William Shatner

I just finished reading Up Till Now, the autobiography of William Shatner, probably best known as Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series in 1966-68, but also from “T.J.  Hooker”, “Rescue 911”, Priceline.com, and most recently Denny Crane in “Boston Legal” – which I have to admit, I’ve seen ZERO episodes of (yes, and I’m a lawyer).  I’ve already covered “Star Trek”, and his career is far too varied to cover everything, so I’ll just touch on some brief topics.

Career.  Born in 1931, in Montreal, Canada.  He started out in local theater, much Shakespeare, on stage, before going to NYC to seek a professional career.  He did various different TV shows and movies, some better than others, before Star Trek came around, and has done various shows since Star Trek, plus a fair amount of movies, far beyond the Star Trek movies themselves.   

He’d been criticized over the years for being indiscriminate in the roles, both TV and movies, that he’s taken.  To him it’s work, which is what actors do, and what might be considered a minor or bullshit role can lead to something much better… plus it pays the mortgage and keeps him busy.  That includes commercials; when his idol Edward G. Robinson, revealed that commercial work helped pay for his impressive art collection, Shatner realized there was no shame in an otherwise serious actor doing commercials. 

He’s had several wives – including one, Nerine, who drowned in their swimming pool (she was an alcoholic) – but is happily married now (sorry, ladies).

            Shatner took all sorts of risks, erring on the side of doing something stupid or risky rather than chosing to miss out.  In fact, it was his critically panned Transformed Man album which got him his highly paid and successful Priceline.com gig.  This is a man who throws himself 100% into any role, and into life itself, never letting failures or setbacks discourage him for long.  He even remarried after the shock and heartache of his second wife Nerine’s death, though it took him some time before he was ready, and considerable effort to get his third wife, Elizabeth, to even take him seriously as a suitor, much less a husband.

Incubus.  One of the only films in Esperanto, the so-called universal language.   It’s in black & white, dating from 1965, before “Star Trek”.  He plays a good man, Marco, who is chased by a beautiful demoness, Kia, who is trying to seduce him and claim his soul for the devil.  But she falls in love with him, and her sister sends an incubus (male demon) to destroy them both.  The lighting and music is amazing, I actually enjoyed the film so much I bought it on DVD.  This is pretty underrated (even by Shatner himself).

Up Till Now.  His autobiography.  Amazingly funny – far more so than books written by comedians.  As you can imagine, he covers his childhood, the development of his acting career, and spends some time – less than you would expect, oddly enough – on “Star Trek”.  Yes, he does describe his famous SNL appearance.  What’s remarkable about this, and what kept me reading it nonstop, was his unusual style.  He’ll zip off into some tangent, very similar to “The Family Guy”, and come back, but it’s always to prove a pertinent point.  He’s also very self-deprecating, as we’ve come to expect from him by now.  Rather than an endless litany of impressive accomplishments (“start at the beginning,” said the Mad Hatter, “and when you get to the end....stop.”) he zips around and takes us on a roller coaster ride all along the way.  You never know where he’ll go next.  I suppose it’s a fitting microcosm of his own life:  unpredictable but somehow always entertaining.

The Transformed Man. His 1968 album of spoken-word performances, including “Mr Tamborine Man” (Dylan), “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (Beatles) and “How Insensitive” (Jobim & Moraes).  Somewhat pedantic, in fact very similar to Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues.  Yet again, it shows that, in many ways like Kirk himself, Shatner is fearless in taking on projects which might reflect poorly on him, or be misunderstood or ridiculed.  Maybe it didn’t work, maybe it’s unintentional comedy, but it’s certainly interesting – just like the man himself.

We Must Obey

A few weeks ago I was entering the parking garage in my apartment building, and to my immense disgust and frustration, the woman in front of me was going at a glacially slow pace, I mean REALLY slow.  It reached the point that I actually honked my horn at her, and her response was to point angrily at the speed limit sign in the garage, which reads “5 MPH”.  Talk about clueless.

First off, 5 miles per hour is how fast an automatic transmission-equipped car goes if you take your foot off the brake and the gas pedal.  It’s that slow creep which is appropriate for bumper-to-bumper traffic.  For a parking garage?  Come on.  I can see not shooting through the garage like a rocket, as people come and go, both pedestrians and other cars, so something like 15-25 mph is a sensible limit.  But 5 mph is idiotic.

What is with people who insist on obeying laws, no matter how idiotic?  What possesses them to turn off what little brains they have and militantly refuse to exercise independent judgment?

I’ve heard a prosecutor argue, when faced with the issue of obeying what are clearly inane, archaic, or obsolete laws, that giving ordinary citizens the prerogative to choose which laws to obey, and which to flaunt, would result in chaos and mayhem.  Nice try, but no cigar.  The speed limit is already an example of a law 85% of the population consistently ignores.  The police have a policy of not pulling anyone over for less than 15 mph over the limit, when theoretically they’re within their rights to pull over anyone exceeding the speed limit; so even cops realize the speed limit is arbitrarily low.  Yet somehow, the scofflaw speeders have not decided that, “hey, I’m violating the speed limit, why not rob, steal, cheat, rape, or murder??”  Failure to enforce zero tolerance for speeding has not resulted in a lawless society.  What these prosecutors fail to do is to give credit to ordinary citizens to distinguish bullshit laws (speed limits) from sensible laws (murder) – which we find, in fact, is a distinction which ordinary citizens are competent of making.  To be fair, I do recall that the Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office expressly declared that they would not be actively enforcing Virginia’s archaic fornication law (making consensual sex between unmarried people illegal) until recently when it was finally (!) repealed.  Maybe there are some sensible prosecutors after all, since we already have sensible non-murdering speeders, myself included.

We usually associate such mindless obedience to authority with Germans.  Yet (as I noted much earlier) even SS personnel refused to obey commands.  Himmler himself issued a ruling that no one would be forced to participate in “eliminations” of the Jewish population.  So even the Germans, even in the SS, could think independently and refuse to participate in these atrocities. To be sure, conscientious SS officers and men were an unfortunately rare minority, otherwise the Holocaust would not have occurred.  I simply bring it up as an extreme example.

The Milgram Experiment was a famous demonstration of this, disturbingly closer to home.  In 1961 Stanley Milgram conducted experiments with US college students, the results of which were published in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority.  He set up college students to test other college students, the latter to answer various questions, receiving a shock for a wrong answer, the strength thereof increased with every wrong answer.  After a few such wrong answers, the subject began making painful noises, then ominously ceased responding.  The true subjects (those administering the test) were told to continue the tests even after the responder began showing signs of extreme pain.  Results?  65% of the subjects obeyed orders to the full strength of shocks.  Although many subjects had misgivings, ultimately they obeyed orders.  Even after the Holocaust, even in the US, so-called normal people could be counted upon to obey orders even when it involved injuring or even killing innocent people.

Some people seem to take solace in security, in a lack of choice, in being told what to do by others, in being relieved of the responsibility of thinking independently, of exercising their own judgment.  To me, the sole legitimate role for such people in a civilized, democratic society is the military, and even then, solely in enlisted ranks.  They have turned off their brains, refuse to think, and turned themselves, voluntarily, by default, into nothing better than robots or animals.  Let them put on a uniform, carry a weapon, and mindlessly obey orders, and let the independent thinkers in the military come home.  Enough. 

Pride & Prejudice

Another example of "love at first hate", which I hadn't dealt with when I wrote that blog.  Here is its own blog....

Book.  Written by “Stone Cold” Jane Austen in 1813.  I was going accuse her of ripping off Dickens, but since David Copperfield came out much later than P&P, the “Steerforth steals Emily” part was probably ripped off from “Wickham steals Lydia”, not the other way around.  However, the plot is very much ripped off from Shakespeake’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Normally I tend to “read the book”, but the BBC adaptation was so long, I can hardly imagine anything they left out.  Ideally an annotated version would be best, which would explain the subtleties behind the scenes (like why earning 5,000 pounds a year was a big deal in early nineteenth century England, or why a daughter’s elopement would ruin an entire family).

Plot:  I’ll keep to the bare essentials, as there are some subplots and characters (mostly Collins and Lady Catherine) which really don’t bear on the main story.

The Bennett family, somewhere in England in the early nineteenth century, has a gang of daughters it wants to marry off to rich husbands.  Mrs. Bennett is kind of a twit, egregiously aggressive at trying to “catch” husbands for her daughters, whereas Mr. Bennett is laid back, comically so – he really doesn’t give a shit, but he’s helpful in his own way (probably so Mrs. Bennett will SHUTUP).  For some reason the parents refer to each other as Mr. & Mrs. Bennett and not by their names or terms of affection.  The eldest two are Jane and Elizabeth.  Jane falls in love at first sight with a “Mr. Bingley”, a handsome doofus who moved into the spacious estate next door.  His dour, arrogant, taciturn friend Darcy, however, will have nothing to do with any of the Bennett girls, and in particular he refers to Elizabeth as “not handsome enough to tempt me”. (Funny how no one suggested that his wholesale rejection of women might indicate some other type of preference....)

            Jane and Bingley hit it off immediately, truly love at first sight.  As with Benedick and Beatrice in MAAN, Elizabeth and Darcy spar off in witty exchanges, with mutual contempt, throughout most (!) of the rest of the story.  Elizabeth grows fond of a “Mr Wickham”, an officer who claims that Darcy cheated him out of a fortune.  Much to the Bennetts’ horror and dismay, Bingley moves back to London, apparently indefinitely. To make matters worse, Darcy admits to Elizabeth that he was behind persuading Bingley to move to London, breaking up the romance between Jane and Bingley.  So he’s arrogant, petulant, and a scoundrel. For his part, Darcy warms to Elizabeth, realizing that she is attractive and has a brain – and is as strong-willed as he is.  However, he proposes to her in a pompous, arrogant, and spectacularly poorly worded fashion, prompting her to respond that he’d be the last man she’d ever consider marrying (aside from Mr. Collins, of course). 

            Although never specifically rejected by Elizabeth, Wickham runs off with Lydia, the youngest Bennett, causing a huge scandal.  Darcy kills two birds with one stone by (A) revealing to Elizabeth the truth behind his prior dealings with Wickham, and (B) by “buying” off Wickham, so he marries Lydia and the Bennetts’ honor is maintained.  While he won’t apologize for having broken up Jane & Bingley, he insists that he did not see that Jane’s feelings for Bingley were sincere and could only see Mrs. Bennett’s shameless antics.  Elizabeth also visits Darcy’s estate and all the people there hold him high esteem, describing a man of immense generosity, character and warmth (not to mention super rich) completely at odds with the cold, arrogant asshole he appeared to be at first.

            Later on, however, after Elizabeth has learned all these good things about him and fallen in love with him, Darcy renews his proposal, and this time she accepts, a dramatic turn of events similar to Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.  Just in time for Jane & Bingley to sort out their earlier misunderstanding and renew their love – just as Hero (actually a girl) and Claudio do in Much Ado About Nothing.  It stuns me that P&P should be considered such a classic in its own right when so much of the essential plot is lifted verbatim from Shakespeare.  Anyhow.

            There are a few major differences, however.  P&P lacks the humor and double entendres of Shakespeare.  It also lacks the scheming, behind the scenes, of the other characters who actively conspire to bring Benedick and Beatrice together, by cleverly manipulating the pair into a romance, “despite themselves”.  Pride & Prejudice is somewhat more straightforward and less imaginative than Much Ado About Nothing.    

       

1995 BBC/A&E Miniseries.  This lasts something like 5 (five or six) hours, but it has Colin Firth as Darcy.  The production values are somewhat BBC-ish, as we could expect.  In fact, it looks just as shiny and new as “Fawlty Towers”, “Benny Hill” or “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.  The Elizabeth character is played by Jennifer Ehle.  Actually, I think she did a better job than Keira Knightly, who plays the character in the 2005 film; the problem with Knightly is that she is so stunning, it’s hard to imagine any man writing her off as “not handsome enough to tempt me.”  You really need an actress who, while not being dull, ugly, average, or homely, is a 7 or 8 compared to Knightly’s 9 or 10; in other words, Jennifer Ehle.  Of course, Colin Firth knocks this out of the ballpark.  It was his performance alone which kept my attention for that time.

2005 Movie.  Very well done, and much higher production values, yet it still looked like nineteenth century England.  Donald Sutherland does a remarkable Mr Bennett, with the same easy charm he used as Hawkeye Pierce in the film version of “M*A*S*H” or Professor Jennings in “Animal House” – which also features Karen Allen, a few years before “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.  I mentioned Knightly’s issue above: I can’t fault her acting one bit, it’s just that she’s too pretty for the character.  Benjamin Whitrow (1995) gives Sutherland a good run for his money as Mr Bennett.  I preferred Adrian Lukis as Wickham in the ’95 version, though, over Rupert Friend from the ’05 version; Lukis injects a roguish quality which Friend lacked.  Since both versions were so well done, about the only major advantages of the ’05 film version are the length (less than half the time) and Keira Knightly, who is always dynamite eye candy in any film.

Bridget Jones’s Diary.  An honorable mention needs to go to this film.  Helen Fielding expressly admits that she completely ripped off P&P for this, not merely the plot but also the name Darcy.  And they were so impressed with Colin Firth from the BBC P&P that they knew right away who they wanted to play Mark Darcy; sure enough he plays the pompous, arrogant stuck up civil rights barrister just as he did Darcy in P&P.  Hugh Grant is the Wickham character (Daniel Cleaver), though here the relationship turns sexual instead of being dancing and flirting in P&P, and Cleaver doesn’t run away with Bridget Jones’ younger sister (she doesn’t have any).  The Bennetts never split up in P&P, and Bridget has a much different personality than Elizabeth Bennett: not intelligent and proud, but more like very real, down to earth, saying whatever pops into her head without any thought as to the consequences (verbally incontinent, as Darcy puts it, verbal diarrhea as she puts it).  Still lovable, though, so we can see why Darcy falls in love with her.  “BJD” is a far more original adaptation of P&P than P&P is of MAAN.

Fever Pitch.  Ok, while I’m at it, I might as well get this Colin Firth rubbish out of my system once and for all. It’s based on a book by Nick Hornby, the author of “High Fidelity” (which became the movie with John Cusack and Jack Black).  Never mind the stupid Red Soxx, Jimmy Fallon, or Drew Barrymore, THIS was the original, done in 1997.   Colin Firth plays Paul Ashworth, the school teacher obsessed with Arsenal, the top tier Premier League team from north London who haven’t won the “league cup” since 1971.  The movie takes place in 1989, when they finally follow up their 1971 victory.  Some stuck up blond English chick (Ruth Gemmell, in her most important role ever!) plays the fellow school teacher, his girlfriend, who has to endure his obsession.   After some resistance, she finds herself even watching the games or checking the scores in his absence (her roommate claims, “it’s a virus!!”).  Of course they fall in love and have a normal relationship despite his mania for everything associated with Arsenal, including (but not limited to) moving into an apartment next to Highbury, the stadium.  Although he’s not arrogant and stuck up in this film – no longer a Darcy type of character -  he’s still moody and negative, convinced that Arsenal will go all the way to the finals, get his hopes up, and then choke at the last moment, which in this case is the second leg of the aggregate, so they have to beat Liverpool by two goals... IN Liverpool.  I originally rented it simply for the Arsenal connection, but liked the movie so much I bought it.  Oh, and Mark Strong, who's been playing plenty of villains lately, is here as Paul's BFF Steve.  Quality.

Scorpions - Wacken '06 - Speedy's Coming w/ Uli Jon Roth

Scorpions performing Speedy's Coming from their Fly to the Rainbow album at the Wacken Open Air Festival in 2006. Special guest Uli Jon Roth rejoins the Scorpions to play one of the Scorpions' first big hits.

Natasha Bedingfield - These Words

Natasha Bedingfield These Words
(C) 2004 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT (UK) Limited Another one I saw at the gym (never heard so much of a note of the music). The animated boom boxes are stupid, but she is stunning, and most important is the great view of Copacabana and Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.... (for some reason the opening shot of Botafogo is reversed).

Beyoncé and Shakira - Beautiful Liar

Beyoncé and Shakira Beautiful Liar
(C) 2007 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT I saw this at the gym: whoa, Shakira! No, wait, it's Beyonce! No, wait.. it's BOTH OF THEM! (died and gone to Heaven!). If forced to choose, I'd be like the donkey starving between two piles of hay (though these two women are considerably hotter than a pile of hay)

Immortality Revisited

Back in high school, I had my first sleepless night contemplating mortality:  what happens when we die – Heaven? Hell? oblivion? - and the fact that (apparently) there is nothing we can do to stop it.  I managed to put that monster to sleep, for some time, but recently he woke up again.  My father’s sudden death in December 2004 probably did more than anything else to resurrect this monster.

 The mortality monster presented me with two additional blows, thought-wise.  1. I’m 39.  We usually think of age 50 as “middle age”, but that assumes a life expectancy of 100, well above the 75 year standard life expectancy for males in industrial nations such as the US.  By that token, I’m already middle-aged.  John Rutsey, the original drummer for Rush, recently died at age 55, meaning he was middle aged at 27, and was probably unaware of the milestone on his 27^th birthday.  2.  If we die eventually, what is the point of all our efforts?  Even our own children (if we have them) will eventually die, our grandchildren, etc. – our entire “line”.  All our possessions, our accomplishments, everything we worked so hard for all our lives, down to NOTHING, absolutely nothing, with the laziest slacker, the most productive saint, the prince and pauper, and the vilest of criminals and murderers all equalized in the oblivion of death.  It seems the happier our all-too-brief lives are, the more we have to fear the inevitable loss thereof that death will bring.  So the only solution to a fear of death is to have a life so dull, miserable, or even painful, that death is actually welcome and not feared.  Brilliant, we have two choices:  happy life with fear of death, or shitty life with no fear of death.  Is that it?

So it should come to no surprise that mankind has sought, for ages, immortality, whether in reality or fiction. 

Vampires.  One of the more glamorous, or horrifying, “solutions” to this topic, are vampires.  First Bram Stoker, then Bela Lugosi (Hungarian, not Romanian, though Transylvania qualifies as both), and most recently the “gay” vampires of Anne Rice (yes, I know that as “vampires” they’re not gay, but funny that Lestat seemed to prefer drinking the blood of male vampires almost exclusively...and the company of David Talbot).  Of course, vampires suffer the drawbacks of having to suck blood constantly and only go about at night, which cuts back on the usefulness of immortality.

Highlander.  “There can be only one.”  Personally, I was never a big fan of these movies, or the TV show.  Christopher Lambert, a French actor, portraying Connor McLeod, a Scotsman, whereas the true Scotsman, Sean Connery, portrays an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard (Ramirez).  No one ever seems to explain how these “Immortals” came to be so, or why there can be only one.  We just have to enjoy the Queen soundtrack and go along for the ride.   However, they were not vampires and could exist in daylight, with the only drawback being apparently sterile.  Is that it?? Hey, I’ll take that.

Futurama.  Matt Groening “solves” the mortality issue by time travel (Fry) and also keeping heads (not only brains) inside jars.  However, this sort of immortality would appear to be disturbing: the heads are sentient and conscious in real time, but cannot move under their own power.  The sole exception was when Nixon managed to buy Bender’s body from him.  This is all more of a ludicrous plot device to get contemporary celebrities into a time frame of the 31^st century.

I Will Fear No Evil.  Robert Heinlein, one of my favorite science fiction authors, took a stab in this direction in this book.  A Montgomery Burns type old man, filthy rich and obnoxiously misanthropic, manages to get his brain transplanted into the body of his young (female) secretary and experiences a second youth, albeit as a woman.  The fix turns out to be quite an adventure, though ultimately short-lived.

Time Enough For Love.  Heinlein clearly hits the mortality issue head on, and here he takes another stab, this time considerably more serious and actually (as discussed below) remarkably more plausible.  The Howard Families selectively breed for longevity, but also use certain periodic rejuvenation treatments which detoxify the body and reverse aging.  They therefore appear considerably younger than their chronological ages.  As noted in Methuselah’s Children, these treatments, though, are exclusively for the Howard Family group and not available to the population at large, which in that book forces the group to escape Earth to avoid uncertain – but certainly unpleasant – consequences at the hands of a jealous and angry population at large.  Lazarus Long is the most important, and longest-lived, member of the family.  Among other things he goes back in time to 1916, engages in a romantic and sexual relationship with his own mother, Maureen (the mother’s side of the story is told in To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Heinlein’s last book) and even volunteers (against his better judgment) for the AEF and goes off to France in 1917.  Time Enough For Love is one of the best of these series of books, as it has longevity/rejuvenation, time travel, Lazarus Long, and LOTS of sex.  The Cat Who Walks Through Walls also has many of the same characters, including a husband who discovers that his “younger” wife turns out to be a Howard old enough to be his grandmother.

Ending Aging, by Aubrey de Grey.  In my earlier blog, “Mein Kampf vs. O Alquimista”, I discussed immortality and decided, after some thought, that it must be theoretically impossible.  And the prior examples I gave are all fiction, so they had no hope of convincing me otherwise.  But it turns out that Heinlein was on to something.

            In this book, de Grey discusses various technologies to treat aging, and makes an astonishing series of arguments:
            A.  No one dies of “old age”, per se; we simply die of some disease or other brought about by either the overaccumulation of waste products in our cells or some disease which our weakened immune system could not defeat.  Therefore, defeating aging is twofold: attack and cure diseases (including cancer) and “throw out the trash”.
            B. He mentioned the Howard Family breeding, but clearly that was only half the story.  We’re not talking about merely slowing the aging process, but actually reversing it, by periodically eliminating waste inside cells which the body’s own system (lysosomes) cannot handle, and by replenishing dead cells, which the body cannot replenish itself, through stem cells.  Anyone who reads this book (myself included) will realize how important stem cell research is and how idiotic the opposition to it is.  Maybe Bush doesn’t want to live forever, but I certainly do.
            C. The fight against cancer is a major part of this.  Cancer, in various forms, is one of the most serious killers.  It basically involves mutant cells which overreproduce and crowd out normal cells.  De Grey’s proposed cure involves gene therapy to permanently switch off cells’ ability to reproduce (cancer cells as well as all others), which would have to be introduced after a person reaches some level of physical maturity, and combine this with stem cells to compensate for this.
            D.  At first the treatments will simply extend life; aging will still take its toll, though not as rapidly.  But eventually, possibly within the lifetime of people alive today, treatment of harder-to-fix damage will become practical, giving us what he calls “longevity escape velocity” (LEV), the ability to reverse aging indefinitely.  While he doesn’t want to scare people off by indulging in wild fantasies, let’s face it: LEV could more clearly be described as nothing less than IMMORTALITY, eternal youth.
            De Grey is a biologist, not a science fiction writer.  He certainly knows far more about this than I do, and far more than Heinlein, though from what I can recall, Heinlein had the basic ideas and principles but was light years away from the details.  My own experience in biology ended in high school, so I’m in a poor position to second-guess de Grey, let alone to pick apart the extensive research he cites.  For all I know it may be complete nonsense, each and every study cited taken out of context and deliberately misquoted – or completely fabricated.  Or perhaps he’s right, but simply overoptimistic about various details or the overall timing – they may discover immortality the day after I die (just so long as they discover resurrection!).  But de Grey has made an argument, at last, for real, true, eternal youth, in our lifetimes.  I’ll take false hope over no hope any time.