Grave Robbers

Last night I watched J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek for the first (and last) time. I have to admit that on one level, I couldn't take my eyes off it: in much the same way that you can't possibly stop looking at a train wreck when it happens right in front of you.

The most basic and obvious reason that I hate this movie is: DeForrest Kelley is dead, Jimmy Doohan is dead, Gene Roddenberry is dead, and here is Leonard Nimoy, playing Spock most likely for the last time, looking like death warmed over.

Meanwhile, here are all these Babies, these new non-entity pukes, all laboring to copy what the Original Cast did so well and so easily. Of all the new cast, the only ones who make no effort whatever to imitate their betters are the actors playing Uhura and Scotty.

For the same reason that I never accepted the impostor Kermit that was installed after Jim Henson's death, I don't accept this impostor crew of the Enterprise, or this alternate history of the Star Trek universe. You can't just keep something alive by pumping hot air into it, just because you're not done making money off it yet. But that's my problem.. What's not my problem is, this movie is just plain bad!

Let's get the good stuff out at the way at the outset, so that I can feel free to knock this piece of tripe from here to eternity. There was one thing and one thing only that I liked about J.J. Abrams's Star Trek:: the production design. They found a way to make the original uniforms work on the big screen, and for the first time since the original series went off the air, Star Trek finally looks the way it ought to.

But that's where it ends.

My biggest gripe is the device that everyone else seems to love: this isn't even our Star Trek anymore, an alternate timeline has been created and the entire original series basically never happened. I've seen this trick used several times before, and it always strikes me as creative arrogance. Abrams doesn't want to be bound by any established rules, so he's just declared that the rules simply don't exist. Like Kirk rewriting the software of the Kobiyashi Maru test, Abrams has declared that the rules are now anything that he wants them to be.

And what he wants is crap. The first twenty minutes of this movie contains some of the most eye-rollinging dumb material ever to come out of Star Trek, and that includes the godawful movie that Shatner directed. Never mind the comic melodrama stuff surrounding Kirk's birth, although that's bad enough. Kirk has always been a cocky piece of work, but never the complete Pain in the Ass and Menace to Society that Abrams has drawn him as here.

Beyond that, I just don't buy Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and all the rest, all at Star Fleet together at the same time. I don't buy Kirk hitting on Uhura all the time, and Uhura throwing herself at Spock on the elevator while they're both still on duty. It's like Star Trek 90210.

I don't buy blowing up Vulcan and killing off Spock's mother just on a whim, just on a plot point.

And I don't buy turning Star Trek into Raiders of the Lost Ark, into an Action Movie. Star Trek is not and never was about car chases, barroom brawls, things exploding everywhere, death drops, shootouts in space or big CGI monsters trying to eat people. Abrams can't seem to hold the camera still even when it's not even a bloody camera, even when it's a CGI shot of the Enterprise! Star Trek is supposed to have a brain -- but you wouldn't know it from this lobotomized, cannibalized monster. All it cost me was my time, and even then I was cheated.

-- Freder.

Another Annual-versity

It was one year ago this past weekend that the auctioneers came to the old house for the last time, took what they were going to take, and I loaded up the last of what I wanted, and turned over the keys to the new owners.

The old house. . . it feels like a dream now. I can still "see" it in my mind's eye, can still mentally navigate it as if it were a bit of virtual reality, but that thirty-five years of history? Gone. It almost feels like it happened to someone else.

I have word through my father that the new owners are planning to tear the barn down. They may already have done so. This means that the old place literally isn't the same place that I lived in anymore.

Although it was nothing but a hardship at the time, I guess now I should be grateful for the move; among other things, it kept some thoughts and emotions at bay that have lately been catching me up.

I can't believe that this coming May, Mom will have been gone for two years. Two YEARS. Two years and it's still an open wound. This morning at work a book landed on my desk that had no obvious connection to the memory, but it dredged everything up anyway, and I had to run to the men's room to cry.

I have so many reasons to be thankful at this point, and yet the memory still has the power to cut me down at will.

One year ago today, the new house was strewn with boxes. Today, it's a home that I am happy in, but it seems that I still have plenty of baggage to unload.

-- Freder

One Battle Won

So here I am -- with my hair More Or Less in its current state of Artificial Color.

Here's the story I want to tell you:

The other day, my Boss's Boss, a person who, before I actually knew his name, I referred to simply as "Scary Bald Guy. . . "

-- and get this . . . when he came in during the construction of the New Store looking for my boss, and I said that I'd tell her he stopped by. . . my message to her was, "There was a Scary Bald Guy asking for you --"

-- she ABSOLUTELY knew who I was talking about!

ANYWAY.

Here's the story.

The other day, on his way out from a meeting with my boss, my Boss's Boss, hereafter known as Scary Bald Guy, asked . . . in what I must say was kind of a Mocking, Demeaning way . . . "How's the hair color working out for you?"

I replied, politely, "Well, I'm still not sure that I'm going to keep it."

If my hormones had been up and my ballocks had been flaring, my response WOULD have been:

"Yah. Well. At least I HAVE hair to color.

"Twat."

The fact that what I actually said was, politely, "Well, I'm still not sure that I'm going to keep it" -- THAT'S the battle that I actually won!

-- Freder

The Paper Age

All doomster predictions aside, I don't believe that the paper book is going away anytime soon, if at all. I can tell you what is going away, though, and soon: the paper catalog.

Especially in the book industry, publishers are falling all over themselves trying to put an end to the paper catalog -- and I suppose there are lots of benefits, to their budgets, to the environment, to my desk. But I hate it.

The industry standard is currently Eidelweiss, a bit of web-based software owned by a company called Above the Treeline that allows publishers to easily share their catalogs online. And it stinks. The sales reps "mark up" (add comments to) the catalog and send us an email link. When we click on the link, what we get is a plain, uniform list a hundred books long, with a tiny thumbnail of each book cover, the ISBN, price, and the sales rep comments, if any. In order to get the details for any one of those books, you have to click through on another link.

Here's the deal: I can not be bothered to click on a hundred links to a hundred separate pages to look at the details of a hundred books. When you do click through, every single page is uniform, identically designed, no individuality for any title. This is not an enticing way to sell books to a book lover. It's like browsing books at Amazon, I defy any book lover to actually do it.

With a paper catalog, you turn the page and all the information you need is right there. Usually there's an image of the book cover that's actually large enough to see, a description, some review quotes, the print run, it's all RIGHT THERE. No clicking to do. Also, if the catalog designer is worth anything, he or she can customize the design of each individual page to suit the book that's on display.

When Penguin's adult hardcover line published paper catalogs, I used to order between sixty to ninety titles from them every season. This spring they went exclusively to Eidelweiss, and you know what? I ordered just twelve titles. In a way, it was kind of a relief. A lot less work for me.

I can't believe that I'm alone in this. At a time when the book industry is whining about how their sales are shrinking, they seem to be doing everything in their power to make their sales worse. People in the retail business do not have the time to be farting around on the internet clicking links for hours. Plus, in order for me to do the purchase order up, I have to print out the damn Eidelweiss listing anyway, and that costs us money. Until they can devise an online catalog that actually looks and works and is as easy to use as paper ones, I predict their sales to retail stores will plummet.

Macmillan is going Eidelweiss this spring, Random House is going Eidelweiss this summer, and the death of the paper catalog is in sight. It's just one more way that the world is changing, not for the better.

-- Freder.

World Without End

. . . was the title of the vintage SF picture I watched last night. It came to me as part of a two-disk set; I really only wanted Ray Harrihausen's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but for under ten bucks I got that, Them!, and two other pictures I'd never heard of before.

Made in 1956, this programmer (shot in color and cinemascope for no good reason, as there is no visual excitement to the thing whatever, unless you count a large and patently rubber spider that gets tossed onto the actors at one point) is just about as wonky as they come. It operates under the exact same premise as the much later (and much better) Planet of the Apes: a group of astronauts get thrown into the future and land on an Earth devastated by nuclear war in the year 2508.

Instead of apes, they find a horde of one-eyed brutes living on the surface, and a highly civilized and refined culture living underground, very Buck Rogers if you ask me.

But get this: The men are all weaklings and Olde Fartes in Flash Gordon headpieces, while the women are all 1950's pin-ups in miniskirts and pedal-pushers. And because they're sick of their attenuated, distant menfolk, they're all over the guys from the 20th century!

That's right -- these guys have landed in the middle of the perfect mid-sixties sex fantasy. And because there's a lot of running and punching and fighting and shooting to do on the surface, it's the best of both worlds for Joe Virile.

Although this is not bad enough to fall into the category of "So Bad it's Good," it is bad enough to be worth a chuckle or two, and oddly enough I did not find myself falling asleep on it. Go figure. The only name I recognized was Rod Taylor, and he didn't even get top billing.

At the end of the picture, the guys from the 20th century have made their point about flexing muscles and returning to the surface, and the Olde Fartes from the undercity all take off their Flash Gordon headgear to show that they are ready to become Real Men and help slaughter all those one-eyed brutes.

I'm not convinced that this gesture is going to be good enough to get the women back.

-- Freder.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I now suppose that it's an Asperger's thing, but I have always hated crowds. It's gotten worse as I get older: the proximity of so many bodies bothers me, but so does the noise -- with so many people yammering away at once, it is sometimes impossible for me to understand or identify a single voice, even when the person is standing right next to me.

I try to avoid arriving at work at the same moment that classes let out just because I can't stand the flow of students around me, crossing my path, cutting me off, walking too slowly, or dominating the sidewalk by walking in groups two to four abreast. All babbling on their cell phones.

Even a busy supermarket or another person in the break room is torture. So Book Rush is one of my least favorite times of year at work: virtually the entire student body will pass through the store at some point, usually in waves at the top of the hour. Sometimes it's a challenge to get from one end of the store to the other.

I've posted about book rush before, so I won't re-tread it. I just wanted to type that with the kind of week it's been, I'm not going to beat myself up about how I plan on spending the weekend.

The Plan:

1) Not to leave the house for any reason, not to see or speak with any damn person

2) Snuggle up with my Honey cat and sleep in AS LONG AS IT TAKES -- even if it's until twelve-thirty or one in the afternoon.

3) Decompress with a movie or two, Doctor Who, Torchwood and Laurel & Hardy.

4) Eat pizza and other comforting things.

5) and last, try to get a complete first draft on the Flash Gordon piece I agreed to write in a moment of arm-twisting, but not to beat myself up if that doesn't happen.

I can't promise that I'll exactly be ready for more punishment once this strict regimen is completed, but with any luck it will get me past the gibbering, twitching, shaking stage.

-- Freder.

Winter of our Discontent

There are days, more and more often, when I feel like I'm losing the war. I'm hoping that it's just the effect of winter, that things will start to get better when the seasons change. But I don't know. I end up in tears every single night. There's shit going on that, even with my almost complete lack of shame, I can't type about here on the blog. When people ask me "How are you?" I don't even know how to answer anymore. I mean, I can't tell them the truth.

The Ice Storm

Last week we had a real honest-to-gosh Ice Storm. There were heavy tree branches down everywhere, including in my driveway. A couple of my pine trees got hit hard. The good news is, this storm just lasted overnight. Back in 1998, the big ice storm that hit Maine lasted several days, piling ice upon ice, knocking out power lines as quickly as they were repaired.

That first morning, so many branches were snapping that it sounded like gunfire. From inside the house we watched a telephone pole across the street slowly bend from the ice that was piling up on it, until it broke in two on the third day.

We were without power, telephone or running water for fourteen days in the dead of winter. Our aged generator powered the heat, refrigerator and one kitchen light. It needed to be gassed up three times every day: first thing in the morning, mid-afternoon, and again just before bed. This meant daily trips to the China Store for gas. The store was a little bit of an oasis, surrounded at first by dark houses. For water to flush the toilets with, I filled buckets with snow and melted it in the basement.

I spent the days chopping up the huge branch -- really a small tree all by itself -- that had dropped off one of the maples in the front yard. I had nothing but a dull axe. I suppose that I could have borrowed my brother-in-law's chainsaw, but chainsaws give me the willies.

From my bedroom window at night, I could see all the people in the distance who had gotten their power back. We occupied a black spot on the landscape.

We took turns being the calm, rational one and the one who had had enough and was ready for their meltdown now.

Midway through the ordeal, we came to town and ate Chinese food. This was like going to heaven.

On the fourteenth day, the truck finally came along. It was a crew from New Jersey. They were very nice, but they could not reconnect our original underground line and had to string a new one over the road. This meant that we also had to call in an electrician to connect the house to the new line.

It was a horrible fourteen days, but once was over it became a badge to wear. There were people who had only lost their power for an hour or a day or so, which allowed me to think of them as pikers. "My Ice Storm was worse than your Ice Storm, so there!" Isn't that what hardships are for? To give you bragging rights when you come out the other side.

-- Freder.