In Her Own Words

I found an old, old AIM conversation with Amanda. It went on for an hour and a half and wasn't at all happy (we were discussing if we should stop talking - one of several times) but I figured this excerpt from her was the most telling.

(6/24/10 12:13:35 PM): well you are great though. the little weirdnesses about people are what makes them lovable, you know that. plus the connection between us feels a little overwhelming

(6/24/10 12:14:52 PM): here is how things go: i go away, feel OK for a while. one night i will randomly dream about you, not even anything scandalous just like when you know someone is in your dream? and then the next day you contact me out of the blue like you knew about it. and THEN i am like maybe we can get together when i am in CT and then i am like no we can’t because obviously i would cheat on (him) and even thinking those thoughts is already cheating so i am totally screwed. in the meantime i love my him and my dog and my life.

(6/24/10 12:15:12 PM): for god sake’s it’s been like 5 years. i will never know how we managed to have coffee last week without having like 80 kinds of sex that time.

I hate to say that I still get a rush thinking about this girl. She was the last one who held my heart in her hands and the only whom I ever shared a mutual, unspoken connection with. And I just found this old AIM conversation and, yeah, man, its been over three years and we don’t talk because she’s married now but … she still sent me an email or two this spring saying “I still love you”. Yeah. Its one of those unfinished works in life; everyone has them, I think.

Yes, this is such a destructive relationship to make another post about but good God was she cute - picture Emmy Rossum in thick framed glasses, having worked in a law library her whole life and dresses like a cross between Daria and Veronica Mars. And she treated me really well, emotionally, which is so very rare. Oh, and she could screw my brains out.

I use to see her around Christmas - spend the day in New Haven just loitering over coffee and talking quietly - so this time of year is awkward & wonderful for me. And without her, I feel like a ghost without a grave. I just wish she'd email me once in a while. Just because just because.

December, 2009 - Putting The X In Xmas

Humbug in its proper vernacular may be tied to Dickens best known book and character but intent of the word is still the same outside of the holiday season. When Scrooge says humbug, its not as a reaction to the holiday so much as his disbelief in people's attitudes. If the book were written today, Scrooge would probably be saying "Bullshit" instead - the affect, the meaning and the bendable quality of the word's intent is the same. That people making merry is bullshit, that people greeting each other happily is bullshit, that giving gifts and seasonal cheer is bullshit.

However, both humbug and bullshit are a less than accurate approach to how I feel about the holiday season. 

This isn't to say I disbelieve everyone's well-wishing or want to spend the holidays alone. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of people - family, strangers, people I work with - are people I do not want to spend time with and yet are forced to. These are people I actively avoid if I can and don't seem to understand I want to keep it that way. I am a miserable fuck this time of year - this year chief amongst all, for reasons I need not detail - and I'd rather not be cornered into giving what will surely amount to either a no-hearted holiday greeting or a screamed line of slurs. Yet they persist, even when I put my hand up and say "No, thank you".

There are three work functions for the holiday season this year: One for this office, one for this building and one for everyone. They all involve different habits and obsessions about what foods, what things to do, what jokes to tell and frankly I'm tired of each of them. People glad-handing each other as if that one day makes a difference, that things could be put aside (if they even existed, as most act out such falsehoods that everyone gets along anyway) and everyone comes together for a celebration of a job well done. My boss wants to take us out to lunch, the following Thursday we had a pizza party upstairs along with a Yankee Swap / Selfish Santa game and then today is a huge President's luncheon which I skipped out on because I am so tired of this drivel.

This is all in the midst of a supposed budget crisis where over thirty people lost their jobs. Where the higher-ups have their thumbs on a pay freeze while they have board meetings for steak and claret luncheons. As they raise a new building, build a museum, purchase a fleet of new vehicles for the "Go Green" ideal. Where they cite that there is no money for anything and yet continue to build, continue to consume, continue to push higher tuition because of fewer applications, continue to raise basic allowances like parking that are free most other places, continue to higher more vice presidents to overlook department heads.

And no where is baby Jesus to be seen. 

(And *I'm* the bad guy.)

Scrooge was right. Humbug. Humbug to the falseness shoved onto the holiday that people willingly take. That in the midst of supposed economic and environmental disasters, we're still expected to make merry even when we have no real right or reason to. That these horrible things that everyone is supposedly affected by somehow *go away* for a day and that goes double if you're Jewish or Muslim. That those of us who just want to skip the damn season aren't allowed to, that we're expected to go along with it and ride it out and give menial gifts we struggle to afford to people we usually don't want to see; these gifts becoming almost like apologies: "Sorry, I haven't been around the last nine months, heres a candy dish or paperweight or pencil sharpener with wall mount to make up for anything I missed bigger than a fender-bender and smaller than a funeral."

Would it be so unkind to get the one Christmas wish I really want: To be left out of this crap? To not have to deal with the social niceties no one actually means, to not have to fight for gift availability or traffic jams? To cut straight past the awful meals where everyone makes a compliment about the tablecloth because no one can think of anything else to say since no one wants to be there? To avoid the shit-stained kids you're asked to buy gifts for as if they didn't have everything already? To ignore the phone calls from estranged family members in the midwest or China or wherever the fuck they are?

I cannot tell you how many times and in how many different iterations I've had to go through with this: "Don't buy me anything. I'm not being coy. Don't buy me anything at all. Seriously, I don't want anything, I work for a living, if I want something I can get it myself. If you bought me something, return it and give the money to the Red Cross or some homeless guy who needs a fix to stay warm tonight. I don't want a goddamned fucking thing, so stop asking. I already have enough nostalgic attachment to shit I have and shouldn't feel attached to, I don't need more to shove into a closet and forget about. In fact, if you don't invite me over at all that would be best. Don't take it personally, I'm talking to you on the phone so I obviously don't mind your company but I don't like getting involved in this sham, thank you." (Strangely, it has yet to work.)

I don't want your holiday. I don't want your homemade dinner with the dirty potatoes made by Aunt Jenette. I don't want the fucking christmas carols. I don't want the holiday specials, the fucking Pine Sol stink of trees and I certainly don't want Its A Wonderful Life playing on the TV (Thats something so ruined by this holiday I'd require an entirely separate rant to explain.). I want to be left. the fuck. alone. I want to stay in and maybe have a few beers, take a nap on the couch and then maybe hang out with spme friends instead of driving to four different places, attempting to get to and from each place with the greatest of haste to get it all over with.

So stop. Please. For the fucking love of Christ in a very, very literal sense - stop with Christmas and leave me the fuck out of it. The real Scrooges are not the ones who say humbug, but Happy Holidays and if you think theres any good at all to come out of the season, you are part of the problem.

Four Rules I Learned This Year

1.) The "Hitler Loved Dogs" Rule (Context Is Paramount)

Everyone loves dogs. I love dogs. You love dogs. If someone stood up in a room full of people and said "raise your hand if you love dogs", most everyone would raise their hand.

However, Hitler loved dogs too, and if it was Hitler who asked you that, chances are you wouldn't raise your hand because, you know, Hitler was an asshole.

The point of the rule is that the source of a statement is as important as the statement it's self. A statement can be true but would you really want to agree with one from a questionable source or use it as evidence to support your own opinions?

The "Sarah Loved Dogs" Addendum: My friend Sarah created the first addendum to the above rule. Its a perversion of the logic stated but I have to keep it. It goes something like this: if someone were to make a truthful statement and they own a dog, you can retort that since they own a dog, Hitler would probably like the dog and thus they have something in common with Hitler and thus the opinion is irrelevant. Its definitely more of a joke than a rule to use but its a nice twist on the logic. Definitely a keeper.

2.) The "Gillian Anderson" Rule (You're Attractive, Fuck-o. Get With It.)

I will not paint over the fact that getting closer than I ever dared expect with Gillian Anderson and entirely of her own volition this year was some kind of weird validation - and I know how completely batshit that sounds, so stay with me.

I'm 32 and yet when it comes to women, I still think like I'm 14. I don't get them. Hell, sometimes I'm so confused by them, I'm outright suspicious - like the whole gender is some kind of collective succubus come to drain me of blood in the cold hours of early morning. And this is despite a pretty okay track record of  some very beautiful women. Yes, that last part sounds totally egotistical of me - but I'm saying that because, well, I'm still not especially confident in some ways. This isn't to say I think I'm a troll, or impersonal but when you live the last 16 years of your life thinking you're (at best) totally nondescript and have the outward personality of a rattlesnake, having *the* beautiful woman / celebrity you had a crush on since the age of twelve grab you and hold you against her goes pretty damn far toward how you feel about yourself. Yes, logically its completely stupid - but for once in my life, the logical part is not what I'm trying to describe; I'm appealing to the honest, emotional side that I keep from most everyone (Even myself.)

This isn't to say that I'm suddenly Don Juan or that my luck has changed. Just that sometimes I deserve to think better of myself than I normally do. And that is okay. Its just so very hard to wrap your head around the complete opposite of what you normally feel is honesty about yourself.

(And if you're reading this, Gillian: I'm free for dinner whenever. Have your people call my people.)


3.) The "JJ Abrams" Rule (Stop Identifying With Things)

If you're reading this, then you probably know of my dislike of everything having to do with JJ Abrams. The man is the literal embodiment of everything wrong in Hollywood: a career based on nepotism, everything  made is a copy sourced from something superior or from an existing franchise and he has no discernible talent in any aspect of writing or directing.

More to the point, you should know that I'd rather take gasoline through a catheter and then piss it out over the open flames of Hell than have anything to do with him. 

That said, his unfortunate presence in the world of the living taught me a very important lesson this year. While it was bad enough that he was behind two completely vacuous Star Trek movies that had no worth what-so-ever except as an example of how to do something wrong, his later assignment to the forthcoming Star Wars sequels sent enough pure bile straight to my brain to drown all joy from my life for several days.

So somewhere between the initial announcement and the half bottle of Jim Beam in reply to it, I came to realize that, once and for all, Star Wars was done for me. Abrams - a man who cannot even pace dialogue  between actors or frame a shot for longer than one whole second - was now being given the holiest of holy assignments. I could no longer identify with the series as I once had; I could not allow something I loved as a child and a teen be beaten down in front of me while I still loved it. Just like watching a vet euthanize your pet, I had to turn away while the needle went in.

So I left. I didn't damn it, I didn't cry "rape" like the common Internet drone nor did I make some crazy-ass YouTube video about what Star Wars is and isn't. I just put it away carefully and closed the lid.

And that made me grow (the fuck) up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not thumbing my nose at the films already made or that I'm dismissing my adoration of them - but like the song goes "Don't dream, its over". Someone I dislike for so many strong reasons is taking something and will no doubt put his stamp all over it. It also doesn't help that Disney is putting out character-based films outside of Episode VII - because people need to know what Yoda was doing with his off-time or something? (Hint: no one cares)

So I just can't go on with that. I can't. Its done for me and I'm a lot happier for it. I feel no anxiety over if it'll be good or not (though there is some anxiety about John Williams being alive to finish the scores) and by pushing it out, man, talk about your relief of burdens. I have refused to take it on as a person and thus, give no shits to how badly Abrams will undoubtedly ruin it.

Thirty years of putting too much of myself out there and into a non-corporeal concept like a movie series. I feel cleaner already.


4.) The "Executioner's Axe" Rule (Don't Throw Yourself On The Sword Willingly)

This is really more of an Internet rule but I suppose it could also be used in face to face conversations at parties. Its basically "don't volunteer to put your head on the chopping block", which is something a lot of people seem to do with immense haste. Its an easier rule to explain by example though.

I'll use the easiest of examples, since this is so common for me: lets say you have two people talking about a movie. One person loved it and one person hated it and the person who loved it is making a much stronger intellectual argument for his viewpoint.A third party comes in and starts yammering that he hated the movie too - totally unprepared for the conversation, without having any of the context spoken between the original parties and simply throwing their hat in the ring in that "JJ Abrams" rule (over-identifying with something) cited above. Needless to say, this third party person gets steamrollered by the opposing party and usually cries foul for all sorts of nebulous reasons.

But they're the ones who stepped in. Its no one else's fault but their own. They put their head under the axe, so to speak. Anyone who voluntarily sticks their neck out is, by the nature of the act alone, probably asking for a direct rebuttal.

Amanda, Epilouge - Sheinberg's edit, "Love Conquers All"

When I told you about moving to Texas, you told me you wanted to see me one last time before it happened. We make plans quietly - another day or short weekend in New Haven. No presumptions, no plans, just idle wandering. It gets compared to the movie Before Sunrise, where those two people just wander around a strange city and ignore everything but each other.

The Saturday morning rolls around and I'm standing in the train station again, my flat-cap in one shaking hand and the other in my pocket. And as you step up, you're wearing a purple scarf, or a purple beret, a purple something. You smile out of the corner of your mouth and we walk out into the street, holding hands. New Haven is busy and loud and we don't notice any of it. The pull of you has nothing to do with how you're leading me.

You talk about your life and your job and your marriage and your dog and how broken your car is and where you got your boots and how tired you are of your mother; with every new subject you creep closer and grip my hand harder until your fingers are pressing white between my knuckles. You coo quietly and say to tell me about my life instead. My job, my apartment (I want to see it! she says with enthusiasm), my cat Greta, my car that is always falling apart, movies, music, close-calls that somehow never turn into girlfriends. An existence of near-misses that somehow culminate into the misery of lost chances, bodies of dreams strewn about.

We duck into alleys and corners and the windows of book stores.You go to kiss me and miss my mouth and get me right under the eye. I ask how long I have with you and you pull away to an arms length before saying "Tomorrow, noon." The last word curves up to the corners of your voice, almost like a question, easily confused with hope.

I take you home and put on the television and we get to cooking. I'm a terrible in front of a stove but between the two of us we make something passable before deciding on throwing it out for Chinese take-out. Between the phone call and picking up the order, we become a mess of limbs on the living room floor, grinding like machines. I can hear the fabric stretch along your back, under your hair. You guide me once or twice - a hand here, no, move your knee - before we start laughing.

I stand up to get my keys - the Chinese is surely ready and probably cold by now - and you hold me before we walk out. My hands find your elbows and I wonder aloud how small they are in my hands. Weird detail.

The takeout is bland, the movie we watch is half ignored. The lights stay off after the plates are in the sink and the DVD player is still. Your glasses come off, the hair is down, we both know this is the one last time we have in a relationship of one last times. Your legs meet around my back and so it goes, on and on, for an hour and then two. You shake so hard that it might actually be me shaking. You curse loudly. It sounds weird coming from you.

===

Now - none of this happened. This epilogue just above. Its what I thought should happen and likely never will. Because, as life is always ready to prove, love does not conquer all. Love is a building block of life, like water, like carbon. It is a thing that is necessary to exist but it is also an inert element when left to its own devices. It is a thing that does not move on its own, does not change without outside forces, does not have any greater meaning without more placed on it.

And thats the cusp of our relationship I guess. And its inert because of you.

I'll allow myself a little bit of anger and a whole lot of self-loathing over that anger because, well, this is all unresolved. What I wrote above was what I would need to end or continue everything we had instead of the basic building block you and I started so long ago. We never finished what we barely even started.

What drives me nuts isn't that I lost to the lesser man. Its that I lost to you. I never tried harder with anyone in my life, never wrote more, never expressed more, never more more'd - and here I am writing fantasy-fiction as I hold a glass of vodka in the other hand. I am drunk enough to know I am right and sober enough to know I still love you; tomorrow morning, I will be sober enough to know its your own decision to make and I'll still be drunk on my affections. (Ah the curse of the Irish holds strong in my genes.)

I don't like letting go. Ive never abandoned a friend in my life and have gladly welcomed back any who have wandered away. That is just who I am. And maybe you need to wander away for a bit too. And like the rest, you're always welcomed back - but I also have the gnawing feeling you never will. That you shut the door so quietly as you left, neither of us heard it click.

So, you are now a song from a summer too far away. A vibe from a passed era, the watermark from a flood forgotten. I loved you like all men would want to love a woman and you found it best served to be cast aside.

Maybe one day you'll find this blog, this entry, read it in full. Maybe you'll take my old suggestion and look up "When You Are Old" by W.B. Yates and know that that is where we've been shoehorned: part my fault, part your decision. And part of me will be waiting for that reply; though instinctively that part of me waits knowing that the reply will never come, or even if it did, it would be much colder than desired.

So this is it then. This is us in our thirties. The bond you and I had under so many dark nights, awake hundreds of miles away and wondering about the other is now tethered to a still lake, all life and living gone from it now.

My God, how I loved you like no one else in my life.

And how I wish that part of me would stop holding on.

March 2013, 10:14 am

Tomorrow is my birthday. I'm sure I'll get all sorts of well-wishes and well-meaning gifts from people and they'll all be nice but none of them are going to be what I want or need. Only I can give that to myself, I suppose. Just sending this to you is that gift - even if you roll your eyes and delete it without reading, thats cool too. You have that right and that option.

This speech, this email was originally something I had hoped to tell you face to face but I fear that time has passed too far and us living in different states nixes that idea. I may be more eloquent here but I'd be more effusive and probably less long-winded if I said it out loud. Blech.

Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. First, my apologies for sending this seemingly at random. I'm not here to kick up dirt or start your day on the wrong foot. I realize we haven't had the best friendship and I realize that I'm pretty much persona non grata as of a decade ago. Its well earned on my part. But now that I'm older and notice how I'm not in touch with those people from my teens and twenties anymore, I need to strike that iron while I still have a chance at saving my soul.

I did a lot of awful things to you way back when and said a lot more. I hate to say the bad things seem to outweigh the good, now. I pretty much hate myself for it. I am so very sorry for the person I was then. It may be water under the bridge for you and I truthfully have moved on a bit myself - but the effect you had on my formative years deserves more respect than I gave them then and at least some acknowledgement in hindsight. I am truly sorry I did not see you for what you were and that I did not love you like you deserved. And this is all some sort of a "Personal Hell In Hindsight".

But I'm not saying I've turned over a new leaf or that I'm a totally new person - just that I'm a little more seasoned, a little more mellow. And looking back at the angry, young man I had been, I feel very little but shame for it all. Its okay if you don't believe me when I say I'm sorry to you every morning I get up; I do it anyway. And I know no matter how many times I say it, what I did to you won't heal anyone's wounds any better but I'll say it every day in hopes it does heal something. 

Believe me when I say I don't expect or require a reply. Its enough that I got to send this to you after years of running this stuff through my head. I feel a little free after typing it and yet the worst part is that everything I said here is an abject failure because what I feel is so much more than what you're reading. I am so sorry for what I did to you. So very sorry.

If you made it this far in reading, thank you. And if you didn't thats fine too. I really, really honestly and truly hope you're happy with where you are and whom you're with and I suspect the best is yet to come with you and I wish nothing but the best for you too. You have, at the very least in your short life, entirely changed my life in the process and taught me some tough lessons in the process.

I miss you, fidget.

J

Elka, Four Years After (Now With 40% Less Uncontrolable Sobbing!)

(Image Redacted For Reasons Of Privacy)

Today marks the fourth anniversary to my losing my mind.

Halloween 2009 was the worst day in my life. I waited months for a reply from a woman I was very much in love with and had foolishly prepared myself only for good news. And in reply to my page of heartfelt adoration - got a three sentence Dear John style reply that broke my brain. I may not have beat my head against a wall, but I understood why people sometimes did that when under duress.

Only two people saw me at my worst and its such a sensitive memory, I don't want to detail much of it. My emotions were completely out of control the first 24 hours: I had lost the ability to use words, sobbing so hard into my best friend and her sitting there knowing there was nothing to be done about it. I shook, I cried, snot ran freely. I was a hopeless bag of flesh; not quite a man, quite nearly a thing. She held me and after a time, said nothing, noticing that the words meant less than just being gripped tighter. It was strangely, deeply intimate in a way and its a favor I still feel I should somehow repay to her. I don't like being the vulnerable one, even less so to that degree.

The months that followed were a rolling fog. In hind sight, I probably should've gotten better help than being alone or even had myself checked into a mental health ward. I would come home every day from work to scream-cry on my couch, sometimes to the point where I'd end up dry-heaving into the toilet. I'd shake uncontrollably: my hands, my legs, the kind of feeling in your guts tremble under your skin. I'd have to go through this for hours every day, just to release all that tension, just to be able to fall asleep. Weekends were the worst since I was left to sit by myself in the dark. And though some days were easier for others, it would eventually crest once again and I'd be back where I started. It made my soul sick to be housed in such an emotionally-ignorant body.

Thats when I started writing about it:

And I know she still thinks about me. And I know she still feels for me more than she dares let on. You don't get close with someone with those kinds of words in an ankle-deep world and then just let go or forget or walk off. But shes with someone else now and I sit in an empty apartment scattered with beer bottles and loose change. A pile of struck matches around the cheap scented candles and the stabbed out ashtray. The bedding needs to be changed though its never been slept in it. The empty refrigerator. The cold linoleum floor. The TV tuned to a dead station. The hot, grimy intuition that shes thinking of me right now.
  

But that doesn't even matter. She's with someone else and she'll probably marry him and that is what wakes you at night and makes you look over at the little black velvet box sitting on top the nightstand. She'll get one like it from someone else.

And writing did help. It was a valve that helped me discard all the collected tension in my chest from days and weeks and months of waiting and suffering and wondering. But even writing can only do so much, words can only go up to the point of the incommunicable. You hit that barrier between language and experience: you can't step through it. And so, left at an impasse, I was right where I started before writing.

By this point, I had considered taking my own life. The memories, the feelings, the unresolvable madness of questions unanswered were pushing me toward that permanent silence. I didn't quite plan it but I was pretty resolved in doing it. I started writing individual letters to people, tidying up my affairs as it were. I began writing about her, about the cancer in my chest from all the thoughts I had had for months, in the hopes that it would not only explain why I was going to do it but have someone have some appreciation after the fact. "I understand why he did this" was what I wanted to hear.

Then I had the dream. A dream that scared the hell out of me. I was in a small glass enclosure, like a phone booth. This booth was floating around a fog of sorts and I saw all my dearest friends going on about their lives - being happy, having children, growing old and satisfied with living. I was banging on the glass, screaming as loud as I could but none of them could hear me. I was trying to warn them about death: that it was one-sided. That you'd float forever, able to watch but unable to interact. That the short time you had was it and that after that, you became a permanent spectator who was alone in his own little glass cube.

When I woke up, I realized that the subconscious part of my brain had basically solved my recent problems for me; that there was no guarantee of peace in death. That there is no contract, no reasoning, no universal agreement or proof of peace in the Great Beyond. That if I had killed myself in that brain-state - who was to say I wouldn't be locked in that place forever? A glass coffin for a ghost without a grave.

So, now what was I left with? I went back and started reading (the worst stuff you can read during major depression) Satre and Hesse and anything basically existential and provoking. I started watching The Fountain once a week; I started to mine myself for all I was worth by overexposing my soul to anything that could touch it. And it helped. Well, it helped a bit anyway. I was trying to squeeze as much blood out of the stone while I could.

And it took over a year to be more or less back to myself. A lesser version of myself - that woman strip-mined everything I had been for 30 years and left me shallow - but myself none the less. And every once in a while, that feeling of her loss creeps up on me. It never comes on fully, it simply passes by and keeps going. Because truth of it is, I won't let it come around to stay anymore. I can't. It crippled me once, and I'm afraid a second round might kill me stone dead.

And I know a lot of friends who pat me on the back and tell me I made it through a bad ordeal and that I'm stronger for it - but the other side is that you're left to wonder if everything is worth surviving? That you're so changed after an event like that, you know you can't ever go back to who you were before, so you're lost even in yourself. The thing is everyone tells you time heals all wounds, but no one mentions that the scars can be disfiguring.

Would you really want to walk through Hell to prove any point? I wouldn't suggest it.

But I'm here now. And she married and had a couple more kids and I definitely think I dodged a bullet in a lot of ways. I don't regret what we had when we had it, simply how we decided to end it. It was a callous way to bring that amount of closeness to an end. And the experience has made me gun-shy: I've all but dismissed the idea of dating ever again. The best way to explain it is that wonderful exchange in 1991's The Rocketeer:

Peevy: You got a good thing goin' on with that girl, Clifford. And I'm tellin' you right now, if she flies the coop, it's gonna be your fault.

Cliff Secord: Aw, what do you know about women, Peev? You haven't had a date since 1932.

Peevy: [wistfully] Flora Maxwell. There wasn't any point datin' nobody after her.

But I'm a little more solid now, a little more on an even keel, a little happier not chasing after a skirt for the first time since high school. I'm practically disinterested in dating now and happy with that. I'll stay with this mindset for as long as it suits that happiness, despite the looks of concern from friends and terror from my elders.

Lets try this out for a while, shall we?

Lou Reed Is Dead. Long Live Lou Reed. - 90 Minutes After The Annoucement Of His Passing, Aged 71 Earth Years

 
The passing of Lou Reed is an odd one. I suppose the big reason is that, by this point, we had all assumed his hard-living lifestyle would've kept him permanently embalmed. Like a Keith Richards or a Iggy Pop, here was someone who lived hard and fast and then harder still and kept on living somehow. His face looked like someone had left Lyle Lovett out in the rain and sun for too damn long.

I don't have many distinct memories of Reed's music either. I really started listening to him in my early 20s, when I'd be up until three in the morning talking on Instant Messenger and watching the Late Late Show. There was a thing I liked about him that escaped me for many years - but it was really about how simple his music was. Unlike a lot of other rock artists before him or following, the great point of Reed's material was how simple it was. At times, I'm even reminded a bit of Philip Glass - where its one idea stretched to its greatest limit, changed in the simplest ways, so its basically four minutes of a chord progression. But where Glass is brilliantly maddening, Reed was brilliantly approachable. His music (and especially his lyrics) were so much like the kind heard in art class rooms where bohemian wanna-be teenagers strummed a guitar and didn't sing a song so much as talk through it. Not quite poetry, not quite fumbling in the dark. But it was distinctly understandable: some half-way-there poet finger-banging greatness but never going the whole way.

And thats where I think the tragedy is in Reed's passing: the man was a simple storyteller. In an age where music has been castrated and cauterized by increasingly stupid pop music clap-trap - the immediacy of a guy struggling to make a song sort of work has all the vibrant workings of a story around the bonfire. Simple. Direct. You either bought it, or you didn't. Pure narration, in a way. I respect that - its the same approach Hemingway had with his readers. Except, you know, nothing about blowjobs.

Reed was the ultimate dream-come-true for all those high school rock band kids. He never made it very far in the charts Hot 100 sense but he never gave in to outside excess or pressures from trends. He was just Lou Reed. Here he is. And his talent wasn't in arrangements or big ideas; he was just a guy with some cute ideas and they were the kind you could see him scrawl on ratty cocktail napkins with ballpoint pens. His kind wouldn't last in this day and age if he was just starting out - which makes you wonder how many other people are out there like him and don't get the chances he had. After all, we don't like people who are just talent and we don't trust people if they're not interested in just taking our money.

But I listened to him a lot. I'll fault the movie Trainspotting for introducing me to my favorite song by him "Perfect Day" but there were others like "No Money Down" which is terrific and a throwback to his love of 50s rock, though it took me a long time to warm up to. "New York Telephone Conversation" with its oom-pah-pah bounce comes off as Danny Elfman finally not giving a shit after coming home to a dirty, laundry-smelling apartment after spending all night drinking mezcal in a dive bar in Hell's Kitchen.

So yeah, Lou Reed is dead. Long live Lou Reed. Ain't gonna find many more like him unless you look harder at the people struggling in high school art class with badly tuned guitars and not giving a fuck about it.

From The "Just So I'm Better Understood" File...

I am what I like to think a deeply empathic person. I feel for the misery and plights of others - be they strangers or friends, be they of any creed or color. I can put myself immediately into that other person's shoes and experience their good news first hand. I would like to think this is an element that makes me maybe not a good friend but a trusted one.

However, theres a fucking limit to it. And you know I'm somewhere near that limit if I'm using the word "fucking" to emphasize it.

To quote the late, great George Carlin - "I don't have pet peeves, I have major, psychotic fucking hatreds" and thats true. Thats the other side of the deep empathy of people - the complete and utter revulsion of them. That is to say I can emphasize with people but it is such a tenuous and exhausting skill that I am an introvert by nature; dealing with people is literally the most exhausting thing I can experience.

So thats the set-up, and heres the meat of the joke.

I purposely delineate all parts of my life from the next. My personal life does not affect my work, my work life does not affect my family life, my family life does not affect some ... other thing that I can't think of right now. But everything is compartmentalized: I do this on purpose. I don't like bleed through. I do not like parts of my life interacting with other parts. If I am dating a girl and she asks me about my job, I'll likely shrug it off. I don't do this to be rude but my work life is exceedingly disinteresting; more over, I don't want to talk about work outside of work. Similarly, I don't want to talk about who I'm dating with those I work with. I haven't told my mother about any dating I've done since probably 2006.

Now I realize that not everyone works this way and thats fine. But there is a boundary involved here that some people see and most people don't. The line is this: don't try to drag me across into your own values. If I do not want to mix my personal life with my work life, it needs to be accepted that way and thats it. My job is not who I am, its merely what I do. I do not wrap myself in the flag, I feel no loyalty to an employer past collecting another paycheck. Thats all I am there for and don't ever think otherwise.

I do not view my job as a second family.

I  view my job as getting paid for having to deal with people I would otherwise avoid.


Similar to the line in the sand about values, as a rule, I don't talk about things like religion or personal opinions often. Its cheap, its chinzy and let me be totally honest (and an asshole) when I say that every one of these discussions at work end up with four people trying to out-yell the others, before they turn to me. "Well, see, I'm leaning more toward the concept that God is only the outward expression of Man's own inward nature as detailed by..." and then I realize I've totally lost everyone already. I am by no means a profoundly smart person - I am simply a well-learned idiot - but I also have no tolerance for people who want to swim in an intellectual ocean with water wings for an IQ. It also doesn't help that I am atheistic but don't identify as with atheist groups. Frankly, I think having a belief system of any kind is stupid; the moment you discard your safety net of an assumed reality, you take things as they come a lot better. Its not always easy but its much easier to cope with reality when you're allowing yourself to

Now where does all this come from?

A coworker of mine has had a family loss. I feel nothing but sad things for him because he's honestly a very nice person and I like his company quite a bit. However, someone else in the department suggested-to-the-point-of-commanding that we get a sympathy card.

And I realize my opinion of not wanting to sign it makes me out to be a monster, but at the same time, I didn't ask for nor did I get one when anyone from my family or friends passed. The point there isn't "I didn't get one, so why should they" sour grapes as it is "I didn't get one because I don't feel comfortable with it; why should I send one too if it makes me uncomfortable?"

I think this is a valid opinion. Its not one made in cruelty or emotion. Its simply saying "I do not want to be involved on this level." Because I purposely bond with very, very few people and I do not want to diminish that capacity by being shoehorned or be made guilty into doing something half-heartedly.

This is a huge reason why I need to leave my job. They are asking too much from me in this way. It is draining. It is vexing. And more over, I find it intrusive in the most horrible way. I am not at my job to peddle my soul to people who do not know me past what I allow them (nor do I ask them to peak into my soul to validate their intrusive nature). I am there to put money in my pocket. Were I to leave it tomorrow, aside from two people, I would not know the other two hundred or so people I see every week. I did not choose to know them; its membership by osmosis in the same way that we're all human - but so the fuck what?

The funny thing is is that my demanding these barriers, and this distance is purely because I do not have barriers and distance with my few close friends.

I am as human as the next person. But I prefer to be human over there.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gillian Anderson Photo Op, 2013

As with all people now in their 30s and full of themselves, I loved loved loved The X-Files. Usual nerd reasons, I won't bore you with them. So when Ally offered me a day pass to New York ComiCon this year, I *had* to go after finding out Gillian Anderson was going to attend that day. Photo ops were a touch expensive but I figured it was worth the cash for a determinedly awkward photo proving, well, absolutely nothing. Lets face it: these are cattle calls. I'd heard iffy things about the company that was doing them but I sent them a Paypal payment anyway. You only live once.

I got in line very early because the queue system wasn't handled well. The staff running the floor were generally very nice but totally out of their element past "don't cross this line" schtick. I had three giggling German girls ahead of me, all of which were super nice, and somewhere to my right and back (the queue went up and down and up and down several aisles) a very nice guy from Australia dressed as Mulder who was charming to talk to and gave really great insight on his experiences in America (all of them positive).

But what was suppose to be a thirty minute wait turned into ninety as Gillian Anderon's plane was late or stuck in customs or something. We got different stories. I didn't care. I was fourth in line and the first guy - my heterosexuality was proven that day, I'll tell you what. The MC working the line eventually said "She's here folks, get your tickets out, stand at the black curtain entrance until staff calls you in to take your ticket" blah blah blah. He was generally a very nice person but anyone who works at NYCC had to be burned out by four in the afternoon. His face was etched with the wrinkles you get from smelling neck sweat and acne topical medicine all day.

The first two girls go in, swallowed up by the velvet entrance. I give my bookbag to the staff to hold. The next girl is called in. Then me. The next few details happened within the span of 2 to 5 seconds.

After walking through the black velvet fabric, the room was a lot to take in. The size of a classroom, something like ten people running around, the light guy adjusting for height, the photographer, two people on computers, the printing guy, the ticket person. Aside from the girl who was just leaving and the girl whos having her picture taking next, I'm alone in the room, in the corner like a truant.

Gillian is 45 pushing 22. Shes wearing a black dress that, when she picks up her water or to turn to talk to someone, proves its actually a matching two-piece. Shes extremely polite and smiles broadly. She's trying to make small talk the people shes taking photos with and its upsetting the cameraman. He continually screams NEXT with the nuance of a drunk cattle baron.

My turn is next. She half-follows the last of the german girls out of the room and then turns to me. We held eye contact as I walked to the mark on the floor for the picture - all of FIFTEEN FEET, which is a lot longer than it seems. She smiled broadly as I approached. I tried to turn on some of the old Sean Connery style charm I use to get phone numbers while at bars. I'd like to think I was successful but ... well, the outcome isn't proof of that.

Me: "Good morning"

Her: "Hey! Good morning! How are you?"

Me: "Pretty good, yourself?"

Her: "I'm good, thanks."

Click. "NEXT!" The end.

(Note to reader: It was 3 in the afternoon and I said "Good morning". Yes, I am dumb sometimes.)

So why aren't I posting the photo here? Right as I replied to "how are you", I had just walked up to her expecting to take a picture like the girl before me - side to side, crooked smile like you're saying "Hi Mom!" on the nightly news - when she stops the cameraman. She holds up her hand and says "Wait, let's do this..." then grabs my wrist and puts my arm around her waist and my hand on her hip, with all the subtlety of a dancing instructor with a new student. As if to say "No, honey - that goes HERE." Much to my credit, I gave the gentlest of squeezes as she put her hand on the small of my back. Between the surreal aspect of the situation, the unexpected physical contact and the fact that we were basically talking as it was taken, well, my face comes off as a half-hearted attempt at Jared Lee Loughner's mug shot - a bit too intense, though I've gotten use to the picture a bit since then.

I'm not disappointed by the photo per se but I am sort of deflated. I've rarely photographed well - I sort of have a brow that makes my eyes seem strained so I end up looking extremely serious when all I'm doing is thinking about what I want for dinner - and this was no exception. A badly timed no exception, actually.

But she did put my hand on her and you better believe I gently got a palm of that. It ain't Abelard and Eloise by any means but, well, fuck you, I'm sticking to the totally grand delusion she thought I was cute if she got that close on her own. Until then, I'm hiding that photo behind something else and taking it out as a great (visual) anecdote for when I'm (drunk) with friends.

X-Files: A Short Retrospective

The X-Files is a really depressing show: a weird, obsessive loner takes on a pretty, fresh from med school doctor on as his partner and basically ruins her life.

In the first season, Scully has something of a social life and helping raise a godson and is fairly well adjusted. Meanwhile, Mulder is running off onto army base's and seeing UFOs before getting his memory wiped. Then they see all sorts of terrifying stuff from Fluke Men living in septic tanks to incest-based families to massive radiation sickness to tunnels leaking goo to aliens gestating inside human hosts.

Their parents die over the span of nine years (the fathers under especially dramatic circumstances).

Scully gives birth twice and eventually loses both (one is taken from her by the government, the second is written out in the second film). She also gets cancer for a time. Moreover, she has her face repeatedly rubbed in the fact that despite her logical mind, Mulder is always right (and they even write an episode about exactly that) and it always IS a monster/alien.

Scully's brothers disapprove of her work and of Mulder, and with their disappearance we can assume she chose Mulder over her flesh and blood relatives. That's kinda cold, no matter how you hack it.

Mulder struggles with suicide, briefly. He may or may not be a bastard son fathered by an affair his mother had (I honestly gave up trying to figure that one out), has a half-brother who ends up being a massive burn victim and perpetually blames himself for his sister's alien abduction before finding out she was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a serial killer going door to door. He himself is eventually abducted and experimented on by aliens.

By the last film, Mulder and Scully live alone in a house in the middle of Nowhere, Canada. Scully is a doctor and Mulder grows crazy-beard and cuts out newspaper articles to perpetuate his own conspiracy theories. He ends up being a Truther in some ways: validated by his own conclusions and less interested in investigation. Scully is too tired and frankly too fucking cranky to go back to running around with a flashlight in the dark and instead, attempts to heal a terminally ill child. Because that's SO much more gentle a life choice.

They never marry.

They do, however, go to a tropical island in a rowboat in the end credits of the second film, further isolating themselves from the world.

So, the truth is out there because they're too depressed and worn out to keep looking and have decided they want to be left the fuck alone for good?

The Aspergers Spider-Man (2012) - A Spoiler Free Review, Now With 30% More Vitamin D

So. Amazing Spider-Man.

THE GOOD: Emma Stone. Like Frank Langella in Masters Of The Universe, Jurgen Prochnow in The Replacement Killers or David Warner in anything ever, Stone is by far the gem in this film. Thoughtful, emotional, well-acted - every scene she's in is a total joy to watch no matter who she's with. She's not only pretty but she can ACT which is rare in this age of gross out comedy and blithering false-feminist feel-good fuck-swap like Perfect Pitch (do NOT google that film). I am deeply impressed with her in this.

Martin Sheen and Sally Field are an interesting pick as Ben and May Parker. It doesn't totally work but it also does - while they don't seem like the comic characters, they do seem very true to life. However, they do seem much colder compared to Cliff Robertson (I'll get to that later).

The movie has a nice color palette to it.

THE BAD: the directing is very, very... VERY flat. It's impossible to compare it against Raimi's in the same way it would be impossible to compare Stanley Kubrick to Paul Verhoeven; and in this case, this film is the more "Kubrick" though without the intellectual bent. It's cold and detached and uninterested in telling a heroic tale. It's not a dumb film but...

Just look at them: homogenized and deadly white-bread. This film is poisonously dull. I can remember two scenes in the film that work and work well but...

1.) neither of them deal with web-swinging or stopping the villain. Or the "A" plot (as opposed to the "B" or sub-plot(s))
2.) though well-done, felt entirely out of place in a superhero movie and would be more in place with a good romance film like Until September or Kate & Leopold.

And so... why does this movie exist if it can't give you good action scenes? As a point of preference, it's interesting to me that compared to this film, the Raimi films are chock full of practical effect shots or at least well rendered greenscreen mattes. All the action sequences in this are CG renders from what I remember and it robs it of both visceral feel and realism. Spider-Man (in this hilariously stupid costume design) leaps about like a feather on the wind: he glides but there is no feeling of muscle or power behind it.

THE UGLY: Garfield is the worst thing to happen to Peter Parker since getting his coke-bottle glasses. Instead of being a quirky, solitary nerd, this version of Peter has a text book case of Aspergers. He twitches, is unable to make eye contact, talks with his hands, stutters and generally acts like a dinner theater version of Billy Bibbit. It was very, very painful to watch him because aside from the twitching and speech impediment, he was also a massive asshole to everyone. His aunt and uncle, the kids in school, Gwen, everyone. I felt bad the other characters had to interact with him.

(Side Note: this film is like a 12 year old's response to Captain America, where the good German doctor said about the little guy appreciating what power was. Well... In this movie, when you get power, you decide to become an asshole the size of a CNN article response thread.)

The thing about Spider-Man, rewrite or not, the character exists as this: nice guy gets powers and makes a tragic mistake that loses him his Uncle Ben and he learns with great power must come great responsibility. This movie purposely avoids that. There is no lesson, Peter goes nowhere and becomes no one special. He is not a hero because he never completes any of the trials a hero must: makes no sacrifice, feels no guilt, doesn't evolve or change. He puts on a mask and... thats it. No hero's journey.

Garfield's Peter Parker is Cameron Fry if he stayed in bed instead of going out with Ferris Beuller. 

 Instead, Peter loses his Uncle Ben (props to how they twisted his fate) and so he puts on his tights and goes on a vigilante spree to find the guy. While chasing the original killer into a warehouse in the original movie is an act of passion, a montage of beating up fleeing blonde men strikes more as misplaced revenge. That's not Spider-Man because thats not heroic.

The Horner score is lilting. It's not bad but it's not heroic. The caper is a complete point of convenience and though not insultingly bad is unraveled as you watch it. You can outsmart the movie very quickly and truth be told, the film cribs it's last 5 minutes from the last 30 seconds of the original Spider-Man.

All in all, the film isn't BAD. It didn't make me angry and I didn't hate it but it did make me sad. Spider-Man was one of my *things* growing up, defining an identity of morals as opposed to The Punisher or Superman... and the fact that we've gone so far from me (and this will make some uncomfortable to read) crying Field Of Dreams style in the theater when Peter talks to Ben in Spider-Man 2 to me nodding off during the climactic fight in this version shows how far we haven't come.

The film isn't made for fans of the series but, instead, made to interest Twilight fans. Garfield's hair is quaffed like the lead vampire in that movie and I'm pretty sure it's for this reason. The leaden action sequences, odd dialogue (they even swipe a throw-away joke from the original Raimi movie!) and a schmear of really bad one-liners and you get this.

The Aspergers Spider-Man

(If you see it, and I'm sure you will, the two parts I liked both involve Gwen. The first one is her trying to heal Peter after fighting the Lizard and it's touching; however, I can't tell if it's because the acting works or because I was having painful flashbacks to Megan and it was like finding a home movie of a good memory, down to hand gestures and her dimples. So when you see the picture, take note of that scene and see if affects you as strongly as it did me.)

The Last Great Star Trek Movie

It is this author's wish to point that this is a writ of opinion. It is a statement of adoration for the ideas and maybe not so much the end result. That said, it will discuss the modes and concepts and perhaps less of the finished film. This writer also assumes the reader has seen and has a working knowledge of the film and so will not explain the plot here.

Star Trek Generations is "the middle child" of Trek films. It doesn't have the sense of self as the original series films did nor does it have the ramped up brew-ha-ha of the Next Generation films. Its sort of stuck between gears. It doesn't quite distinguish its self in any manner and seems to be perfectly fine with that. So at the end of the day, there may be no one who says Star Trek Generations is their favorite film. Even I am not such a fan of it to say that much - but I do enjoy it a lot more than most. It was the right movie for the right time in my life - I was in Middle School about to hit High School and I saw it in a second-run theater the next town over. It was a TNG episode made a bit larger and had an actor I'd just discovered as the villain and things exploded and Picard was as oxford button-down as ever. It hit all the right notes.

And yet, its not the best foot forward for the transition from the long loved original cast and the 1980s group of relative penny players.

This is not to say Generations is a bad film but its also far from even trying at being a perfect film. It suffers from uneven qualities, particularly the fact that director David Carson shoots it exactly like a television series. It has a very flat, very "pilot episode" feel to the camera framing and how the film is paced. Outside of some nice protracted shots, its extremely static in its movements throughout, almost robotic at times. It also doesn't help that Dennis McCarthy's score is dialed out of the sound mix quite a bit (the recent GNP Crescendo two-disc reveals a greater depth to the score) or that the villain is basically Trek's answer to Moonraker's Hugo Drax. Malcolm McDowell makes the most of it, as he has made a career in doing so much with so little. (He was doing exactly the same with the Wing Commander PC games when Generations was being shot.)

This said, the film has a beautiful lighting scheme (one of the best I've ever seen in any '90s film, actually), has some terrific special effects and model shots and, at least as tone goes, one of the best in the last thirty years for big screen sci-fi.

Wait, what? Yes, in terms of its intent, Generations is in a lot of ways a great, thoughtful, even meaningful outing. Despite its culmination of milquetoast space opera, the largely unfinished ideas still have a great deal of weight.

* Generations is a flip on Its A Wonderful Life

The most obvious influence on Generations is the classic Capra Christmas film. Putting aside the fact that both films feature the Yuletide season, rethink it like this: both learn the same lesson by going in opposite directions.

Captain Picard / George Bailey has struggled hard his whole life and made sacrifices to get where he is. Unfortunately, the past comes crashing down on him - Capra has it be Uncle Billy losing the bank deposit which then snowballs into desperation, Picard's loss is both his brother and nephew in a fire which spirals into despair - and both finds himself lost and without much guidance, considers sacrificing himself (though George Bailey considers suicide, Picard simply allows himself to be a hostage exchange - one is far more dynamic, the other is more passive) and both are ultimately lead back to real life through a Dante's Inferno style journey.

Here is where things get flipped: when George Bailey jumps off the bridge to save Clarence, he's given the gift of seeing the world without him. Its a personal hell: his wife is an old librarian, his house is empty and dark, his friends don't know him, his town is what passes for loose morals in 1946. Bailey pleads for the fantasy to not be real, to go back to reality because that's where his life, where he's earned his person, lives and he is ultimately rewarded for that. He rejects the pain of what he wanted for what he has and found a spiritual epiphany.

On the other hand, Picard unwittingly enters into The Nexus, he finds the perfect life. A wife (that looks exactly like Beverly Crusher but... isn't? I still don't get that), children, his nephew still alive, a beautiful home at Christmas... but its all unearned. And despite the relative ease that staying in the Nexus would allow - a perfect, immortal life bound to your whims and will - Picard knows that it has no value. "This isn't real", he slowly says to Guinan, who then suggests Picard seek out his own version of Clarance - James Kirk.

*You Can't Have Picard Without Kirk

John Adams famously said "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." and that is basically the Kirk / Picard dynamic. While Picard is a refined Renaissance man with great speeches and internal values, he wouldn't have existed at all without a cowboy, rolled-shirt-sleeve intergalactic badass like Jim Kirk. Something that is lost on most of the people my age and younger is that as great as the other Captains are, the reason Kirk is the best is because he represents the bold, youthful enthusiasm of America's dreams being realized during its turbulent times in the 60s. Kirk is, quite literally, modeled after JFK (Captain Archer on the other hand is, quite literally, modeled after George W Bush).

In an unusual bit of writing, Kirk starts off with having the same misgivings about the Nexus as Picard does. He wants to accept what he sees, his old house, the clock he'd given McCoy, his long dead dog Butler. The Nexus, in a "Faustian Deal" type of way, is tempting Kirk with the best moment possible: its the day he decided to go back to Starfleet instead of stay with Antonia, a woman who coos his name from up the bedroom stairs. Now Kirk is left with the same moral dilemma that Picard just went through - do I stay true to who I am (as a person) or do I stay true to what I am (as an example)?

Whats interesting is that Kirk holds on to the fantasy much harder, much to Picard's disbelief. Kirk wants the fantasy to be real - he's farmed out, he's older and the story points of age from Wrath Of Khan have caught up to him. Its only when his horse jumps a gorge that he realizes that this isn't what he'd want: where Picard rejected his fantasy because he didn't earn the family life he was given by the Nexus, Kirk rejects the Nexus because there is no thrill. The thrill is gone. What both men wanted most in life are only given as shadow figures and both arrive to the same conclusion from different angles of perception.

* Generations basically disproves the Star Trek II & III morals by advancing them

At the end of Nick Meyer's Star Trek II, Spock has made the ultimate sacrifice - by exposing himself to lethal amounts of radiation in a sacrifice play to save the ship and its crew. It is probably the most dramatic act of any Trek series and for good reason - Spock had long been a pop icon by this point and to see him act both heroically and totally in character created a greater respect. "The needs of the many, out weight the needs of the few..." says Kirk, and Spock corrects with "Or the one" as he slowly dies.

Star Trek III more or less undoes this. The pathos and pain Kirk has rightly earned in Wrath Of Khan is pushed aside with spiritualism mumbo-jumbo and a wave of a writer's magic wand. This isn't to say that its a bad movie - truthfully, I think the third film is dramatically better written and is in many ways a superior film, but thats for another discussion - but the character growth is very much dialed back, especially since Kirk marginalizes the Death Of Spock by... resurrecting Spock literally.

Even as a child, I thought the "literal resurrection" thing was a huge cop-out. Without knowing how to verbalize it at the time, I felt that the film should've been about finding out the kind of person Spock was and that he was still alive, even in death, through Kirk and his friends. This would be a tremendously difficult thing to write but like Nimoy himself said - unless the movie ends with Spock being alive, people will hate it. Unfortunate but too true; and even if they had made the third film like I proposed here, there would be a huge missing piece of Trek in all future installments.

And thats why Generations is so great: it forces Kirk to die. Not just write him out, but have a meaningful, even meta-level death. He never comes back (unless you count books, and I don't). And to be honest: Kirk dies terribly. Of all the things you'd think would have killed the Captain of the Enterprise over the years - Khan, Kruge, the Doomsday Machine, the salt vampire, Gary Mitchell, the God entity at the center of the galaxy - its instead some jerk scientist who's unwilling to let go of the past - which is in a lot of ways what our heroes are forced to do.

Kirk's end is more or less a pedestrian death; like how Douglas MacArthur died from cirrhosis or George Patton who died paralyzed days after a car accident. The great men of history often die indignantly. No blaze of glory, no charge of the light brigade - in this case, it was just helping complete yet another mission and it happens to go wrong. In a way, that makes it all the more heavy. There is a, well, reality to it all.

Captain Kirk, the man who admitted to cheating death but never facing it, who has lead countless red shirts to die in various scenarios both legitimate (name them yourself) and not (I'll go out on a limb and recount the TOS episode "Obsession") finally completes his journey by doing what every great General does: leads by example. This is especially poignant since his death affirms Picard's character arc. Kirk shows Picard how to die and that its not something to be feared or saddening. Just look how Picard acts when he finds out his brother and nephew die versus his thoughts when picking through the crashed Enterprise bridge at the end: he is at peace, despite the fact that he's basically picking through his own burned-to-the-ground home as an echo of his brother's vineyard. The final dialogue exchange is also telling:

Picard: Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal.

Riker: Speak for yourself sir, I plan to live forever.

Riker hasn't learned the lesson himself. Maybe he's next? Or perhaps its just youthful arrogance.

* Generations was right, the JJ Abrams reboot is wrong

The cusp of Generations is that life goes on, even after death. That people will continue to be people, no matter how many tragedies pile up and how many horrible people plot against the greater good.

Unfortunately, the Abrams reboots are little more than window dressing. Putting aside the basic Hollywood reason that all reboots should exist simply as grave robbery for the sake of a dollar, the 2009 movie's overarching point is "you CAN go home again" and what's so infuriating is that you can't. No one can. Short of time-traveling back to the late 60s and hiring the same writers, Star Trek as it was is just that - as it was. And the new films exist more as brand acknowledgement (Kirk, Spock, names we're familiar with) and not as new ways to tell stories but old ways to ruin what was once singular. Look no further than the fact that the films want to be reboots and start fresh but are also drowned in references to the original timeline.

If Generations is the sad, stoic funeral of a family member, the reboot movies are the loud, obnoxious five year old who doesn't know what a funeral is, doesn't know what is going on and definitely doesn't want to be there.

* Generations is about reverence as much as letting go

A lot of people like Star Trek VI. I'm not really one of them anymore. Despite probably the best looking bridge in any Trek appearance, some fine acting and a great bad guy - its nothing more than a Scooby Doo episode. Kirk and McCoy are the Shaggy and Scooby of the story, with Spock left behind like Fred at the Mystery Machine and when they figure out whos behind the plot, they even take a rubber mask off the assassin.

What I did like about it is the themes. Putting aside the heavy-handed "Hey, this is the Soviet Union dissolving", the fact that it has the gall to say "It's time to out your toys away" to the characters - Spock all but says this, calmly musing if the crew is too old to be of any use anymore - at least acknowledges that as much good as any one person or groups of people can do, they only last so long for the next great generation to come along. Undiscovered Country touches on this briefly, perhaps more eloquently, where as Generations makes it its case to prove.

(As an aside, its pretty obvious that the closing credits for STVI was the jumping off point for the music tone for Generations. Both have a sense of reverence and reflection to them that is lacking in subsequent scores - and for good reason: these two films are about looking back, not forward.)

And ultimately, Generations is about letting go. Its about moving on. When TNG was announced in 1986, a lot of old Trek fans cried foul because, well, how dare they make a series without the original characters. How dare they do something new? And this film, in part, is a reaction to that response. Its saying "move on", and I suppose in a way, "grow up". In the end, Kirk had to do that and like Picard, we should follow that example.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Though this film's twists are a badly kept secret, those who have not seen the movie may find spoilers written within this review. Please be advised.

I won't bore you with the history that details my long adoration of Star Trek. I am as stereotypical as they come, straight down to having action figures and a tricorder toy when I was growing up. I was the TNG generation, but have since happily extended it to every branch of the franchise save Voyager which just never much connected with me. That being said and you knowing where I come from, let us move on.

I didn't *hate* Star Trek Into Darkness and that's really the most praise I can find for it. I suppose that is a step-up considering everyone alive knows I thought the last film was a train wreck for various reasons both legitimate and not. But yes, I went in expecting it to be the science fiction Ishtar and found a mildly distracting summer movie with no brains in its head.

If you saw the last film, its really more of the same. They minimized the weakest points of the 2009 film (Scotty's alien buddy is mostly absent this time, thank the fuck Christ) and adapted the characters into more formed if not complete figures that have some semblance of their original characters (which leads one to ask why bother rebooting?)

This time around, the caper is that someone has blown up an archive in San Francisco and later kills one of Kirk's friends. Kirk swears vengeance against this man - a traitor named Harrison - and races to the man's hideout first to kill, then changing his mind to arrest him. All is not as it seems, as Harrison reveals himself to be a pawn of Starfleet's brass and is in fact Khan (originally played my Ricardo Montlebon in the original series and Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan) who turns the tables on both Kirk and Starfleet to his own ends.

Its not a particularly clever plot or anything especially convincing past its typical dialogue sequences in an attempt to justify the special effects.

(I will say this one more time: liking the 2009 movie does not make you a Trekkie/Trekker. Stop that! The 2009 movie is to Star Trek what the Peter Cushing films are to Dr Who. In the end, you are a Trek-loving person based only on the time you have put into it, just like every other fandom, which is populated by die hards and fair-weather fans alike.)

The biggest strength I can find with it is that despite the BIG VILLAIN REVEAL (stomps foot three times) half way through the film - the film isn't a Star Trek II remake. It has more to do with my favorite Original Series episode "Obsession", where Kirk hunts down a sentient cloud vapor thats been killing people for years. Its a thin Moby Dick analogy, which the franchise will overuse as the years ago on but unlike the rest of its incarnations, Kirk actually learns something in this film and in that TOS episode. The big moral is basically "your desire for revenge will be what undoes everything else" and its learned by more than one character in this film. And thats something that should be applauded as its actual character growth and less about yet another action scene.

That is... if it was written by anyone else.

The writers on these last two Trek movies are akin to surgeons who opens you up, poke around to find the problem, doesn't fix or change anything and then refuses to stitch you up. Robert Orci, Damon Lindelof and Alex Kurtzman have every idea of what they want to do but no idea how to go about it. The result is an intriguing first half that explosively decompresses in the second half. Once the audience finds out that Harrison is Khan, it comes apart in such a spectacular fashion, I am at a loss to think of an equal. First off, and perhaps most importantly, theres no reason for it to *actually* be Khan, The writers essentially robbed themselves of creating their first "heavy" character (Lets face it, Nero in 2009 was a very bad/stupid foil and is a thinly cloaked attempt to legitimize the reboot by using a TNG bad guy) by making him the most recognized villain in the series (who is suddenly British? Why? ask people with functioning synapses) and thus robbing it of any individuality. There is no reason for Khan in the story except to pander to people who sort of know who he is but not enough to be angry about it (As someone else brilliantly pointed out: see also General Zod in Superman movies). Its the writing equivalent of product promotion.

There is also a 9/11 analogy involved this time around. Basically that the events of the previous movie push Starfleet into being a more military force and later on there is a ship that crashes into a city and so on. Now, how each person deals with this sort of plot point is on them but for me, it doesn't work. Its many years too late and its blundered about as badly as it was in 2006's Superman Returns. The United States no longer self-identifies with the 9/11 events in so much as needing direct analogy; we're in a post-9/11 world, not a current one. And so, as art should be a product of its time, I'm at a loss as to what the meaning was to do this. A good friend of mine suggested this film was about how the events of 9/11 didn't matter as much as our response to it - a point which I agree on - but even then, its a point which is nearly a decade too old. Why are we being told this *now*? And its especially redundant since an entire season of Enterprise dealt with this in 2003. They're ten years too late once again.

(And for those keeping score, the three writers behind this newest film are responsible for the following: Cowboys & Aliens, Prometheus, the Lost TV series, the Michael Bay Transformers series, The Island, The Legend Of Zorro and one of them produced the horrible movie Eagle Eye. Has the human imagination ever before produced such a wasteland of unmitigated shit? Coleman Francis's films are suddenly looking a bit better.)
 
As to the bad guy in this film, and I realize that I'm against the grain on this but Cumberpatch was awful. He over enunciates every word, acting only with how he moves his mouth. When Hugo Weaving did this for the Matrix movies, it was with a bit of camp in mind but this is played straight and without anything "behind it". This time, it reminded me a lot of Bruce Payne's bad guy in the hilariously awful Dungeons & Dragons movie: overly preening and as threatening as a case of indigestion. I am not threatened because someone has a deep voice, I am threatened by *presence*, which this character (and actor, by proxy) had none of. Kahn in the original incarnation was more about physicality and intellect while Benedict is simply a talking metrosexual head. As a character and as a bit of acting, Into Darkness understands nothing about what Khan is suppose to be - which is telling of the story as a whole. If you can't get the villain right, wheres the jeopardy? (Hollywood: when guys go to an action movie, the villain shouldn't be someone your girlfriend finds attractive. We're not threatened by boyish men whos faces and jawlines look as streamlined as a speedboat. Character actors with years of experience on stage and screen carry way more weight than a thirty-something model beauty. Remember William Sadler in Die Hard 2? Or what about Christopher Walken? )

And I walked out of the theater thinking of that line from Star Trek VI: "Is it possible, that we two, you and I, have become so old and inflexible that we have outlived our usefulness?".

With these last two films defining the series (and directed by someone who has repeatedly said isn't into Star Trek either) I do not know if Star Trek is "my thing" anymore. I don't think I can identify or even agree with the story choices and writing style these films are going in. To borrow from a Chris Hedge's book subtitle, these films seen to be "the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle". Yes, this film did have something to it - something to actually SAY - but it wasn't nearly enough; the movies before 2009 (well, perhaps not Nemesis or First Contact, we can argue about that later) had stronger moral statements. This is more about "lets make things explode in space and if we have time, we can squeeze some moral stuff in". The message is the thing, always - and though it had more message than the last film, that isn't nearly enough to call it Star Trek either.

I'm not as angry as I was when I left the theater in 2009 but maybe I've simply grown so disappointed, anything would look better now?

That Time I Wrote To Susan Cooper And She Replied

Some back story: Susan Cooper is the greatest living fantasy writer in the world. Forget Rowling or George R.R. Martin; thats like comparing a candlestick to a star. She's been compared in the same breath to Tolkien and Lewis. Her "Dark Is Rising" cycle is written for young adults but also asks of a working knowledge of Arthurian Myth, Norse Mythology and Celtic Mythology. It is, in no small way, exceedingly literate, especially for such a young audience. Most kids hated reading the (first) book in 7th grade English while I completed the entire series in mere months.

(I was once an incredible reader. By the fifth grade, I had been tested as having a "post-college reading level" and would tear through science fiction novels three or four at a time, often finishing a book a week and once finishing an entire novel in under three hours. Now? I'm lucky if I read two books a YEAR.)

Anyway, when I was writing to John Williams a while back I stumbled upon the notion of writing to Mrs Cooper as well, since her novels served to fill a very important part of my growing up. My letter follows, then her reply which I promptly received merely a week later...

===

Dear Mrs Cooper,

I consider it the privilege of a life time to have the chance to write to you. I’m a little giddy to be honest because I had no idea you accepted mail. Along with Robert E. Howard, I don’t think there is a writer who had a greater influence on not only my reading but in how I perceive the world around me.

I first read The Dark Is Rising cycle back in middle school, which is now half my lifetime away. I cannot say how it happened into my hand, save either magical means or (perhaps) my mother feeding me any book she could find. Stomping around with a copy of “Le Morte d'Arthur” strapped to my back by grade seven, she was hard-pressed to find anything that I found up to snuff. To say that your books agreed with me would be an insult to their power; I can say with some certainty I finished the entire cycle in under two months. I was a hellion for reading, something I seem to have lost with age and a full-time job.

And with age comes a certain cynicism and cynicism is now at a premium in this era. Everything is a rehash, reboot, recycle. What little I’ve experienced of Harry Potter made my insides twist like I’d eaten bad oysters. Movies are increasingly tedious and predictable with few morals and ever-more robots with machine guns. I look at how a generation behind me is experiencing what passes for art or writing or music and I am reminded of the subtitle to a Chris Hedges book – “The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”.

And so, by proxy, by disliking the cynical – I too have become cynical. Oy gevalt.

I’ve since decided to disconnect (as much as I can) from that frustrating world and, in a sense, partially regress to being a child again. And so I am very pleased to say I’ve sat down with your books this winter and have been enjoying myself immensely, as if for the first time. That young boy that would read about Will Stanton and Bran in front of a bay window during a steady snow is doing the same as an “adult” – though perhaps with a dark porter instead of hot chocolate and Bernard Herrmann instead of Pearl Jam.

It was as if I was meeting childhood friends all over again and the boy who went stomping through acres of woods after a good snowfall or in the blister of summer was still pleased to get lost in something and have an adventure. And it is very strange that something from so far past has as strong a hold on me as Rilke or Neruda or any other writer I discovered in college or elsewhere. Perhaps because the books are about such elemental concepts, they fulfill an elemental desire in all readers? I do not know for certain, only that they do fulfill something deeply unmentionable. And so, perhaps this letter to you is an abject failure - because what I feel and sense about them is so much more than what you're reading. (Please know that this letter is somewhat roughshod and “finished” after so many drafts, that I'm done trying to get it perfect and will concentrate on making it right.)

But in any case, I cannot thank you nearly enough for what you have brought to my life twice now. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. It is a great comfort to find that powerful writing remains timeless and as sweet as ever.

Enclosed you’ll find a SASE though feel no obligation to use it; it is there merely as option. Again, thank you ever so much. You’ve deeply changed this one person’s life for the better.

Most sincerely, 

Justin

===

Dear Justin,

Thank you very much for your letter, and your kind words about the books. If your mother did send you to them, I should thank her too.

Don't give up hop for your generation and its successors. Yes, theres always a lot of rubbish out there, much of it best-selling, but there always was. In all the arts, theres always a lot of candy, which gives pleasure, relieves depression - and then vanishes. But also theres always a little of the other stuff, which lasts.

I was a judge for the National Book Awards this* year, for "young people's" books of course. We read 325 books (each submission costing its publisher $150 I believe) and most of them were candy. But I kept about 35 of them for my grandchildren to read, we had five finalists, and just one book (the winner) really gave me hopes for the future: it was William Alexander's "Goblin Secrets". His first novel. So now I'm wondering how on earth I find the people like him who are out there in the worlds of music and painting - but I do know they exist, quietly, as they always have and will. 

So hang in there - keep looking! And thank you so much for being on the wavelength of the "Dark Is Rising" books.

With best wishes, 

Susan Cooper

* well, no - last year!