I’m a little late posting up this week’s music vid, but hey, it’s still before midnight, right? Just consider this my homage to the good old days of middle school, when we kids who lived out in the sticks had to stay up ’til the wee hours to see Friday Night Videos because we didn’t have cable service — and thus the holy font of all that was cool, circa 1983, MTV — like the lucky urbanites to the north.
I planned to write yesterday evening about the gorgeous weather we’re having this week, and the pleasant lunchtime walk I took and the nostalgic mood it engendered… you know, my usual sentimental drivel. But then the earthquake struck.
No, I’m not kidding.
The actor Robert Culp, who unexpectedly died a couple weeks ago at the age of 79, has long struck me as an example of an increasingly rare type of American male. Like Peter Graves, who also recently passed away, Culp always seemed to project an air of confident masculinity. Or masculine confidence, if you’d prefer. Either way, he was a good old-fashioned “man’s man.” Not macho, with all the arrogance, cruelty, and phoniness often implied by that term, and not misogynistic, either, but simply a man who had no hang-ups about being a man. It was a trait of his generation, I think, something as instinctive for them as breathing. And they were the last generation for whom carrying the Y chromosome would come so easily.
Now, I’ve got nothing against feminism per se — I think the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s was both necessary and generally resulted in positive change — but it did make being a man considerably more complicated for those males who grew up in the aftermath, especially those of us who looked to pop culture for guidance. What the hell were we supposed to be like, anyway? The sensitive Alan Alda/Phil Donohue intellectual types that were lauded in the ’70s as “the new man,” or the reactionary, bodybuilding action heroes who took over the big screen in the ’80s? How can we be kind and noble without being self-loathing and tortured, strong without being hypermasculinized caricatures? I’m 40 years old and I’m still trying to find the proper balance between those extremes, to figure out just what being a man is all about.
But guys like Robert Culp, Peter Graves, Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Clint Eastwood — God, yes, Clint! — they just seemed to come into the world already knowing. No, that’s not quite right… they wouldn’t have even wondered how to be a man. They simply were. And that I think is the secret of their enduring appeal, the reason why we still think they’re cool even now, years after the prime of their careers and even, in many cases, their deaths. I admire men like this, and I envy them. And I’m really starting to miss them now that there are so few of them left.
Jaquandor points us today to an opinion piece by comic-book writer and novelist Warren Ellis on the public’s waning enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. Ellis is a bit more curmudgeonly than myself — I know, difficult to believe, but as misanthropic as I sometimes get, I can’t quite bring myself to suggest that Twilight fans “could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser.” The woman I love reads those books, you know, and I’d rather not see her turned into Gro-Mor. Go figure.
I also don’t share Ellis’ concern with getting people into space as a hedge against extinction. This is a good reason for colonizing other worlds, to be sure, and it’s one many people believe ought to be paramount, but I myself have never been able to warm to this particular line of thinking. I’m just not enough of a doomsday-ist, I guess; I am less inspired by fear than by nobler sentiments.
Which is why Ellis’ rant doesn’t start to echo my own thinking until right about here:
Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it’s in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.
We’re almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We’re just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.
In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.
Here, here. I have a lot of respect and affection for those Mars rovers that Ellis sneeringly dismisses as “skateboards” (actually, I think I’m guilty of calling them that myself), but it’s the idea of human eyes looking out on those fantastic, literally unearthly landscapes that fires me up. Being human means you do some things simply because no one else has ever done them before, and somewhere along the line, I think we’ve lost touch with that aspect of our nature. I couldn’t care less about the latest cell phone, myself. Buttons, touchscreen, telepathic interface… who cares? It’s a phone. But crossing the horizon, just to find out what’s over there? Now that‘s exciting!
After a stressful week at work that included the passing specter of layoffs (thankfully averted) followed by one night when I was at the office until 10:15 PM, as well as a busy calendar of late that’s left me feeling behind on a lot of household chores, errands, and projects, I decided to take today off and try to catch up. Or at least catch my breath.
I awoke this morning a bit later than usual, feeling atypically refreshed. There were blue skies outside, my adoring kitty Blackjack was at my feet, and I was all ready for a hot breakfast and a cup of good coffee, precursors to an excellent and productive day.
Savoring the warmth of the mug in my hand and feeling a mild sense of pleasant anticipation, I took my first sip of go-go juice. There was something… odd… about it. I took another sip. Odder still, but I still couldn’t place it. It was an aftertaste, something vaguely floral. And it seemed to be getting stronger, too. On the third sip, I started to think… lavender maybe? Yes, definitely lavender. Lavender with… ylang-ylang essences, whatever the hell they are… dish soap, in other words! I hadn’t rinsed the basket from the coffee maker well enough the night before and I’d just brewed an entire pot of Peet’s House Blend premium roast with lavender and ylang-ylang essences.
I may not be at work, but a Monday is apparently still a Monday.
It’s that time again, the end of a long and (for me, anyway) especially grinding week. I need to decompress, but since I’ve never gotten around to replacing the bottle that used to be in my bottom desk drawer, I think maybe I’ll head on over to the student union… find myself a spot in front of that projection TV the size of a bank-vault door… I’ve got a paper tray filled with those greasy English chips I like, a big splotch of ketchup in the corner for dipping… what’s on today? Oh, this is good! It’s that song I used to consider my personal anthem back in my, shall we say, less settled days:
I realize there’s a certain redundancy in the videos I keep choosing… Look, it’s another cavernous performance space filled with moody shadows, except for the shafts of light silhouetting the band. Look, more self-important posturing while wearing ridiculous outfits! Look, more hair!
Meh, whatever. I like the song. It resonated very strongly with me for a couple of years, all that stuff about “another heart in need of rescue” and “the lonely street of dreams.” It fit my notion of myself as a Byronic hero brooding in the dark about lost love. Or maybe it was frustrated lust. So hard to remember now.
Speaking of lust, incidentally, I really like the redhead who is, to paraphrase the immortal words of Bowling for Soup, shaking her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car. You might recognize her; she’s a model-turned-actress named Tawni Kitaen who had a few good years in the late ’80s and early ’90s with frequent guest spots on TV series such as Seinfeld, Married… with Children, and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. She also appeared in the movie Bachelor Party (the one Tom Hanks doesn’t put on his resume any more), co-hosted America’s Funniest Home Videos, and had a starring role in the short-lived syndicated sitcom The New WKRP in Cincinnati (which is actually where I first noticed her, as best I can recall).
And she provided eye-candy for a number of Whitesnake videos in addition to this one. That’s not surprising when you consider she was dating the lead singer, David Coverdale, during the band’s most successful years. (Did you notice that they share essentially the same hair style?) They would later marry for a brief, tumultuous period.
Sadly, time hasn’t been very kind to her since her heavy-metal heyday. After several years in obscurity, she roared back into the public eye in 2002, charged with beating up her then-husband, a pro baseball player, and appearing in an infamous (and not very flattering) mugshot. Since then, she’s had various substance-abuse and anger-management problems and is widely viewed as a bit of a nut case. (Perhaps we should’ve taken the end of the video, when she drags Coverdale into the back seat of a moving car, more seriously!)
She may be a wreck today, but back in her prime… wow. Remember what I wrote a while back about Kirsten Dunst sometimes getting a certain look in her eye that I find very, ahem, appealing? Tawni gets that look, too… it’s especially nice right around the 4:05 mark, when she’s mussing her hair. Yeah… that’s a nice image to end the week on, don’t you all think?
My friend Mike Gillilan sent this to me last night, and I thought it warranted sharing:
That’s the space shuttle Discovery (obviously) arriving at the International Space Station. I believe the structure in the upper part of the photo is one of several Russian spacecraft currently docked there; the Soyuz and Progress capsules serve as taxis, resupply ships, garbage disposal units, and, in an emergency, escape pods for the station crew.
Sorry the thumbnail is so small, but this is apparently how Twitter codes images for embedding on other websites. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to the full-size Twitpic version. It’s worth a click, believe me; the sharpness of the original is breathtaking.
After you look at this picture, be sure to check out the entire feed. It’s the personal Twitter account (or whatever the hell you call it) of a Japanese astronaut named Soichi Noguchi, and he posts at least a couple new photos every day. Here are a couple of my recent favorites:
That’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the day Discovery launched. The two roundish features to the right are the launch pads, one of which would’ve been occupied by the shuttle when this was taken. And here’s one that’s not so great, technically speaking — there’s quite a bit of “noise” in the image — but is beautiful and awesome — in the original, pre-1980s sense of that word — nonetheless:
The green glow that looks like classic Star Trek phaserfire is in fact the aurora borealis, the famed northern lights; a pair of Soyuz capsules are in the foreground.
As much as I gripe about the way the 21st century has turned out (as opposed to the way we all imagined it), how incredible is it that we have people living in space, taking photographs of what they’re seeing, and sending back to us via the Internet?
Just listening to some music while I sort through some photos, and the following verse from The Who’s “It’s Your Turn” jumped out at me:
There’s a young kid inside me somewhere
He stays up all night, a vampire that never dies,
With the blood and the moon in his eyes
I hear his voice when I’m comin’ down,
Sleep is for fools, who never see the sunrise,
Who never get to live twice.
Like most Who lyrics, that’s a little obscure, but I think I get what they’re saying, and it sounds a lot like how I feel these days. I’ve always been something a night-owl, and just lately… well, I haven’t been sleeping much the last few weeks. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was at least getting some things accomplished with my insomnia-derived extra time. But no, I simply seem to be awake…
UPDATE: Hmm. Curious. What seemed to so clearly mean one thing in the bleary-eyed night seems to have an entirely different meaning in the bleary-eyed morn. Looking at these lyrics now, I see they’re about missing that feeling of being up all night, of being young and energetic and not wanting to miss anything. The vampiric inner kid is chastising the (adult) singer for giving in to the need for sleep, and the singer seems to regret that he can no longer stay up until sunrise the way he used to. Which I can, indeed, relate to.
But last night, I was thinking the verse was more about burning the candle at both ends (and in the middle, too), and the bit about sleep being for fools was a grimly ironic bit of gallows humor, i.e., someone who can’t sleep resorting to sarcasm and saying, “eh, who needs it?” Which is where I’ve actually been lately. So I guess I can relate to this song any way you spin it.
I’m sure none of this is remotely interesting to anyone else, though. Sorry…
Would any of my Loyal Readers be surprised in the least to learn that I just scored 100% on the Boing Boing Star Wars Sound Effects Quiz?
Curiously, I had no problem identifying even those effects that come from the prequels. The only one I dithered over was something from the revised edition of the original film. Make of that what you will…
This was the scene in Florida early this morning as space shuttle Discovery lifted off before dawn for a rendezvous with the International Space Station:
Watch that video a couple of times, kids, and savor it with a bit of melancholy nostalgia, because this will be the last time anyone ever sees the golden flare of a space shuttle’s main engines and solid-rocket boosters combined to banish the darkness. This flight is the last scheduled nighttime launch, and the last that will feature a full crew complement of seven astronauts. After this, only three missions remain before the surviving shuttles are sent off to the museums… and the way things are going, manned American spaceflight may be going with them.
I’ve been wanting to write for some time about the impending end of the shuttle program, as well as the president’s desire to spike the Constellation program that would replace it, but it’s such an emotional issue for me, and I am so ambivalent about the details, that the subject tends to elude me. Still, here are a few quasi-coherent thoughts:
