“At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book … [but] he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of … invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.”
— Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)
“The Omega Glory” is often derided as one of the worst episodes of the original Star Trek, for any number of reasons, everything from Shatner’s melodramatic reading of the Constitution (especially his… unique… pronunciation of “TRAWNquility”) to the far-fetched premise of another world that so closely parallels our own that they have a word-for-word version of America’s founding documents. If you simply don’t like Shatner, I can’t do much to change your mind. But as to the other point, I would suggest that you’re taking it all too literally. If it helps, think of this as less an episode of Star Trek than a segment of The Twilight Zone: simply a fantastical setup for making a point that probably ought to be obvious but so often isn’t.
I urge you to watch this clip, but don’t worry about Shatner’s delivery; listen to what he’s SAYING: the “holy words” of America — the ideals of America, and yes, the laws too — must apply to EVERYONE or they mean NOTHING.
I think about that every Fourth of July. And especially on this Fourth.
E plebnista, my friends.
When I was 20 years old, my soul was divided between two Jims: Morrison and Buffett. One spoke to my dark brooding side, the other to my romantic, nostalgic nature. Both of them encouraged my budding interest in debauchery, but one was benign and fun, the other destructive and kind of scary. In the end, I sided with Buffett… but not the Parrothead party-tune aspect of his scene, which frankly grew dumber the more of an institution it became. “Come Monday,” “He Went to Paris,” “The Captain and the Kid,” “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” “Last Mango in Paris”… those songs about restless spirits looking for some place to toss out their anchor and the bleary-eyed survivors of the night before… those were the songs that spoke most to me. And they still do.
This one hurts.
I’d been aware of her from the moment she came in and sat down at the end of the bar. Any man with a pulse — and I daresay quite a few women as well — would have been. It wasn’t just the million-dollar legs, or the attitude big enough to fill a room that was empty this deep into the night. It was that smile. I’d seen her flash it at the bartender when she ordered and I knew then I’d make her any drink she wanted.
I tried not to stare, tried to play it cool and just focus on my own drink and my own business, but of course she caught me. I imagine she was used to it, but still, I didn’t want to be a creep, because I imagine she was used to that as well. So I looked away. But it wasn’t long before I wanted to look again. It was like an itch in an inconvenient place that only gets stronger the more you try to ignore it. So finally I risked a glance… and she flashed that smile again, in my direction this time, and I swear that this is what she said, stranger to stranger in some desolate watering hole in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night:
“Well… ain’t we a pair… Raggedy Man?”
(The preceding never happened, in case you’re tempted to think I’m relating a treasured memory. It’s nothing more than a rock-and-roll fantasy that came to mind on an overcast Friday afternoon as I studied a photo that’s going around and which I happen to really like. She did have one hell of a smile, though, didn’t she?)
“I just spent three hours witnessing a big eyepopping spectacle that transports the viewer to a strange world full of utterly alien life.
— My initial Facebook post made last night immediately after seeing Babylon
All right, now for a couple thoughts on Babylon in the bleary-eyed morning after.
As my lovely viewing companion Anne said when the credits started to roll, there’s a good movie in there somewhere. There are moments in this film that approach genuine brilliance… moments of breathtaking beauty and infectious enthusiasm. There’s also a lot of moments when I wonder what in the hell I was watching and why I was doing this to myself. The first 10 minutes of the film are the acid test, I think, for whether you’re going to be able to stomach the rest of it. I predict that a sizable number of my readers won’t pass that test.
The problem is that in trying to show the decadence of the era he’s depicting, writer-director Damien Chazelle gets swept up in self-indulgent excess himself. The movie is too long, too graphic, too frenetic, too many subplots, too jam-packed, too… just too. It’s also self-aware in a way that occasionally seems more cloying than clever. I started to notice the parallels to Singin’ in the Rain fairly early on. (Babylon is about the moment when talking pictures upended the industry and countless lives virtually overnight.) Nothing wrong with that, nobody says you can’t revisit the same general territory occupied by a beloved classic. But then the film has the audacity to actually reference Singin’ in the Rain — as in depicting an actual musical number where people are singing the song — and, as a lover of old movies, I couldn’t help thinking, “Oh, this guy is cheeky… ” But considering there had been some earlier references to other classic films in kind of a what-if-this-happened-differently sort of way, I let it go. I even briefly considered the idea that perhaps this movie was happening in some kind of parallel universe. Then in the film’s denouement, Chazelle uses clips from Singin’ in the Rain and I thought… well, by that point, I really didn’t know what to think. I’d been battered into submission by the too-ness of it all. If the creator of Babylon is so aware that he’s making a pastiche of one of the greats, I suppose you can’t fault him for it. Or can you? I just keep going back and forth on that question. Does this film work or not?
The frustrating thing is that Chazelle really gets something about Hollywood. About the idea of Hollywood and movies and what they mean to a certain type of movie fan. He understand the romantic pull of a lost era. And he understands the reasons why people dream of a career in movies and how hard it is to let go when that career runs its course. (In a way, Babylon is complementary to another film I recently saw, 5-25-77, which is also about the all-consuming drive to make movies and more importantly the reasons behind that drive.) Babylon is an ambitious film about ambitious people, and it’s a compelling film, but much like the Hollywood of the late silent era — about to brought low by a number of scandals that led to the oppressive Production Code, as well as a sea change in technology and public tastes — it’s kneecapped by its own base impulses.
I will say this, though: if you’re remotely interested in this movie after reading all this, you need to see it for Brad Pitt. Even now, decades after his big break in Thelma & Louise, I occasionally see people saying that he’s nothing more than a pretty face. I’m here to tell you that this is simply not true, and that he delivers a career-defining performance in Babylon. Possibly an Oscar-winning performance. There is one scene in particular where he exudes such pain without ever saying a word that I defy anyone to not feel absolutely heartbroken for him. Seriously, he is that good.
So, bottom line, would I recommend Babylon? That’s a hard call. The movie is unquestionably a hot mess. And yet… I’m still thinking about it this morning and that says something to me. I can’t deny that I did enjoy it — or at least parts of it — very much. So I would say that if the subject matter interests you… if you love movies, specifically old movies… if you’ve ever dreamed of making movies yourself or if you’ve ever felt any romance at all toward “Hollywood” as a concept… then give it a try. Just be warned that it’s going to be something of a rough ride. If you can make it through that first 10 minutes…
I love the movie Dirty Dancing. Yes, even though I’m a straight male. And I love it unironically too (I don’t do irony): the music, the setting, the cars, the coming-of-age story, and yes, the dancing. And like everyone who loves this movie, I break out in a huge grin at the climatic moment when Johnny announces that “nobody puts Baby in a corner.” It’s one of the all-time great cinematic “feelgood” moments, isn’t it?
But people tend forget a very significant subplot of Dirty Dancing, the whole reason Johnny and Baby are thrown together in the first place. The fact is, this “cute” little movie has a rough edge just below the romance… a rough, dirty, damn-near-fatal edge…
Here’s a post I encountered on Facebook the other day, written by a woman named Elissa Gonzales, that I think bears repeating:
When we think about Dirty Dancing, we often picture the bottom image. We forget that the whole reason Baby has to fill in for Penny is because Robby gets Penny pregnant and refuses to take responsibility.
We forget that the abortion is so expensive Penny cannot afford it, even from a questionable practitioner, and when Robby refuses to pay for it, Baby has to get the money for her.
We forget that Penny nearly dies because abortions are illegal. We forget the horrible conditions she is forced to endure in order to get the abortion and the incredible pain she was in afterwards.
We forget her tears.
We forget her shame.
We forget the judgment and condemnation towards her.
We forget Robby’s endorsement for college and smug attitude as his life remained unchanged.
While this is a movie, there have been real life Pennys. We must not return to the time where this is the norm. Abortions have never been an issue for the wealthy. Money affords opportunity and secrecy.
The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate amongst industrialized countries. Banning abortions is not going to help that number.
#DirtyDancing #WarOnWomen #abortion #maternalmortality #womensrights
I know I’m about to grab the third rail here, but in light of recent and ongoing events, I can’t hold my tongue any longer. May the Force be with me.
It’s been clear for a number of years that certain freedoms my generation grew up taking more-or-less for granted are not as inalienable as we had assumed. That judicial decisions alone simply aren’t strong enough to protect these freedoms. Not when institutions that were formerly… well, maybe not objective but at least not lopsidedly and blatantly partisan… are now dominated by activist judges (yes, I went there) who are quite obviously determined to overturn “settled law” now that they have the raw power to do it.
I’m speaking, obviously, about a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy.
Abortion.
Such an innocuous word that’s been rendered into an ugly epithet by decades of heated arguments.
Now, before anyone flies off half-cocked, I am not interested in having one of those arguments here. The way I see it, the two sides of the abortion argument — and it is an argument, not a true debate — aren’t even shouting about the same issue. Pro-lifers are concerned with the morality of ending a potential life, while pro-choicers are defending the individual autonomy of people who are already here. That is, the pro-choice concern is whether or not it’s moral to compel someone to undergo a life-altering event if they don’t want to, for whatever reason. These two concerns are adjacent, obviously, but they are not the same issue.
For the record, my own position on abortion is much the same as it is on any number of “morality issues,” including drugs, prostitution, and teenage sex: pragmatism. It frankly doesn’t matter what I personally think about abortion, or what you think either. The fact is, there are some activities that have always been part of the human experience and always will be, and that it’s a waste of energy to try and prohibit them altogether — the War on Drugs being a prime example. It’s been raging for decades, we’ve spent fortunes on it, militarized our police, incarcerated thousands of people, killed people, turned our borders and cities into warzones, and guess what? Our country is more awash in drugs now that it was when Richard Nixon declared this war. People like their drugs, and as long as there is demand, there will be a supply. The same applies with all these “moral problems.” Our goal shouldn’t be to try to do away with these things but rather to reduce the overall level of harm associated with them, for both individuals and for our society in general. To wit, women have always found ways to do away with unwanted pregnancies. Always. All throughout history. It’s not something that was invented in the 1970s. But prior to the ’70s, a lot of women died or maimed themselves while doing it. So what’s the greater harm? To allow something that a lot of people (but not all people) think is a sin but isn’t ever going to go away, or to try and prohibit it and drive it back into a dangerous underground?
I know, of course, what the hardcore pro-lifers would say. They unequivocally equate abortion with murder, and who thinks it’s a good idea to allow legal murder in our society? The thing is, though… not everyone agrees that abortion is murder. We all know what murder is and (hopefully) we all agree that’s something that is truly harmful to individuals and society. We don’t have that kind of collective clarity around abortion. Which is probably why 72% of Americans still believe it should remain legal, according to recent polling. Nevertheless, it’s very likely that a partisan Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade this summer, ending a 50-year-old paradigm. I fear we’re about to find out exactly which is the more harmful route.
The thing that really concerns me, though, is the likelihood that the crusaders who see victory within their grasp won’t be content to stop with abortion. There are other “morals issues” that were decided by SCOTUS decisions, and there are already rumblings that those decisions could also face being overturned by this current Court. Gay marriage is definitely in danger, but so is legal contraception and possibly even interracial marriage — things that are now so much part of the fabric of American life that many people today find impossible to imagine them ever not being legal. In short, the entire sexual revolution could be undone in the next couple of years. The freedom Americans have enjoyed (nudge nudge wink wink) for over half a century — the freedom to marry the person they love, the freedom for consenting adults to enjoy sex without fear — could very well be taken away. A minority of religious conservatives want this. They see it as a reestablishment of a natural order, a return to their definition of responsibility (i.e., no sex outside of marriage for straight couples, no sex without the possibility of pregnancy, and no legal homosexual activity at all). I — and I imagine a lot of other Americans — see this scenario as a huge step backwards, a regression into a less-civilized time defined by fear and a tyrannical pulpit. I say it’s nobody’s business what other people do with respect to love, sex and reproduction, and that trying to push the genie back into the bottle is going to result in utter chaos… and a lot of pain.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Supreme Court is not as agenda-driven as I fear they are and will rule on the side of true conservatism, i.e., not rocking a long-established boat. I hope that’s the case. But either way, I think it’s time to stop depending on judicial decisions for our sexual and marital rights. I see now that this has been a historic mistake. It’s long past time to codify these rights. The House of Representatives passed a bill to codify abortion rights back in September, but as far as I know, it’s gone nowhere in the Senate, and even if it does somehow pass — and I know that’s incredibly unlikely — I don’t think that’s enough. For an issue so utterly fundamental to true human liberty, we need to pull out the big guns. We need a Constitutional amendment to guarantee freedom of marriage, freedom of reproductive choice (abortion and contraception), and while we’re at it, freedom of privacy as well, which has always been the foundation of those other freedoms in the relevant judicial decisions but is not, as so many have pointed out, specifically articulated in the Constitution. Let’s call it… the “Pursuit of Happiness” Amendment. It needn’t be a long or complicated thing, and in fact, it would probably be better if it’s not. Here’s my back-of-an-envelope draft:
Now, I’m not a legal scholar, obviously. I don’t know if that language would be sufficient to do the trick or if there are loopholes or other problems there. I’m also not naive. I know that getting any amendment passed, on any subject, is a Herculean effort, and that the odds for something like this succeeding would be incredibly slim. Hell, we couldn’t even manage to ratify the ERA, which seems to me like a total no-brainer. But I do know that the way to make change is to start talking about ideas. And I am convinced that we’ve got to start talking about something like this amendment, and very soon. So… how do we get this ball rolling?
Thirty years ago tonight, a new television series debuted: The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Coming only a couple years after what we then thought was the final big-screen adventure of our favorite fedora’d archeologist, this little show was a very big deal for Indy fans. In fact, I don’t remember being so excited for the premiere of a TV series since the original Battlestar Galactica when I was a kid. And I don’t think I’ve been so excited for any TV series since.
Looking back now, though, Chronicles was clearly a bit of a mixed bag, and for many viewers who expected something like the cliffhanger-serial, high-adventure style of the Indy movies, it was an outright disappointment. The series was not like the feature films. Aside from the pilot and a later TV movie that came out after the show ended, Young Indy did not hunt for ancient treasure. The show was far more concerned with character and conversation than action, and it was overtly intended to deliver a history lesson to kids. In addition, the tone veered wildly between tragedy, wistful nostalgia, and juvenile silliness. I think that, coupled with the creative decision to alternate every other week between stories about 10-year-old Indy and teenaged Indy, made it difficult to find an audience, or even to figure out who the audience was supposed to be. It didn’t help that ABC kept changing the show’s time slot, or outright preempting it for football games. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when it was cancelled only a year later. The last few episodes didn’t even air until The Family Channel cable network reran the series later in the decade. In the end, I guess Chronicles must be viewed as a failed experiment, a mere footnote in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Nevertheless, I liked it.
Like I told the show’s star, Sean Patrick Flannery, at a convention a few years back, I was probably a bit older than the target audience — I was 22 in March of 1992 — but I identified with the teenaged version of the character he played. Like him, I was restless and idealistic, well-read but naive in a lot of ways, and I wanted more than anything to see the world. The show’s airing overlapped with the beginning of my own travels, and it’s no coincidence that the journal I used during my 1993 study-abroad adventure in Cambridge, England, resembled the one Young Indy carries on the show. (Yeah, I know, I’m a dork.) In certain respects, the character’s maturation paralleled my own, or so it seemed to me at the time. If nothing else, Chronicles is very special to me as a reminder of that period in my life. (Flannery seemed genuinely touched by all that; he’d seemed sort of cocky when I first approached him, but he dropped that attitude as I spoke, then extended his hand and sincerely thanked me for sharing that with him. It was one of my more memorable celebrity interactions.)
Sadly, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles isn’t available today, at least not in its original form. Just like he did with Star Wars, George Lucas couldn’t resist tinkering with it, and what came out in a lavish DVD release in the mid-2000s is not the show I watched a decade earlier. Even the title has changed; the series on DVD is called The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. Long-time readers of this blog can probably guess how I feel about that. Fortunately — for a given value of “fortunate,’ considering the picture quality — I’ve still got my old VHS recordings of the broadcast episodes, and one of these days I’ll get around to digitizing them. But damn, that’s a lot of work…
A random Facebook post this afternoon reminded me that the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, which were held right here in little ol’ Salt Lake City, opened 20 years ago today. Hard to believe so much time has passed already. The Olympics were perhaps the biggest thing that’s happened to this place — which I’ve always thought of in very similar terms to Luke Skywalker’s description of Tatooine — since the Mormons first arrived here in 1847. The stakes were impossibly high. The bidding process that landed us the Games had been tainted by allegations of bribery, and there were budgetary shortfalls on the order of several hundred million dollars. Mitt Romney — yes, that Mitt Romney, the future governor of Massachusetts and current US Senator from Utah — was brought in to assume control of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and get things back on track. Local scions like the Eccles family contributed money to help, as did the federal government, and a crash program was implemented to build venues and infrastructure, including the TRAX light-rail transit system connecting downtown Salt Lake to the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley and an ambitious expansion of I-15. In the end, much to the surprise of… well, everyone, I think… we pulled it off. The 2002 Winter Games were a financial success, ending with a surplus of $40 million. Moreover, the Games were a cultural success, viewed by some two billion people around the world (according to IOC estimates) and putting Salt Lake on the map, as it were. In my travels prior to 2002, nobody ever knew where I was talking about when I said I was from Salt Lake; afterwards, everyone responded, “Where the Olympics were held?”
It’s funny to me that I’m thinking about all of this with such nostalgia now, because in the beginning, I was solidly opposed to the whole damned thing. When Salt Lake was awarded the bid in 1995, I imagined that hosting the Games would be nothing more than a nuisance. Ungodly traffic jams and a small handful of hustlers, er, entrepreneurs getting rich while the rest of us got stuck with the bill. Later, as the event grew near, I became concerned about security (remember, the Games took place only a few months after 9/11), not to mention the very real possibility that my parochial little home — then one of the least diverse places in the United States, whose greatest culinary highlights were fry sauce and funeral potatoes, and whose religious, unworldly citizens prided themselves on being “a peculiar people” — would fall on its face in front of the entire world. I didn’t know how Salt Lake would fall on its face, but I just didn’t think the city or its people were up to such an enormous undertaking, and I didn’t want to face the collective humiliation that certainly awaited. Or the traffic. I hadn’t forgotten the traffic. To be honest, I gave serious thought to planning a vacation to coincide with those two weeks.
In spite of all my big curmudgeonly talk, though, I stayed in town after all. And before it was all said and done, I couldn’t resist making a few treks downtown to experience everything that was going on. I was pretty oblivious to the actual sporting events — you know, the whole reason for hosting the Olympics! — but the Games had also attracted a lot of ancillary cultural offerings, many of them limited-time things that had never visited Utah before and, for all we knew, would never come again. Anne and I saw Savion Glover dance and took in an exhibition of glass artist Dale Chihuly’s work. (I knew about Chihuly from a PBS documentary I’d seen, but this was the first time we’d encountered his work in person, and we both became fans almost instantly.) As I recall, we attended a couple of special film screenings. And most of all we were just there, soaking in the atmosphere. There was an irresistible crackle in the air, the electricity of something big and novel and seemingly historic.
For two weeks, this boring, buttoned-down, beige-stucco’d outpost of conformity on the edge of a vast desert wasteland felt… important. Not only that, it felt different. More diverse, more active, freer, somehow more grown-up. Cosmopolitan. As impressive as the Chihulys and Glover’s tapping were, the thing I most remember is just walking around downtown, marveling at familiar skyscrapers transformed by those giant banners you can see in the photo above, immersed in a stew of different languages and accents from all over the world.
The first trip I took anywhere as an adult was to San Francisco, way back in 1991 when I was a mere babe of 21 years old. I remember experiencing a bit of culture shock at suddenly being surrounded by so many different kinds of faces and languages after coming from such a whitebread place as Utah. It was exotic and it was exhilarating. And for two weeks, I got to experience that same feeling right here in my own back yard. That’s what the 2002 Winter Games were for me. I can’t tell you who medalled or in what sport. But for two weeks, Salt Lake was an exciting place to be.
According to various think pieces I’ve read, Salt Lake City has become surprisingly progressive in recent years, at least relative to the rest of the state. It’s now home to a vibrant LGBTQ community and you see a lot more people of color in downtown than you used to. And SLC is now a political outlier, too, a pocket of Democratic blue in a red, red state. I don’t know if these changes have anything to do with the city hosting the Games or if they would’ve happened organically over time anyhow. But the one thing I do know is that Salt Lake is no longer invisible to the rest of the country, or the world. It’s no longer “the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe.” And I am relatively certain that that, at least, is the legacy of the 2002 Olympics.
There’s talk about Salt Lake bidding to host the Games again. I don’t know how I feel about that. On the one hand, we’re in a much better position now to do it. The venues are already in place and have been maintained. We know what to expect. But somehow I just can’t imagine that it would be as much fun as it was the first time. No matter what happens with another Games, though, I still get a warm glow whenever I glimpse Salt Lake’s very own Chihuly installation — originally just a loaner that became a permanent fixture — through the windows of Abravanel Hall. And I still have my Roots beret, too.
Carrie Fisher died five years ago today. I still mourn for her, still get teary-eyed when this day rolls around and I read her daughter Billie’s annual tributes, and on some level, I know it’s crazy because I didn’t really know her. I met her once and spoke with her for about 90 seconds. I had a boyhood crush that became a middle-aged-manhood crush when she flashed those deep brown eyes at me across a book-signing table. But… it feels like I knew her. It feels like we all did. And how could we not? We grew up with her. Princess Leia was our big sister, our first crush, our hero. General Leia was our mom… and our hero… and maybe our continuing crush, too. And figuring out where Leia stopped and Carrie began was very, very difficult, even for Carrie. Maybe especially for Carrie.
I’ve written a lot of dead-celebrity posts on this blog over the years. Some of them have been quite good, if I say so myself. And they’ve all been from the heart; I always feel genuine emotion about the loss of the people whose work matters to me. But not like Carrie. Not like her. I’m not ashamed to say that when Carrie Fisher died, a big part of me went with her. A part that came from childhood and from adolescence, from my imagination since I was seven years old, and from the reality of the woman I once met and wished I could’ve spent more time with and really gotten to know as a friend. I don’t know how I could’ve loved her any more if I’d actually known her.
Here’s a photo of her that I particularly like.
