Lived Long and Prospered: RIP Leonard Nimoy

The following scene is the one that probably solidified Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn as my new favorite movie whilst a lad of 10--a love which, unlike most other childhood loves, has strengthened, not lessened, as the years progressed.  When my Trekkie fandom was oft-tested by the likes of Voyager, Enterprise, Nemesis, and the "Sub-Rosa" episode of TNG, well, this was the film--and this the scene--that always reminded me why I fell for the series in the first place.

And now I'll never be able to watch it the same way again.  RIP Leonard Nimoy.  I have been, and always shall be, your friend.  Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, yours was the most... human.

Requiem on the Final Decade of NBC Comedy

There's an early xkcd cartoon wherein Randolph Munroe pleads with Jim Davis to "Throw off your commercial shackles.  Challenge us.  Go out in a blaze of dadaist glory."  The past decade of NBC sitcoms--in particular The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Rec--has felt like that cartoon brought to life.  And it was glorious.  It all ended in flames, with ratings that fell like a meteor and burned so bright that they may have permanently destroyed NBC comedy for good (serious, NBC has formally announced the end of its comedy block this Spring). But it was still glorious.

To a very specific generation--say, folks currently in their mid-20s to mid-30s--this past decade featured some of greatest sitcoms to ever air in our lifetimes.  Now, the ratings of The Office, 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Rec were positively abysmal among all other demographics.  But that's just another way of saying they were too good for this world--and if you were to go strictly off of my Facebook newsfeed and quotes from my college friends, you would have assumed that these were the most popular shows in America.  These were our shows.

And now they're gone.  As in, right now.  Mark your calenders, visit its grave on anniversaries, this is it.  Yes, Community is still set to debut its 6th (and likely final) season on Yahoo! in less than a month, limping across the finish line to its self-imposed #sixseasonsandamovie--but still crossing it.  But for all intents and purposes, the era is over.  I mark today specifically as the end, for last night was the Parks and Rec series finale.  I don't even care that the ending was ridiculously schmaltzy and a blatant series of wish-fulfillment, those characters dang well earned it!

For it's not just Parks and Rec that ended yesterday--it's the end of the decade marked by the debut of the U.S. version of The Office in 2005, the show that would give birth to its spinoff-in-spirit Parks and Rec--that is, before the latter found its own voice as a human cartoon that sang the praises of reckless ambition in the face of a hilariously indifferent world (a fair description of the show's own relationship with its ratings, too).   

The Office for its part pulled off the tricky balance between paying homage to the original, deeply-cynical U.K. version, while still making the show it's own (well, at least for its first 6 seasons, arguably).  Both versions mined the inherent absurdity of the white-collar workplace with funhouse mirrors that distorted to reveal so devastatingly that we laughed just to keep from hurting--but the U.S. version was still somehow able to carry an infusion of genuine, unmistakeable American optimism.

I also argue that The Office, in addition to begetting Parks and Rec, created a spiritual home for that madcap, mile-a-minute parody and deconstruction of NBC itself, 30 Rock--which in turn cleared the way for its spirit animal Community, wherein the lowly community college paradoxically became backdrop for the most brilliant show on television.

There was a brief stretch in, say, 2009-2010, when all 4 were on at once Thursday nights--never were all 4 at their peak at once, but it was nevertheless just shy of a perfect night of television.  We didn't know what we had.  But how glorious that we had it at all. 

Now, these were 4 completely different shows--but what they shared was a rapid-fire joke delivery that trusted you to get it without the laugh track, that rewarded your intelligence, and that allowed you to still genuinely care about these characters, too.  These were the shows about the losers--but also about how the losers can learn to grow, to be better.  Each of these shows violated the iron-clad rule of sitcoms that the status quo must always be maintained at all costs, that no one can improve, and for that they were punished terribly in the ratings--and, like the characters they portrayed, these sitcoms became better than their approval ratings.

They were also all fearless, never afraid to go big concept, big ideas, or big budgets that far exceeded what their meager ratings justified. And while NBC execs no doubt tore out their hair and gnashed their teeth at their last place numbers, those of my generation who were on these shows' wave-length laughed uproariously and gratefully!  Now the flame has burned too brightly to last, the inevitable finale has come, it is the end of NBC comedy--but my oh my, what a way to go!

These were the capstone shows, the ones who exceeded even the dizzying heights of such old NBC classics as Cheers, The Cosby Show (ugh...), Friends, and, yes, I dare even say Seinfeld!  After this last decade, NBC comedy can progress no further.  Perhaps at a certain subconscious level, NBC knew this as well, and figured that if their best days (ratings-wise) were behind them, then they might as well finish last a blaze of Dadaist glory--and heavens be praised, they did, they did!

Hunt For Red October Revisited

Praise be to Netflix streaming, I suppose; for I just spent what spare moments I had last week rewatching Hunt for Red October for the first time since a wee knee-high.

I dare say this was the first "serious," "grown-up" flick I saw as a child--and even then, it was just peaking from behind my Dad while he and some friends watched it on VHS one Thanksgiving weekend (presumably while waiting for some game to start).  So young was I and so undeveloped my capacity for abstract thought, that the scariest part for me was when a Russian sailor laughed at Jack Ryan for "turning green" as he shared a cigarette--for I did not grasp that this was but a joke, a metaphor, that he was not physiologically turning green in some horrid Lynchian nightmare.

It later became one of my favorite films by Middle School (which was also likely the last time I've seen it).  Such was its impression on me, that for years I assumed the film's score was the actual anthem of the Soviet Union.

Re-watching it today was, like all revisits of childhood memories, an anxious experience.  For as we all know, some youthful artifacts are best left untouched, as they all too often can't stand up to the harsh light of adulthood.

Loading Red October in particular was especially fraught.  For starters, the film is arguably most notorious today for casting a Scotman as a Russian, one who scarcely even tries to affect an accent, as though they thought Americans were too dumb to tell the difference anyways.  What other glaring flaws would become obvious this time through?

Then there's the sheer dated nature of the subject matter.  When the book was first published, the Cold War was still in full swing; but by the 1990 adaptation, the Soviet Union was actively collapsing.  By the following year, the film's geopolitics would be laughably outdated--and how much more so by 2015?

Likewise, author Tom Clancy felt increasingly trapped in amber.  His '90s books, rather than moving beyond the Cold War world, seemed to endlessly grasp at  new ways to revive it--whether by switching the threat to China, or even just bringing back good ol' fashioned Soviet Russia.  (It's like he was nostalgic for the Cold War and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation!)

Worse still, he realized that he was now a "brand," and so then promptly began diluting it through cheap video game adaptations, "co-authored" novels that farmed out his actual writing to formulaic hacks, and dreadful new novel series (I seem to recall an especially dire one called "NetForce,"  wherein an FBI task-force with VR helmets battled ex-KGB rogue agents in cyberspace, in the futuristic year of 2010; it couldn't have been more '90s if it had been sporting a pair of JNCOs).

By 9/11, many folks openly wondered why Clancy, this former insurance agent perpetually stuck in the Cold War, was on TV giving "expert" counter-terrorist advise.  He sadly seemed a fit symbol of the times, as the Bush administration likewise invaded Iraq as though it were still the Cold War, as though organized land invasions of sovereign states could defeat asymmetric terrorist cells and tribal rivalries.  I feared Clancy's first film adaptation would similarly feel painfully out of touch with our present world.

What's more, I was raised in a fairly conservative home, and when I last saw Red October, still self-identified as one; but I now lean firmly left, to say the least.  Tom Clancy, to put it mildly, did not.  Would this film now come off to me as a giant cringe-fest, as some ridiculously jingoist, self-congratulatory, oblivious, patriotic wankfest?  I began to wonder if I should just catch up with the latest season of Parks and Rec instead.

But I soldiered on and rewatched it anyways. Glad I did.  Here's what I found:

• The score should have been the anthem of the Soviet Union (and Russia don't have a bad one to begin with).
• I was shocked by how many lines I still remembered, viz: "Most things in here don't react well to bullets." "I'm a politician, and that means when I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops." "Andrei, you've lost another sub?"
• I'd forgotten that there was a time in the '80s and early-'90s when James Earl Jones was well-nigh inescapable.  From Darth Vader to Field of Dreams to Mufasa, he was the center of gravity for some of my earliest childhood cinema.  I guess the whole black-man-as-the-voice-of-god role has been ceded to Morgan Freeman nowadays; but before Freeman it was Jones.
• Dr. Beverly Crusher from TNG makes a cameo as an English nanny in the opening scenes.  That is all.
• Movies used to be much better paced, and far more efficient in building characters in shorts amount of time.  Red October is a good example of that.  It's a lost art that Hollywood needs to recover.
• Sweet mercy, Alex Baldwin looks young here!  It caused me such cognitive dissonance to remember that he is Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock.  Especially given what a raging liberal Baldwin is in real life.
• But then, that was another thing about Red October: Just how...well, not liberal per se it was, but how much of it a liberal could still get behind it.  The hero, you see, is an idealistic young scholar who actually attempts diplomacy first, who assumes the best of his enemy, who reaches out, shoots only as a last resort, tries to save as many lives--yes, even enemy lives--as possible, and who talks down an American naval commander from attacking an enemy sub possibly on its way to nuke the east coast.  Consider, by contrast, how much the Jack Bauer "ticking time bomb" defense is employed today to monstrously defend torture, "extraordinary rendition," and deploying drones to shoot first and ask questions later (even if it turns out to be less an enemy camp than an Afghan wedding). Jack Ryan, this fictional CIA spook dreamed up by an ardent Reaganite conservative, is practically a filthy hippie compared to 21st century America.
• Then there are the reasons for Sean Connery's--er, Capt. Remus'--defection.  As he explains in the final scene, "there are those who believe that we should attack the United States first. Settle everything in one moment. Red October was built for that purpose."  That is, Remus defects in order to prevent nuclear war.  This hardened Soviet naval captain is a peace-nick at heart.
• Ryan and Remus then bond over the memories of learning to fish from their grandfathers.  The image is clear: we are far more like our enemies than we are different, and we may all be one in the end.  How much more idealistic can you get?
• In one early scene, we learn the political officer on board the Red October is a dirtbag because he snoops through Capt. Ramus' Bible, then justifies himself with "privacy is not a priority of the People's Republic."  Yes, that's right, lack of privacy was once a signifier of an evil dictatorship, of something only the commies did--and not, say, a standard condition of the PATRIOT ACT, the NSA, and over-posting on Facebook.  How far we've come.
• I said earlier that Tom Clancy has a weird nostalgia for the Cold War.  It's even more basic than that: Clancy has a nostalgia for honor in warfare.  Clancy, deep down, I suspect still wishes we had rigged clippers waging noble combat in close-quarters upon the high seas.  Russia and America are not truly enemies in Red October, no--they are only opponents.
• Closely related to that is the sheer competency of all the players in this film.  From Remus and the Red October, to the crew of the USS Dallas figuring out how to track her, to Fred Thompson's navy admiral, to Jack Ryan and Jones' CIA chief, to the on-board KGB saboteur, to the pursuing Russian sub, to Russia just able to innovate silent subs in the first place, this film is a roll-call of uber-competent professionals at the top of their game, making all the right moves at the right time.  Here, people do not capitalize on each others mistakes, since no one makes any--they only out-maneuver each other.  In a cinematic world (not to mention a real world) that is so dominated nowadays by fools, dolts, ignoramuses, and "loveable" losers tripping over their own feet and blundering into success, it is frankly refreshing to see competent adults in charge for a change. 

The Hunt for Red October is still a fossil from a bygone era (the corded phones give that away, if nothing else).  But it's a good fossil, and one well-worth revisiting--not only to remind us how well a film used to be constructed, but also remind us of the values we used to take for granted (or at least pay lip service to) in this country, such as diplomacy, respect, care for human life, privacy, intelligence, and competency.  No matter how dark the literal depths these submarines descend to, the fundamental tone of this film is one of hope, of a quiet assurance that our better selves will win out in the end, that our best impulses will be proven right, that peace will prevail.

Unpopular Opinions

We all have Popular Opinions (e.g. ice cream is delicious, Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars, Phantom Menace the worst, The Simpsons should have been cancelled by now, etc).  We also all have Unpopular Opinions.  In the spirit of confession, here are some of mine:

Man of Steel is a pretty good movie, and most of the criticisms lobbed against it are unfounded.

The Amazing Spiderman was a much better Spiderman film than any of the Toby Maguire ones--yes, including Spiderman 2.

Star Trek Into Darkness is a pretty good film, and certainly better than the 2009 Star Trek reboot, which was lazily written.

Batman Returns is the best Batman movie.

Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is a good movie.


Star Trek III is better than Star Trek IV.

There Will Be Blood is inconsistent and overrated.

I love Portland, but have never once even chuckled during Portlandia.

The Harry Potter movies are much better than, and improve upon, the books.

The Community season 4 finale was funny.

Community is a much better TV show than Big Bang Theory (maybe not a controversial opinion around the sorts of folks I hang out with, but given their respective ratings, an objectively Unpopular Opinion nonetheless). 

Arcade Fire's The Suburbs is not a very good album--and its Album of the Year Grammy proves it.

Speaking strictly of his music, I think Kanye West is only OK, not great.

David Foster Wallace's The Pale King is better than Infinite Jest.

Twelfth Night is not a good Shakespeare play.

The 50 Shades of Gray books, while unquestionably bad by every definable metric, still deserve props for foregrounding how the purported "chasity" of its Twilight source material was really just abstinence-as-sado-masochism all along.

Sense and Sensibility is not a good Jane Austen novel.

Lasagna is gross.

Tomatoes do not belong on sandwiches.

Pouring milk on cereal ruins it.

Whew, feels good to get that all off my chest!

What are some of your Unpopular Opinions?

On Decennials

The thing about decennials is that once 10 years have passed, you can no longer think of something as being "just a few years ago."  Shoot, you arguably can't tell yourself "it was just a few years ago" after only, say, 5 years, or more than 1 presidential administration--and certainly not after 7 or 8 years.  But something about 10 years--the looming menace of that big round number--really forces you to face the facts: the things you once experienced are now officially too long ago. 

Decennials have been on my mind lately, because just a few months ago, I quietly observed the decennial of my return home from LDS mission service in Puerto Rico.  I even scanned some old photos and posted them here.  Then, just a scant few days later, I observed the decennial of my mother's untimely passing.

See, here's the thing: my entire childhood and adolescent years and everything that happened to me before my mission are all a dreamlike haze to me now, visions from some other life.  However, I can still draw in my mind a clear sequence of events from my mission homecoming to the present moment,  all as though it were all yesterday.  My mission is the great epistemological break in my life.

But, upon the Decennial, my mission is now officially too long ago now; and what now gives me pause is that all the other things I've done since my mission are about to cross their decennials, too!

Case in point: this weekend is the decennial of me breaking my ankle in a sledding accident on one of the only hills in Illinois.  I still have a plate and 5 screws under my skin there; and there are no doubt people I knew that winter who, to this day, primarily remember me being in either a wheelchair, a pair of crutches, or a walking cast.

Just 3 months after I got home from Puerto Rico, you see, my Dad sent me to Nauvoo for a BYU college semester studying church history (the man who baptized my Dad was teaching there, and it was important to my Dad that I get to know him better).  Yet I still catch myself absently thinking of that semester as something that only happened "a little while ago"--and this in the face of the fact that the academy there was torn down at least 8 years ago! (I reminisced about it here). 

What's more, I was in Nauvoo recently, showing my folks around, when against all odds I ran into a girl I knew there whom I hadn't seen since--in fact, I didn't recognize her at first.  She's long married now, with kids, pushing 30 and complaining about feeling "old."  Part of why she was excited to see me is that at least 2 other classmates of ours took their own lives in the interim--she was happy to see that our semester's strangely high suicide rate didn't also include me.  So much has happened in the decade since, yet still my foolish unconscious insists that Nauvoo was only "a little while ago," or that the plate on my ankle is still some new thing, and not a part of me now.

This is only the beginning: I am now far closer to the decennials of some of my favorite memories of my post-mission 20s than to their initial occurrence.

For in just a few months, it will be the decennial of graduating from my hometown community college (which is particularly sobering given how I'm currently completing the last of my PhD course work).

Also, this coming summer will mark the decennial of my one summer semester at BYU--a trifle scarcely worth noting, save that I made at least a few friendships there that, despite all my other innumerable friendships that forged, flourished, then faded away in the ensuing years, have somehow stayed strong to this day.

Then this coming Fall (when I hope to be passing my comprehensive exams), will be the decennial of my first semester at BYU-Idaho (I was reminded of that when the Church recently announced that Kim Clark, who arrived the same semester as I, would be stepping down as college president after 10 years of "faithful service").

This Fall will also mark the decennial of my one foray into construction--I was paid less to be a roofer that semester than the current Federal minimum wage.  Yet though the pay was inexcusably low, I still, strangely, have the fondest memories of our commute to Island Park--and how one of those drives was when I first fell in love with Ben Fold Fives' The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner--which is also now an old album.

The Decennials will only keep cascading from there.  Fall 2016 (when I should be dissertating) will mark 10 years since I taught English in China (an experience that still pays dividends today, as my survival-Mandarin is all that helps me cope with my Rhetoric classes overwhelmed with Chinese internationals).  That will also mean a Decennial since I giddily skipped down to the Long River while I listened to Rocket Summer's Hello, Good Friend, and a Decennial since my triumphant stroll along the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square, the Summer Palace, Tianzhu Shan, JiuHua Shan--and of my encounter with the sublime atop Huang Shan.  All these, too, shall soon be officially, achingly, too long ago.

2017 (when I hope to be defending) will mark the decennial since my graduation from Rexburg; of my double-date to Yellowstone; of my newspaper internship in Guadalajara, Mexico; of the failure of my first real relationship.  Hot on its heels, 2018 will then mark too long since I worked as a substitute teacher, broke and alone; when I jogged a half-marathon alone through the backwoods of Washington; when I was seduced by summer sales; when Kyle (is he still alive??) and I gleefully burned our work-shirts under the Denver full moon; then when I drove triumphant into Salt Lake City, to start grad school at the University of Utah, which kicks off a whole other slew of memories of friends, co-workers, classmates, roommates, professors, first conferences, first publications, hikes, national parks, dates, lovers, various crushes and feeling crushed--

And so on.

I believe I will get a breather from major decennials for a maybe a year there...till rolls the decennial of my MA; then of hunting for my first teaching job, of my first PhD applications, of my first trips to Spain, France, England, London, Italy, Rome...at which point my initial bewildering arrival to Iowa will begin to seem too long ago, as I then approach the decennial of this silly little blogpost (assuming I'll still have a blog then--shouldn't I be on tumblr by now or something?), as I smile at my youthful naivety, as I must then grapple with what it means for things to now be 20 years ago...then 30...40...50...Eternity.

Perhaps there is some innate survival mechanism embedded within these anxious anticipations of coming anniversaries--they maybe are meant to imbue you with a firm resolution that you will be better in the future than you were in the past, so that the anniversary doesn't feel quite so sad.  For example, me realizing that post-PhD graduation 2018 will be a decennial since my broke/lonely post-BA graduation 2008, burns within me a deep and abiding desire to ensure that that anniversary isn't also a repeat.  It also fills me with a determination to ensure that the things I once did are kept good company by the things I will do.  Perhaps all these decennials are a manner by which to push myself into the future, not just wallow in the past.

Perhaps.