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Don't Trust Anyone Over 300: Rewatching "Miri" from the original Star Trek

I don’t think I’ve watched a full episode of the original Star Trek since the 1970s.  So when I downloaded some early Friday evening–E was visiting some friends–I was actually able to see them with something like fresh eyes. 

The oddest of them was “Miri.”

1.    Strange new worlds, my ass.

The crew happen upon an exact replica of earth.  Not “earth-type” planet.  Earth. As in “hey, look there’s Winona.”  Star Trek loved alternative history, the most narcissistic of fantasies. But also my favorite. The only question more interesting than “What’s next?” may be “What if?”

2. And the moral of the story.

It turns out that this version of earth was stripped of all post-pubescent life by a man-made plague, which resulted from an attempt to extend life.  Kirk is attacked by Grandma Addams. For guys in a spaceship, the Enterprise crew is strangely anti-hubris.

3. Selective linguistics.

Just as our language has evolved from Chaucer’s English so has “Grup” evolved from “Grown Up.”  All other words have remained stable for three centuries.

4    Kirk’s charms are even creepier than usual.

See absence of grown ups. The planet is inhabited by children who you would think would be even more feral than they are, given that their parents died horribly three centuries ago.  The eldest of these children is a girl named Miri. Since she is “becoming a young woman,” Kirk flirts with her to get information. Given the crisis everyone is facing, this is understandable. But then he has her clean tables and sharpen pencils.  Adding to the off-the-charts cringe factor are also some scenes with Yeoman Rand, designed by the script-writers to induce jealousy.  Yeoman Rand complains, “On the ship, I always was trying to get you to notice my legs.” Really? That was a problem?  To call the female crew members’ skirts short is to acknowledge that the top/loincloth combo was, in fact, a skirt.

5. The revenge of the set decorators.

On DVD, you can see–and confirm–some details that are positively Lynchian. At 23:38 note the window tableau:  a glazed, red-smeared harlequin bust impaled on a trombone; a strangely hoisted doll with mussed hair.

6. And yet. 

The characters are chuckle-headed but sympathetic; while the science tends to be a little elided, the plots follow an engaging pattern of problem, complication, resolution that reminded me of the Horatio Hornblower I read last year.    

Noble Savages

E pointed out that if we had watched The Savages before The Darjeeling Limited we could not have enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited. 

She’s right. Compared to the Savages, which tells the story of two adult children putting their father in a nursing home, the Darjeeling Limited feels just feckless.  People talk about a death, but no one grieves. People claim to be on a journey, but it feels like a prank.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes the Savages so good, but it’s easy to see when you compare it to other movies.

Compare the Phillip Seymour Hoffman professorial character to the Dennis Quaid professorial character in Smart People. The Quaid character, though no fault of his own, fits Pauline Kael’s definition of a caricature: a character with the responses built in.  Oh, I bet that curmudgeon isn’t such a curmudgeon by the end of the movie, dontcha know.

Watch the scene where Phillip Seymour Hoffman has his chin in a sling, And here you see what separates the Savages from a kind of adolescent, video game inspired moviemaking in which ratcheting up conflict seems to be the point.   

Watch the scene in the “nicer” nursing home parking lot where the Laura Linney character explains why she wants their father to be admitted, then Hoffman explains why she’s full of shit, and then reality chastens Hoffman.

I want to call The Savages grown up, but that’s like saying it has plenty of riboflavin.  It's better than that. It's funnier than that.

God, I hope I haven't overpraised it.   

And isn't Laura Linney the most underracted actress in America?

Hankering for Tanpopo

Even more so than most restaurants, Tanpopo makes a neighborhood a nicer, livelier place. When we first saw our condo, it was a chilly overcast Friday night in March and our real estate agent pointed us in Tanpopo’s direction. The restaurant combined the exoticness of Japanese cuisine with the comfort of soup (noodles in broth); the place was packed with people on dates, and groups of students, but also people who stopped by, by themselves, after a hard work week.  Tanpopo seemed somehow central to what the neighborhood aspired to be, and we were sad when it was forced out of its building. Our loss has long been Lowertown’s gain, and when we ate there Saturday night, we noticed that it is kid friendly.

About A Boy

Photo by E.

Dogs are not curricula. But they do sweeten, or bitter-sweeten, our experience of life and this can sometimes be reduced to a lesson. 

Al is nine and a half. Greyhounds live ten to twelve years, fifteen on the outside. Grey peppers his muzzle. When he ran with some other dogs this winter, Al–who once covered 300 meters in 17.2 seconds and raced in the night of the greyhound stars– could not keep up. He has some calcification between two disks and in the morning, when he is stiff from sleep, sometimes one paw drags a little. But this is now treated with a supplement and, when I took him in to the vet last Monday for his annual physical, they said if the pain gets worse, it can be treated with medication.      

Spring makes Al happy.  How do we know this, since he can’t talk? The bouncy gait, the open mouth, the bright eyes, the lobbying nose–he’ll thwop you with it–whenever a walk is mentioned. He has friends–people he brightens when he sees–and he makes friends. He worships E.

In one of the two sunny days we had last week, I had to take Al on a very short late morning walk because I had a lunch meeting. So I gave him an unexpected walk at 2:30. You’ve never seen a happier animal. The sun was out, the breeze was light, the grass was finally greening and Al just bounced along our six block jaunt.  Sometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. Or, well, the urine.

Maybe the moment was sweet because last week was generally a smear of overcast days, multitasking, conference calls, anxious deadlines, Pavlovian dings signaling email, frantic yet unfocused work. At any rate, that walk was one of those rare moments that defines what it means to be alive.

Hour Car: A Little Red Green Car

I have some trepidation about "green" gestures, even though I make them both as a marketing writer and as a consumer and ciizen. The problem isn't the actions, but the ratio of self-congratulation to actual positive change.  To its credit, the Lil Green Patch application on Facebook is relentlessly precise about this: I have saved not a Rain Forest but a Rain Twig. That said, this car is a good idea and it brightened my day to see it in the neighborhood. Plus the owner  turned out to be a big fan of Al.

My Limited Understanding: The Darjeeling Limited

The Darjeeling Limited reminded me of someone I used to work with who would show me her ideas and when I said I liked one, she would say, “Really?” I was afraid to like the movie, because the filmmaker didn’t seem to like it. There was something half confused, half contemptuous, half-committed about it. Was this dark comedy or just mean? If you don’t quite believe in what you’re doing, is that satire? But then you get into the Beatles’ movie meets the Addams Family charm of the thing and you walk away thinking, that was an enjoyable movie.

The Wired Apple Article: Controlling My Inner Control Freak

I’ve been thinking about the recent Wired article on Steve Jobs. The upshot is that Jobs is an asshole: controlling, demeaning, aggressive, so fundamentally disrespectful that he parks in handicapped spaces.

But that’s not all he is. Jobs also has a vision of what he wants to do that is so vivid that he is charismatic in almost the original, Old Testament sense of the word:  some version of the spirit flows through him, touches others and makes them so hungry that they will follow him. 

I’ve worked with people who’ve tried to get away with inverting this formula—I scream, therefore, I’m passionate, therefore I must have a vision. Such people usually don’t have vision at all, they just lack manners.

Some of the great creative directors–and Jobs is fundamentally a creative director–have been notoriously soft spoken. Tom McElligott would just say,  “We’re not quite there yet.”  This meant that the creative team needed to come up with dozens of more ideas.  I’ve also seen people with legitimate vision that was slightly undersized: they needed to listen just a little more to others to correct some lack in their concept and they never did.  The clung to their stunted, merely personal, overcherished ideas for too long.

I’m not Jobs; I’m just not that smart; my ideas aren’t that fully formed. Criticism and collaboration usually helps me see how my work could become better.

I’ve also always liked the original hiring policy of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the single most influential advertising agency in the short history of the industry: you need to have talent, because without talent you’re no use to us and you can’t be a bastard, because life is too short to work with bastards. But the Jobs article still haunts me. 

Chip Kidd's The Learners: I Know, It's Just A Damn Cover, But What A Cover

I keep looking at the cover of Chip Kidd's The Learners: appreciating the thwock! of the Chris Ware line art; the nostalgic frisson of the image printed right on the cover; the cleverness of the angled, partial book jacket which obscures the character’s expression (and which thus gives the cover a punchline); the way the angled jacket invokes x-acto blades and, I just realized, Batman hideouts; the way the type on the jacket suggests the image it hides. This is the joy of seeing an object which has been completely thought through by a gifted practitioner. There are no inefficiencies here, no sputter of compromise, no smear of laziness. Maybe I just know too much about the design process to know how exceptional this is. 

I have totally made up with the internet. I was just as busy today, but I took a break and took a look at this designer's site, and it cheered me up, especially these wonderful photographs of her studio.  I love the airiness of the space, the light, the huge posters which are superbly designed but have some of the  freedom of a kid's drawing, and the fact that the posters aren't framed.  They get to be big, floppy, temporary, sail-like pieces of paper.

In honor of earth day . . .

I'm not going to go outside. That would be crazy. But I am going to open the window near the Nordic Track.  Then I will I return to the rhythm of deadline-driven dread and naps that never quite materialize that is my life the past few days.

Plus, I am just sick of the internet. It has the unventilated, petty, time-wasting, fake-busy, neither life-nor-art qualities that I don't like in my own mind. This is not a balanced consideration but a pungent feeling. 

I love the earth because the earth is not my idea.