Monthly Archives: May 2013

May142013

Amusing Literary Quip of the Day

“Being cranky about a Dan Brown book not being high literature is like yelling at a cupcake for not being a salad.” — John Scalzi

(For the record, I’m not a fan of Dan Brown. I’ve never read any of his stuff, so I have no opinion whatsoever about him, his stories, or his writing abilities. I will say that, from what I know about The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, I don’t think he’d be my particular pint of beer. Nevertheless, I do seem to have a history of defending low-brow entertainment over serious art, whether we’re talking about pulp versus Literature-with-a-capital-L, Hollywood blockbusters compared to indie darlings, or ’80s pop metal against “important” music, so Scalzi’s comment — made in the context of refusing to slam Brown for being immensely successful while not being generally considered a “good” writer — found a sympathetic ear with me. I’ve never understood the disdain that so many people seem to hold for simple escapism. Sometimes you really do just want to hear a story, or have a good time, and what’s wrong with that?)

May122013

My Latest Acquisition

What you see up there at the top of this post is the cover of one of my favorite novels when I was around 11 or 12 years old — middle-school age. While my friends were discovering Tolkien, I was devouring pulpier, frankly trashier stuff: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom tales, Doc Savage reprints, Alan Dean Foster movie novelizations, and anything relating to Flash Gordon, the space-adventure hero who started in a newspaper comic strip when my grandparents were still children, and who seems destined to undergo periodic revivals every couple of decades. (The latest, a misfire of a TV series, came and went in 2007.)

Massacre in the 22nd Century was the first of a series of six Flash novels that came out in 1980 and ’81. They were written by a guy named David Hagberg, although I never learned that until decades later, after the Internet came along, because his name curiously does not appear anywhere in the books themselves. While I remember them as entertaining reads, their connection to the universe originally conceived by Alex Raymond is tenuous at best. There is no Ming the Merciless in Hagberg’s books, no planet Mongo. And even though the characters at the center of this series are named Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov, they are significantly “off-model.” I won’t bore you with the details of how Hagberg deviates from the traditional Flash backstory; suffice it to say, I’ve long theorized that these books began as fairly generic space-opera adventures and some editor convinced him to change his protagonists’ names in an attempt to cash in on the notoriously campy Flash Gordon movie that was released around the same time. (Christopher Mills, who runs the incredible Space: 1970 blog, asserts that the Hagberg novels bear some resemblance to a Flash television series that was done in the 1950s, but I’ve never seen that version myself, so I can’t say.)

Even so, I have very fond memories of the first two books in Hagberg’s series (somehow I never got around to reading the others). And one of the things I especially loved about them was their cover art by the master illustrator Boris Vallejo. In general, I’ve always gravitated more toward the work of Frank Frazetta; his style generally has a rougher, wilder edge to it, and his fleshier women push my buttons a bit more than Vallejo’s, which seem to me a bit too smooth and perfect to be believably human. But the covers for the Hagberg books really appealed to me for some reason. I’m not ashamed to admit I spent long evenings during my adolescence closely studying the one above, lusting for Boris’ lovely red-haired take on Dale, and imagining myself as the bare-chested, noble-looking hero standing protectively behind her. It was an ideal I could never meet, of course… but even today, this image evokes so much aspirational yearning in me. It reminds me of who I wanted to be before I discovered who I actually was.

A few months ago, I stumbled across the website of Boris Vellejo and his wife Julie Bell — who is also a commercial illustrator of some note — and I learned that prints of pretty much every cover piece he ever painted are available for purchase… and Boris will even sign them for no extra charge! I’ve been babbling to The Girlfriend about this discovery ever since, certain that I wanted to get something from the site, but vacillating indecisively between the art from Massacre — which Boris incongruously titled “Future Land” — and the cover of the second book in Hagberg’s series, War of the Citadels (officially called “Flash Gordon“), of which I’m also very fond.

Well, I guess she finally grew tired of my dithering, because she took the decision out of my hands and surprised me for our 20th anniversary with this:

She made a good call, from the choice of the print to the red matte (her pick again — I was thinking of a plain white one, myself, but in retrospect, she was right about the red making the colors in the painting pop). I absolutely adore this, and can’t wait to hang it up. Anne may not be Dale Arden, and god knows I’m a long way from anything resembling Flash Gordon… but she awakens many of the same yearnings this painting always has. I’m thankful she’s still standing with me in this strange future land in which we’ve found ourselves…

May102013

Friday Evening Videos: “Willin'”

So, this song popped into my head a couple days ago, as these things do from time to time, and it hasn’t left yet. After having a fairly amusing conversation about it with my friend Anastasia, I thought maybe I’d share it with all you fine people, too. You can thank me later.

The song is called “Willin’,” and I was frankly amazed that Anastasia — or anyone else in my circle of friends — actually knew it, as I’ve always thought of it as somewhat obscure. It was originally recorded by the band Little Feat, and I like their version fine, but it is Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 cover that’s been on a continuous loop in my brain this week. Probably because her version was my first exposure to it. I’ll talk about that in a moment, but first… the song:

I first encountered “Willin'” in a fairly unlikely context: you can hear about 10 seconds of it in one scene of James Cameron’s film The Abyss. If you don’t know that one, much of the story takes place inside an experimental underwater oil-drilling platform on the bottom of the ocean. In the scene in question, the rig is being towed to a new location, and as the camera zooms in on the cockpit of the “tug sub,” the overalls-wearing pilot is singing along to this tune — coming from a boombox duct-taped above her seat — at the top of her lungs. Specifically, the line about driving every kind of rig that’s ever been made. It’s a cute gag — what’s a sub, after all, but another kind of rig? — that serves to illustrate the earthy, blue-collar, average-jane-and-joe aspect of the movie’s characters. They’re roughnecks and truck drivers, despite their science-fictiony surroundings.

Well, that brief snippet of incidental music was enough to pique my curiosity. It took me a long time to identify the song and track it down, and when I heard it all the way through for the first time, I loved it. But I also thought it was kind of weird. After all, here was a woman signing longingly about another woman, that beautiful girl back in Dallas… The song made a lot more sense when I learned it had been written for a man. Of course, this was in the early ’90s, before I developed a taste for Melissa Etheridge and Joan Jett, and got used to the idea of women singing love songs about women.

MTV-style music videos were still several years in the future when Linda Ronstadt recorded “Willin’,” so all the clips I found of it were concert recordings. But that’s fine, considering her skill with live performance. This particular one was made at the New Victoria Theatre in London, in November 1976, when Ronstadt was in her heyday as a rock-and-roll artist. She was also (I think) incredibly sexy at the time. The look on her face when she first says “willin'” about 20 seconds in… well, it does happy things for me.

I remember I used to have a poster of her that I won at a county fair midway game. This would’ve been in the mid ’80s, by which time Linda was moving past her rocker persona and starting to explore traditional songbook pop, so I’ve long suspected the carnie was trying to move some very old stock. Regardless, I had no idea then of who she was… but I hung the poster anyway because I liked her looks. I recall she was wearing a lot of bangles and a button-down shirt in the picture, and generally looked very soft and feminine in the way that 1970s “rocker chicks” had, and which went away in the more harshly-styled ’80s. (I’ll be honest, even though I tend to rhapsodize a great deal about the ’80s — the decade in which I was a teenager — I generally think women’s looks were sexier in the the ’70s.)

I’m just rambling at this point, so I’ll leave you with the song and bid you all a good weekend. I’m going to head home now. And when I get there, I think maybe I’ll fire up my old turntable and listen to some vintage Linda Ronstadt LPs…

May072013

Star Destroyers Over Coruscant

Nothing much to say here, I just wanted to repost some cool artwork I encountered over the weekend, when “Star Wars Day” was generating a feverish amount of related material:

Click to see it in its full-sized glory.

If it’s not immediately obvious to you, what we have here is a fleet of Imperial Star Destroyers in orbit around Coruscant, the galactic capital world seen in the prequel trilogy (“…the entire planet is one big city”). Besides being a wonderfully rendered piece of kick-ass imagery (pretty much anything featuring a Star Destroyer is going to kick some ass), it’s also a nice visual bridge between the two trilogies… certainly more elegant than the ham-fisted revisionism that substituted Hayden Christensen’s youthful self for the more venerable Sebastian Shaw in the “holy trinity” of Force ghosts at the end of Return of the Jedi!

I imagine the more casual fans in our audience might be wondering about the ship in the bottom left of this picture, the one that looks like a Star Destroyer suffering from boils. Unless I miss my guess, that’s an Interdictor, a class of ship that’s appeared in a number of Expanded Universe novels and comics. Interdictors are capable of generating an intense gravity field that yanks passing starships out of hyperspace, so they can be easily detained or destroyed by Imperial forces. Of course, postulating such technology opens a big old can of worms, namely, why didn’t Darth Vader’s battle fleet have an Interdictor when it was trying to blockade Hoth? Things would have gone very differently for Luke Skywalker and Friends if they’d been unable to jump to lightspeed! (God, I’m such a nerd!)

Sadly, I don’t have any info on who created this image, whether it’s digital or a painting, or what context it originally appeared in, so I don’t know if it’s a fan-made piece or a licensed piece created for Lucasfilm. It’s cool, regardless…

Tip of the hat to Jaquandor for posting this one, along with a lot of other fun stuff, on the Fourth.

May062013

Protesting… Something… But Doing It Fiercely

Last Wednesday was just a weird day, man. It started with that phone call I told you about. It ended with a scene that was almost surreal enough for a Fellini movie. Almost.

I had to work late that night. Not terribly late, really, just a little under a couple of hours; the sun was still in the sky when I descended from the 13th Floor and exited out through the Mall. But the thing you have to understand about Salt Lake City is that very few people remain in the downtown area after 6 o’clock. Unlike other cities, few people live there, and there’s just not much in the way of night life, despite the repeated attempts of mayor after mayor to find some way of coaxing dedicated suburbanites to stick around and spend their money in SLC proper, instead of fleeing to their outlying bedroom communities after the quitting bell rings. Which meant I had the platform all to myself as I waited for the next train heading toward my own bedroom community. There were a few passersby on the sidewalks across the street, outside the Mall, but the hum of activity that defines this block during the middle of the day had faded like an oven cools after you turn it off. There were no cars driving along Main Street, and a thick tide of silence seemed to descend the sides of the surrounding building one step ahead of the deepening shadows.

I briefly considered dipping into my messenger bag for my book, but, as much as it pains me to admit this, I find I really don’t enjoy reading anymore. Not after doing it at work all day long. That’s something I probably ought to write about in more depth one of these days. But the important thing for now is that I was standing alone on a train platform in the middle of an eerily deserted city that felt something like a post-apocalyptic film from the early ’70s. (Think of Charlton Heston’s Omega Man.)

And that’s when I heard it. An indistinct, rhythmic chanting. I tried to make out what the chanters were saying, but I’m not very good at that — the cries of “DE-FENSE” at basketball games inevitably sound like “Sieg Heil!” to my ears. I tried to identify where it was coming from, but it was echoing off the concrete and glass canyons of the city, seeming to originate from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The only thing I was sure of was that it was coming closer. (I found myself thinking of The Omega Man again…)

Then the cops arrived. Several police cruisers rolled into the intersection at one end of the block, their lightbars flashing. They parked so as to halt any traffic that might come along — not likely — and the officers threw open their car doors, stepped out into the street, and waited.

A few moments later, a crowd of people appeared on one of the cross-streets, turning the corner past the police cordon onto Main and marching right past me. The marchers were all young, college age it looked like, and most of them were dressed in black. Many of them had covered their faces with black bandanas. Incongruously, there was a pretty blonde girl on a bicycle in their midst, as if she’d just been out for an evening ride, seen the protest, and thought it might be fun to tag along. The two protesters in the lead had a long black banner strung between them, the only sign I could see in the entire group. It read “End Capitalism,” and had a dollar sign with a slash through it.

Their chant was clear to me now. They were shouting “No justice, no peace… f**k the police!” The police standing by their cruisers in the intersection took this provocation rather calmly, I thought.

As protests go, this one was pretty small. It took only a minute for the entire crowd to file past me, up to the end of Main Street, and turn westward around another corner, trailed by a slowly creeping cop car.

They had just vanished from my view when two stragglers came after them, a couple of guys wearing the stylized Guy Fawkes masks that have been de rigueur for protesters ever since the movie V for Vendetta was released in 2005. One of the cops called after them: “You know, your protest might be more effective if you all stuck together.” The would-be Vs both turned and showed the cop their middle fingers, then took up the “f**k the police” chant.

I remember thinking, “It might be more effective if people actually knew what the hell your protest is about.”

And then it was all over. The cops got back in their cars and drove away. The sound of the chanting faded away. And I was alone on a train platform at quarter-of-eight at the end of a very weird Wednesday, waiting for my ride home.

May042013

It’s a Silly Thing…

…this made-up fanboy holiday in celebration of our favorite space-opera movie saga of all time. As our colleague Jaquandor points out this morning, it would actually make more sense to reflect on the glory that is Star Wars on May 25, the day the original film was actually released. But hey, who am I to rain on the parade? People like their puns, after all, so…

May032013

It’s Like We’re Living in the Future, Part XXVIII

The movie Blade Runner seems to be one of those polarizing flicks that either works for you or it doesn’t. Despite its wide reputation as a classic that rose from the ashes of its initial failure at the box office, I know a number of people who just don’t understand the fuss that gets made over this one. And you know, that’s perfectly valid. I feel the same way about Pulp Fiction myself. It’s immensely popular, critically acclaimed, massively influential… and it does absolutely nothing for me. In fact, it actively repelled me the one and only time I actually watched it. So, yeah, Blade Runner critics, I hear you. But I don’t agree with you.

Personally, I find Blade Runner endlessly fascinating, especially its incredibly dense production design. The first time I saw the movie when I was about 13 or thereabouts, I didn’t understand a lick about its themes of weary existentialism (“tears in the rain”) or its defiant romanticism (“it’s too bad she won’t live… but then again, who does?”), but its depiction of a 21st century Los Angeles mesmerized me. Even now, when I watch it, I sometimes find myself slipping into a kind of reverie, not paying attention to what’s happening on-screen so much as where it’s happening. There are so many details in every shot, everything from brand logos to buzzing neon signs to weirdly menacing technology to plain old dirt and grime to that insane, dazzling blimp floating through shots as it shills for the Off-World Colonies. All this stuff builds on itself, layer after layer, to finally accrete into — in my opinion — one of the most realistic futuristic environments ever presented on screen.

One little detail I particularly love is the lumbering juggernaut of an automobile you can see in one of the street scenes, an early-Sixties something I’ve never quite been able to identify — you get a pretty good look at it in this clip, at about the 0:32 mark — mingling with all the bubble-topped Spinners and boxy utilitarian transports of the imaginary year 2019. Growing up around old cars and the people who love them, I understand and believe in the idea that some folks will never let go and will find a way to keep their beloved old beasts on the road as long as possible.

I found myself thinking of that scene this morning as I drove to the train station. I got stuck, as I so often do, in the middle of a morning convoy, a two-lane-wide “Mormon blockade,” as we call them around here (because they so often consist of mothers taking their multiple children to school). But today, right there alongside all those boxy, utilitarian SUVs and aerodynamic, bubble-topped sedans and hybrids, was an Edsel station wagon from the late 1950s.

Our real-world 2015 doesn’t much resemble the dystopian 2019 of Blade Runner — at least, not yet — but that doesn’t mean that life doesn’t imitate art! At least closely enough to make a fortysomething nerd smile and write a blog entry about it…

May022013

Perspective

I was just on my way out the door for work yesterday when my phone rang. My landline, to be specific. (Yes, I still have a landline. It suits my purposes to do so. Don’t hate.) Figuring that it was most likely one of my parents at that hour, I answered it. A voice I didn’t recognize asked, “Is this the blogger Jason Bennion?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you the Jason Bennion who writes a blog?”

A little uncertain of where this was going or whether I should answer, I finally said, “Um, yeah, I suppose I am. Who’s this?”

The man on the other end identified himself as the brother of Shane Gillette, then immediately launched into a diatribe about how wrong I’d been to make his brother out to be such a dirtbag, because it just wasn’t true. Shane was a good person, the man asserted, who’d battled demons for years, who’d been up for four days hearing voices and was convinced the cops were chasing him that horrible morning, but he’s taking his medication now and he’s just not the dirtbag I describe, he’s not. The man on the phone sounded very emotional about all of this, and was speaking very rapidly, but he finally gave me an opportunity to confess that I didn’t have the slightest idea what or who he was talking about.

“You were a friend of Julie Jorgenson, weren’t you?” he asked.

Ah. Yes. Now I understood. Julie. My coworker who was killed in a car accident a little over two years ago. This man’s brother — Shane Roy Gillette — was responsible for her death.

The man on the phone continued in the same vein as before, repeating over and over that his brother had been misrepresented by the media, that he’d been out of his head and not high on drugs the morning his pickup truck slammed into the rear of Julie’s car with such terrible force, that he hadn’t even known there was marijuana in the truck and that there’s a difference between the inactive THC found in his bloodstream and active THC (I have no idea if this is correct), and that I’d been wrong to write all those things I’d written. I let him talk, not knowing what else to do or say. The man eventually explained that Shane’s attempts to plea-bargain were being denied, and he — the brother who was talking to me — had been googling for information on the case when something from my blog popped up in his search results. (I’m guessing it was probably this entry, in which I said some very unkind things indeed about Shane Gillette.) The man hadn’t appreciated what he read… understandably so, I have to admit.

He was running out of steam now, talking slower and repeating himself more, and I felt like I had to say something to him. “Look, I wrote those things two years ago,” I began. “I was angry, and I was just going on what I’d read in the news. I hope things turn out for your brother.”

The man apparently had been ready for an argument, had expected me to be more defensive or belligerent or something, because I got the distinct impression that the wind had just fallen out of his sails. He mumbled a suggestion that I ought to take down my blog posts, or edit them, and then he said he’d just had to get all this off his chest. I thanked him for offering his perspective. Then he hung up.

I’ve been thinking about the incident ever since. I’m more than a little shaken that he tracked me down at my home. I’ve never made any effort to conceal my real-world identity or location during my online activities, but I also haven’t put my phone number here on my blog and invited disgruntled readers to call or stop by the house. If I were the paranoid type, I’d be locking my doors, hunkering down behind the couch, and jumping at every shadow that flashes across the window shades. Thankfully, this guy didn’t seem to be threatening me or suggesting he wanted to do violence to me. He was just upset that I’d ripped on his brother. As I said, I understand. If I had a brother and stumbled across some smart-ass blogger calling him dirty names, I’d be upset too. However, the caller also expressed a lot of sympathy for Julie’s family, which helped allay some of my worries that he might be waiting behind a bush somewhere. He’s not lacking in empathy.

And neither am I. So I find myself troubled by how easily I’d overlooked the possibility that Shane Roy Gillette might have a family and people who are hurting for him as much as the people who knew Julie are hurting. That Shane himself might not be a monster, but just a guy with problems who had an accident and now has to live with the consequences. I like to think of myself as such a fair-minded person, a genuine liberal all-people-are-essentially-good bleeding heart… but in Gillette’s case, my sense of empathy totally deserted me.

I don’t mean to trivialize this situation in any way, but I keep thinking of the Star Trek episode “Arena.” If you don’t know it, briefly, it begins with an alien lizard race called the Gorn attacking a Federation outpost for no apparent reason. The Enterprise pursues the Gorn ship, intent on destroying it. But when the two ships pass through an unexplored star system, a third race — the mysterious, god-like Metrons — stops them dead in their tracks and sends Kirk and the Gorn captain to a barren desert environment to fight one-on-one… to the death. Naturally, Kirk eventually gets the best of the Gorn and prepares to do him in, but when he has his knife at the creature’s throat, he has a change of heart. He refuses to kill the alien, conceding that maybe the Gorn had had their reasons for attacking the outpost, that perhaps they’d thought they were defending themselves against intruders. The lesson, of course, is that there are two (or more) sides to every story. It’s all a matter of perspective. And we should be willing to exercise a little mercy in light of that fact. By realizing this before he took the Gorn’s life, Kirk passed a test being conducted by the Metrons to determine just how advanced these two combatant species really were. But of course he passed… he’s the hero. I fear that I failed essentially the same test two years ago.

I’m not going to retract or apologize for anything I said about Shane Gillette in the past. Blogs are essentially a stream of consciousness, and I wrote what I wrote at the time I wrote it. I was angry then, and I see my expression of that anger as an act of honesty. I’m still angry about what happened to Julie. Whether Gillette was high or delusional really makes no difference in the big picture — he shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of that truck, and a beautiful young woman died because he was. But I do regret that in my anger, I caused more hurt to people who already had a boatload of it to deal with. I shall try not to make that mistake in the future.

If nothing else, that phone call was a valuable reminder that words have power, and the online world is not so insulated from the real world as we all like to believe.