Freeform on a Friday By AH.

The man himself Sir Rantalot asked me to post something for his website. Lately I haven‚t had a strong focus to act like a microscope/telescope/magnifying glass bringing verbal order to the more or less random events of our lives. Mostly been just been kicking stuff around.

Enjoying being a parent. It helps having, objectively speaking, the cutest kid in the Milky Way. It's hard to imagine how much you will enjoy your kids until you have some of your own; and damn near impossible to convey in a meaningful way the beauty and delight of their Tabula Rasa perception of the world, their ever shifting behavior patterns, the satisfaction of comforting them when they are sad and joy in watching them take hours of delight in playing with something as simple as a cardboard box. So I won‚t try.

Note to Broadway: "The Princess Bride" is dying for a musical makeover. Just a little FYI. Oh, quick rave: „Avenue Q‰ is awesome. Log off, go run to your local music store and buy it, log back on, and continue reading.

Is it just me, or is our generation (I'm 29 FYI) the biggest bunch of flakes ever? Tossing it out there. I‚m sure are some standards to apply to quantify this relative lack of consideration/inability to make plans/lack of calling to cancel/etc. to other generations. Just answer me this: have you tried throwing together 8 20-something people for a dinner/movie/whatever? Wow.

At the risk of making myself sound pretentious, has anyone checked out "My Dinner with Andre?" There is a part in there where Andre is talking about why everyone talks about leaving New York, but no one ever does (which isn't true. I left NY. But then I didn't grow up there). He says it is because New York is the model for the new prison, where everyone is both a prisoner and a guard, and this schizophrenia has people walking around in a confused haze.

This may sound abstract, but let's put it in another context. Say you are an employee and shareholder of a company. The company wants to freeze wages and cut staff, leaving those left over double the workload. This will make the share price rise. Are you for it or against? Is it a moral judgment, or are your leanings in proportion to how much share you have and if you are the one getting the ax? (Quick note to job seekers: get a job with a private company if at all possible).

Someone once asked me what I think the biggest problem our country faces right now. I think it is the continued stratification of our society and the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. It’s already epidemic and has already created an informal class system, which runs against the grain of what this country is about.

Not saying we can do anything about it. It just kinda sucks, that’s all.

I think the attitude of the ruling class was best summed up in the Mel Brooks movie "A History of the World Part One" when one Senator begs: "But what about the poor?" and the entire assembly in unison yells back "Fuck the poor!" Truth is beauty and beauty truth.

Living in the bay area and not remotely being in the neighborhood of even imagining I could buy a house kinda brings this divide into focus for me. The divide between homeowners and renters is another focal point of this class thing. The fact that I won‚t own till I move or win the lottery is just another concrete reminder that our generation will be the first American one to be materially poorer than the one that preceded it.

My friend once said that he wasn't rich like my parents. I was aghast because my parents aren't rich. My dad teaches at a community college and, without disclosing too much, is definitely within the five-figure range. I worked at restaurants until I graduated college to augment the bare minimum I was given to live. I guess my friend thought my folks had dough because of where they lived.

My parents were lucky enough to buy a 4 bedroom/2 bath house in North Berkeley a few blocks from campus for around $25,000. Now it's true that this investment has returned probably 50-fold (damn Bay Area real estate is a good investment). But it means nothing until they actually sell it. In the 6th grade I had three pairs of identical blue jeans, of which one I duct taped together because the button came off. People at Longfellow elementary thought I was the poorest kid in the class.

My point is this: my definition of wealth is not numerically oriented but is held up to this standard: are you working for your money or is your money working for you? To this my parents and myself definitely fall into the former.

Quick aside: what is with this week of mourning‚ for Reagan? Perhaps the public has a shorter-term memory than even Reagan had himself. I guess growing up in the Bay Area gave me a somewhat skewed and not so mainstream perception. Let me put it this way: I was SHOCKED that Reagan beat Mondale (I was 9 at the time). I mean, the promise of higher taxes, a choice of a woman as a running mate-what‚s not to like? I’m glad Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia agreed with me. Every other state was enjoying their “Morning in America.” And now they seem to be enjoying their mourning in America.

Since the only other president to die in my lifetime was Nixon, a disgraced president whose death was more or less swept under the rug, I had no real basis of comparison for this event. I was like “What the hell? An entire week of mourning?”

Am I the only one who recalls a line from Evita "When they are bringing your curtain down-demand to be buried like Eva Peron"?

In fact the whole song is strangely poignant:
O what a circus
O what a show

America has gone to town, over the death of an actor named Ronald Reagan.

We've all gone crazy
Mourning all day and mourning all night
Falling over ourselves to get all of the misery right

Oh what an exit, that's how to go
When they're ringing your curtain down
Demand to be buried like Ronald Reagan
It's quite a sunset
And good for the country in a roundabout way
We've made the front page of all the world's papers today

Oops. I just admitted I could paraphrase portions of Evita by heart. I'll just check my heterosexual credentials at the door. At least I got a small assist by the internet.

Though those who work for the federal government got Friday off to mourn, those of us working in the private sector still had to go to work. I mildly resented that, as I wanted to mourn in my own private way. Does a day at the beach and a movie count as mourning?

Anyways, that‚s what I got right now.

Toodles.

The Death of Objectivity in Relationships: By AH

The title of this piece is a misnomer, of course. For something to die, it must have existed in the first place.
There was a great moment in Annie Hall when Annie walked in, and clearly says something. Woodman asks her about it, and she says she didn't say that. He turns to the camera and asks us to validate that he is not going crazy. Wouldn't it be great if it was like that in real life?

Because it is hard to see things as they really are. Sometimes it feels like you do nothing but work, and then all of a sudden your woman will wheel on you and call you lazy. Sometimes you lay out your carefully considered ideas, and she says "you couldn't be more off-track." Sometimes it feels like you do everything for her, and she asks "but what about me? Have you considered me?" And-after you get over the rage-you ask yourself "Am I the asshole?"
It is our nature to want to pinpoint root causes and effects. We are rational creatures by design (OK, that can and has been debated). We seek reasons and are probably unique in the animal kingdom in that we need meaning. Need it. Kill ourselves without it.

But in the quagmire that is relationship logic, accounting for who is really right and who is really wrong is, well, damn near IMPOSSIBLE. We have to live with the fact that sometimes things are true because your partner thinks they are.
Plus, bean-counting relationship's right and wrong denies the true nature of women. Call me old fashion, call me patriarchal, whatever. Women are magic.

Of course you guys get what I'm getting at. This is a meditation on God. Objectivity has been described as a God's eye view. But is the nature of God really objective, a sort of mountain top view, or is it the heart of subjectivity? Does God give you such trials because he loves you?

I think Chris Rock put it best - "When you are married, you want to kill your partner. When you are single, you want to kill yourself." Live with it, I guess - the alternative is worse.

Whatever Happened to the Star Trek Movies? By AH.

It's been a rough ride for us Star Trek movie fans. After the glory that was First Contact, we've had to suffer through the lame Insurrection and the promising but ultimately unfulfilling Nemesis. And the prospect of no more ST:TNG movies ever is, well, grim.

So, where has the magic gone? What happened to this once glorious franchise, which has now gone the way of baseball in the 24th century? Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio? I think there are two things at play here. First, when you deal with movies, the emphasis tends to be on the star characters (Picard and Data); but ST:TNG has always been an ensemble effort. It stings to see the noble and powerful Worf from "A matter of honor" and "Lower Decks" reduced to a bit cameo. Troi, Crusher, Geordi, and even, to a degree, Riker have been marginalized, and the dimension and scope of the movies suffer.

Cinema has two principle pleasures; voyeuristic and narcissistic. The voyeuristic pleasure is still there; cool space battles and the strange aliens. But what is missing is the narcissistic pleasure; or, the feeling that these movies are talking about us.

Star Trek was always at its best when we felt that we, as individuals or as a society, are being mirrored. McCarthyism, Homosexuality, family issues-these things and many others were successfully tackled within this show. What worked with Star Trek is that though the settings and characters were fantastic, paradoxically this allowed a greater amount of depth and, dare I say, realism in talking about issues we cannot, in polite society, deal with directly.

So is the Star Trek franchise irrelevant? No. There has never been a greater need for our Star Trek heroes than now. We live in extremely trying times. We need to simultaneously escape with and deal with our times.

Here are some ideas. What we are dealing with now, in the Middle East, is a culture, which confuses us; an ever shifting political structure where our friends today are our mortal enemies tomorrow; a morality, which has a logic strange to our own; and a culture, which presents, as of now, a grave threat to our way of life. Does this sound like the Klingon empire to anyone?

(Sir Rantalot’s note: Klingons have always embodied America’s fears of whatever race we currently see as a problem. The Klingons were in fact created in response to the Yellow Peril fears of the late fifties and early sixties. That’s why they looked so Asian in the original Star Trek. Then, in the late eighties and early nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Klingons became the black people who live among us (Worf) and with whom we have an uneasy peace. So why not make them Middle-Eastern? For more on depictions of ethnicity in Sci-Fi see the Essays Page.)

How about this: after a devastating terrorist attack on the Federation capital, San Francisco, by some rogue Klingons, a fragile political climate is placed in severe danger by Federation renegades to gain retribution and plunge the galaxy into chaos by destroying the planet Klingons find most holy, Boreth (Mecca); also, the assassination of Kahless might make a fine subplot. Though the Federation is stronger than the Klingon empire, a war would be devastating to both sides. It is up to Picard and company from stopping this from happening.
Worf would play a key role in this story, and rather than the ineffectual Worf from the past few movies, I see this Worf with a Bat'leth and a flowing cape. Worf is a badass; give the guy his due.

Also, there needs to be a fight, weather in space or with fist, between Riker and Worf over Deanna. Some long simmering feelings could erupt due to some friendly Klingon prodding for Worf. This issue was not dealt with in a satisfying manner. This, as well, would make some good fodder for Deanna, who always seems to get the short end of the plot stick.

Now, a note on the "B4" character. I know Brent Spiner had his hand in this character development. Brent is a fine actor, and is one of the most memorable characters on the show; but he needs to be reigned in. I know they are setting up a "Search for Spock" scenario, where the original Data is resurrected somehow. But that B4 character is just painful.

In a subplot, the Federation military scientists should be developing a species of Datas bred for fighting, with Nanites being the mechanisms (like cells) of which this Species is created (out of what raw materials, I'm not sure). Data fights the other Datas in that they, like Lore, want their own species of superior beings, and can see themselves rising from the choas.

Side note: Geek goddess Tina Fey from SNL must come in for some geek sex appeal and be strong, funny, dare I say ballsy character. Perhaps an academic who wrote a book „The Klingon Problem,‰ or something like it. She has the spark and intelligence for some great dialogue.

OK. That's my rant. It is hard to see ST:TNG struggle so hard and stray so far from the things which made us great. ST:TNG reminds us that we as a species can achieve greater things; and though we came from the earth, we belong in the stars.