90s, I wasn’t their target demographic. Something about how I didn’t think, at least at the time, that anyone needed to fight, as such, for their right to party. (That and I did, and still do, find a lot of their early stuff to be mired in easy misogyny, but let’s not speak (too) ill of the dead.)
That said, I realized that this would be a perfect time, albeit two years late, to propound on one of my favorite paradoxes involving The Beastie Boys. That being, if they’re around in the Star Trek universe, for young Kirk to be listening to in his step-dad’s car in the latest Trek movie, how can they refer to the fictional Mr. Spock in their song “Intergalactic”? I think the lyric specifically is “like a pinch on the neck from Mr. Spock.”
And the answer actually came to me pretty quickly, because in Star Trek IV, Spock is referred to by name in public and… knocks out some annoying punk, to applause, on a city bus with a pinch on the neck. And then it kind of writes itself. Spock and Kirk and company aren’t aware of it, but “Mr. Spock” becomes a sort of folk hero in San Francisco in the late 80s and 90s, big enough to come to the awareness of MCA, et al., and it’s just the kind of obscure, local, subculturish thing they’d include in one of their songs.
Dumb and unnecessary, but I thought I’d share anyway and let that little bit of geekery stand in for a proper tribute to Yauch.
- I did this thing last night that I do sometimes wherein I go to bed almost as soon as I get home (my wife totally loves me), then get up somewhere between 10 and midnight, then basically take a long nap just before it’s time to get up for the day. For some reason, this completely recharges my batteries. I kind of wish it were something I could do on a really regular basis, but I’m afraid my wife doesn’t love me so much that she’ll let me get out of dinner, helping with homework, and bedtimes (to say the least) every night. And, oh yeah, I’d hate to miss out on my kids growing up or something.
- A bumper sticker I see too much around West Michigan: “Work Harder! Millions on Welfare Depend On You!” I realize that it’s supposed to be a put down of welfare or the poor, but whenever I see it, I think of it as a call to action. “Oh shit, you’re right!” is usually my reaction. I wish we had more of a “we’re in this together” attitude in this country, but if we ever did, we’ve lost it, and I fear what it would take to get it back.
- I could watch this all day, on infinite loop: Takedown. Watch it at least once, you won’t be sorry. (And no, not embedding it here, since it’s a rapidly cycling .gif)
- It turns out 2am is a great time to write, see point one. Also? As it turns out, the sort of music I’m listening to does actually impact how well I get into the mindset of writing in certain genres. Listening to Our Lady Peace’s Healthy in Paranoid Times [iTunes | Amazon] last night on the drive home actually put me in the mood to write cyberpunk. Which is odd, because I never have. But, it put me in that mood anyway.
I want to be excited about Prometheus. I see stills like the one above, and I really want to be excited about Prometheus. But I’m not.
Why?
Because it seems to fit in this movie genre bucket that I dislike. It’s as though movie makers have three of them, when it comes to science fiction with spaceships and other worlds and stuff. One is for Star Wars, one is for Star Trek, and the other is labelled “Survival Horror in Space.” And if you want to make a movie with spaceships, it has to fit in one of those buckets.
Alien? Sunshine? Event Horizon? Survival horror.
Hell, even 2001 is basically a horror movie in space. You have to step down to the B-grade, basically, to get to movies that are Star Wars-style adventures, and then they’re not always very good. Or, really, hardly any good at all. So then we’re left with the likes of Prometheus, which they’re marketing basically as survival horror, and you have Guillermo Del Toro throwing his hands up on one of his projects because Prometheus basically taps the same Lovecraftian horror vein. Which… if there’s one thing I like less than survival horror, it’s Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
And I get it, on some level. There’s been two ways to deal with aliens in science fiction movies, and one is “they’re just like us (no, really, they’re just like us)” of Star Trek/Star Wars, and the other is “they’re unspeakably different, no common ground, we’re hamburger to them” of the survival horror science fiction. (And by this I mean the, we go out there and seek them out aliens–aliens visiting Earth is a whole other thing.) There’s been very little middle ground in the last 30-40 years, it seems. Enemy Mine? The Last Starfighter? Can’t think of much more, and none recently, other than Serenity (which still had to have a horror element in the Reavers, so… blah).
Frankly, it’s kind of annoying. I think the spaceship-and-other-worlds spectacle is part of what the bigscreen experience is for and it’s been hijacked by Lucas, Rodenberry’s ghost, and horror. There are, there have to be other stories, other sorts of stories to tell. But either no one wants to tell them, or the studios don’t think they can make any money. Which, given the middling performance of Serenity, they might just be right.
Still, annoying. And disappointing. Which is why I can’t get excited for Prometheus. I appreciate it for what it is, and I wouldn’t want it not to be. But it’s not for me, and it’s one of those funny experiences, feeling outside of geekdom by not being able to get excited about this movie.
So, a few weeks ago, I switched hosts and with it, had to move the blog over. Rather than just trying to bring it over as a whole, I decided to start over fresh a little. Part of that means restructuring the site a bit, giving up on the idea that the blog is just a subordinate part of the site. I did export all the other posts before shutting down on the old host, so I’ll probably re-import those at some point, but it also feels nice just to start from scratch and let things grow from here.
Otherwise, I’m hoping the revitalized blog can become a little more what it is for other people, a place to be themselves. I feel like I haven’t done enough of that, the last few years. We’ll see if that actually comes to fruition, or if I’m just spitting in the wind.
