gugeo

A Metaphysical Quickie

2008-07-06T01:05:00.003-05:00

We like our Kirk/Spock slash, sure, [click on My Somber youTube video to the right] but no one ever said Kirk didn't enjoy the girlies!
Especially the green ones.
Here below, Star Trek's "The Gamesters of Triskelion" (one of the freakiest BDSM episodes) hooks up with a few lines of To His Mistress Going to Bed, by John Donne (one of the metaphysical poets, like Marvell).
(Tip to Manfred.)

Hey, I'm getting faster at this. Took about 30 minutes to put the pix & words together. Of course there's no music, so listen to a few minutes of "Stand on Zanzibar" [post below] while you read this, for the appropriate spacey feel.

Oh, and the whole scrumptious poem, from Donne's pre-Church days--(before all those "no man is an island" sermons)--is to be found here.

"Stand on Zanzibar"

2008-07-05T20:54:00.018-05:00

Listen to "Stand on Zanzibar" by Trip to Jerusalem, the UK band of Manfred Allseason (the man who ponders whether Sherlock Holmes was getting it on with Mrs. Bridges, in a comment on previous post).

The song is an electronic post-imperial "Star Wars" (with touches of TNG) waiting-for-the-barbarians type of story told from the colonizers' pov...

But mostly it's cool music that makes great listening while downloading Star Trek clips.

Click on the arrow in the round circle in the box below to make it so.
If this box thingy doesn't work, you can find the song here.

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eSnips Social DNA

I don't know if Trip to Jerusalem referenced this, but here is the extraordinary explanation of the title of the 1968 book Stand on Zanzibar, from Wikipedia:

The novel's main driver is overpopulation and its projected consequences.
* * * Its title refers to an early twentieth century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight (area 381 km²) if they were all standing upright.

[The author] Brunner remarked that ... the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 km²), while the 7 billion people whom he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1554 km²).

Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world where each person feels hemmed in by a prison made not of metal bars, but of other human beings. By the end of the book, some of that crowd is (metaphorically) knee deep in the Indian Ocean surrounding the island.

___________

Really spooky kids: In 2008, we almost have reached a world population of 7 billion.

My Second Vid: Kirk/Spock: "The Definition of Love" (poem by Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678)

2008-07-04T15:47:00.005-05:00

I spent about 4 x as much time on this one as the last one, and it's only 3 x longer. This is a nerve-racking process!
(But thanks to Kellie for making it easier by helping with the music!)

K/S:"A Definition of Love"

My accompanying notes on youTube:

Unmet longing + stars + navigation.
The 17th cent. British "metaphysical" poets wrote about this stuff long before 1960's Star Trek.
I mashed-up this poem by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), music from "The Four Seasons" by Antonio Vivaldi (born the year Marvell died), and Kirk and Spock.

So I guess that makes this metaphysical Baroque Star Trek slash...

Kirk & Spock do--eventually--fulfill the seemingly impossible demands Marvell set for ill-fated loves to meet. (Helps to have a starship.)

The angst of the poem is obvious enough, but some of the language may be unfamiliar to modern readers, so here's the whole poem to read at your leisure, if you want.

(I had to look up "planisphere" = a star chart made of a flat surface--the plane--with a movable disc--the sphere--on top; and "oblique lines" = lines that are neither perpendicular nor parallel.)

"The Definition of Love"

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced--

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines, so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.
_______

Marvell's work is in the public domain; Paramount owns Star Trek; I offer this solely for pleasure and edification.
Thanks to Trekcore.com for the screencaps!

"Middle Ages Tech Support"

2008-07-04T10:31:00.003-05:00

Since I am always saying we are living in the same sort of confusion as people in Gutenberg's era, Stef sent me this funny youTube on that subject: Middle Ages Tech Support (2:25 sec.).

And since I am having a heck of a time getting my second video to upload to youTube (failed once, is taking a worryingly long time this time), today was the perfect day to get it. I'm hoping my problem is as simple as getting turned around with the concept "turn the pages."

The Page 123 Meme

2008-07-01T17:18:00.007-05:00

Oh, that worked well, my plan to go to bed early and read a book.
I slept until 1 a.m., when a large thump woke me up. The house I'm sitting is not in a particularly safe neighborhood, so I jolted wide awake, even though, of course, it was just the cats.

(Frizzy Logic has been discussing ways to eat cats, and I think I might experiment with one of these I'm caring for. The vacationing owner doesn't really need all three, does she?)

Anyway, after that I tossed and turned till dawn, thinking about the vid I'm trying to construct (or whatever you do with vids--I am still learning the vocabulary).
I also thought, the time has come to respond to being tagged by two people: Sally of Already Pretty and Matt of Longburn.

Here's how this meme works:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post the next 5 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The book I was reading last night was The Writing Life (1989), by Annie Dillard. It only runs 111 pages, so I am going to post 5 sentences from page 103 instead.
I find Dillard a bit overly reverential, a bit precious (e.g. "the page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity..."), so I was pleased that the sentences display a rare glimpse of humor:

"Later I learned that some stunt pilots tune up by wearing gravity boots. These are boots made to hook over a doorway; wearing them, you hang in the doorway upside-down. It must startle a pilot's children, to run into their father or mother in the course of their home wandering––the parent hanging wide-eyed upside-down in the doorway like a bat."

Oh--I'm supposed to tag 5 people. So: other bloggers who read my blog, consider yourselves tagged!

Wall-E

2008-06-30T19:59:00.009-05:00

I went with L & M to see Wall-E--about a plucky robot carrying on among the ruins of Earth--and left thinking, "I want to work for Pixar." The movie immediately rose to No. 1 on My Favorite Post-Apocalypse Movies. (Sorry, Mel Gibson.) It even incorporated a few Star Trek sound effects--not to mention Hello, Dolly!
This mashup all poured fuel on my desire to create iMovies.

Then Sal came over the next day and we talked about how I don't have anything yet to wear for the Las Vegas ST con in one month. She said, "You want to feel good about yourself when you go," and I agreed.

I asked myself later, what will make me feel good about myself at the con?
Having a couple videos I'm proud of under my belt.
So, this is a preview frame from my second video:

If you recognize the quote, 10 cents off your next cup of coffee. (Kellie, you can't enter to win.)

I don't know. It boggles my brain that I am making movies, even these tiny little things (with stills, even), when it is something I have wanted to do for so long but never thought I could.
Thank you, fellow humans who made this possible.

However, I have also been feeling a wee bit insanely obsessive, and even though I applaud Werner Herzog and his like, I am not built for those speeds (with their attendant sleeplessness), so I am going to turn off this computer at this early hour of 8 p.m. and read a book.
Remember those?

My Silly Kirk Video

2008-06-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not ready to let this get buried under new posts, so let me give the youTube link to my first ever fanvid again:
"Don't Touch Jim's Flower".

Terriers in Movies 1: Flike

2008-06-28T13:17:00.009-05:00

Umberto D (1962, Italy, dir. Vittorio De Sica) is nauseatingly sad, but it offers my favorite answer to Marcel Camus's central philosophical question:
Why not kill yourself?

[Spoiler alert, but I don't think you should watch this movie anyway, it's too painful, despite its "happy" ending.]

The old man Umberto D. has lost everything in a series of humiliating events, so at the end of the movie he decides to kill himself and his little dog, Flike, by stepping onto train tracks as a train approaches.

Flike is having none of it, however, being a terrier and therefore not worried about maintaining dignity and whatnot. He squirms out of Umberto's arms and runs into a park, followed by Umberto, who loves him.

Flike is suspicious at first, but Umberto wins his dog's forgiveness by throwing a pine cone like a ball for him.
The movie ends with Umberto playing with Flike.
And that's how a terrier answers central existential questions.

Credo 3: Get Hold of a Terrier

2008-06-28T13:07:00.002-05:00

I believe (along with Frizzy Logic): "...many [bad] circumstances in life can be attributed to lack of terrier."
I have solved this by having a best friend with a wire-haired fox terrier, Joop, who is one of the delights of my life. When I happen to be in situations where people ask you to call up something that always makes you smile (this happens sometimes in stretch class or when listening to Buddhist meditation CDs), I always think of him.

Credo 2: Add Another Zero

2008-06-28T11:46:00.029-05:00

I believe: We have all the space and time we need.

(You know, in cosmic terms.)
_____________________

I lucked into going to the P.O. this week right after these stamps honoring Ray and Charles Eames came out (June 17, 2008), and I bought 5 sheets.

The Eameses were a wife-and-husband design team, famous for their chairs, among other things.
They also made 100 short films.

Exploring ways to teach physics, they created the 8 minute The Power of Ten [click to watch on youTube], which I count among the influences of my life.

It is "about relative size and distance...and the effect of adding another zero."

Starting 1 meter above a man and a woman on a picnic blanket, the scene pulls back every 10 seconds, each time as if the camera moved 10 x farther away at a 10 x wider angle. Then it zooms 10 x closer in and narrower. So it journeys deep into the universe and back into subatomic molecule--and in each case reaches empty space.

I often think of these perspectives when I'm feeling overly crunched or spaced out.

Credo 1: Feed Your Sheep

2008-06-27T22:17:00.009-05:00

I believe: 90% of everything may indeed be crap, as Sturgeon's Law has it ;
but that means 10% is not.

Feed them sheep.

____________________

Bink went onto the roof of the Basilica to photograph her labyrinth, now mowed into the west lawn, alongside the highway.

A good place to graze your urban sheep.

My First YouTube: Captain Kirk's Flower

2008-06-26T08:22:00.007-05:00

I finished my first video ever last night at 3 a.m. and uploaded it on youTube (another first):
"Don't Touch Jim's Flower"

It's 1 min., 20 sec. of pure silliness about Captain Kirk and his pet ego. I am like to die of pride.

The music is "Jazzy Bach," by Ben Charest (and Bach). It's from The Triplets of Belleville.
Thanks to Bink, who helped get me started on iMovies (and lent me the Triplets soundtrack)!

"How to Watch a Fanvid"

2008-06-26T07:53:00.000-05:00

This article by Henry Jenkins-- author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and the guy who wrote about Obama as a Secret Vulcan--is the smartest thing I've read on fan culture:
How to Watch a Fanvid

His explanation of slash is the only thing I've read that I would give to someone who just didn't get it. It ...well, here, I'm going to cut and paste this bit:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies.

Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series.

Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed.
And, I tell my nonfan listeners,
slash is what happens when you take away the glass. [bolded by Fresca]

The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship.

Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like.

One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

Icons

2008-06-25T21:48:00.017-05:00

I've spent all day and most of the evening--with significant help from Bink (not that she knew any more than I did)--working on my first *ever* iMovie!

I'm arranging and titling screencaps (stills "captured" from film) from the Star Trek episode "The Apple" to make an utterly rIDICulous story, with a few sound effects, etc.

(IDIC = "infinite diversity in infinite combination".)

How extraordinary that without knowing anything (no lie) about moviemaking, I can put together a rudimentary movie...
I will post the results when it's a bit smoother.
I predict I will spend my summer making ST flicks.
My life as a filmmaker is launched.

Lemonrocket is the maker of 107 Spock icons and the two icons here.

Cat & Co.

2008-06-24T23:47:00.015-05:00

The Pink Cat is gaining in my favor. She's been dozing next to me tonight as I hack my way through a ms. more dreadful than usual (even allowing generous accomodation for Sturgeon's Law: the ”90 percent of everything is crap” dictum of sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon).

It's almost midnight now, so Pink Cat is getting active, preparing to save me soon from that human mistake of trying to sleep at night. For we must remain vigilant: there may be bugs on the ceiling!

(Anyone who would like to explain to me what cats think they're doing when they bat at the walls, please do. Or what cats think they're doing, period.)

Cats Sleep in the Day

2008-06-24T13:25:00.006-05:00

...So they can bother you at night.
This is The Pink Cat, one of the cats I am housesitting--an affectionate cat who does that thing cats do:
when you are asleep (or trying to be), they come and stand on top of you.

I wrote to Sister, who knows about cats and lives with three, including her cat Miko, asking about this.

She responded:
"Only the Love Nut cats do that. The Pinkster and Miko, for example.
I find it soooo calming to have a cat standing on me because it usually leads to them lying down and falling asleep on you, which is even better.

"Also, have you noticed another thing about cats: they only get up close and personal when you
(a) have your eyes closed, or
(b) are looking the other way."

Naturally. Cats are Vulcans, even the Love Nut ones.

What's with the Whipped Cream?

2008-06-24T12:14:00.006-05:00

I am housesitting a wonderful big old house for two weeks, full of books and music and art and plants and cats. So of course I am being very literary and artistic and working on my novel and...
Um, well, no. In fact, I am sitting around watching Kirk/Spock slash on youTube. And just found this fluff with a whipped cream theme. Bink, have you been watching silly, naughty videos on youTube? Or is there just something about Kirk/Spock that suggests whipped cream?

I also found the source for "screencaps"--still photos of the TV shows, such as the author (author?)--mortmere used here), from TrekCore.com:
Kirk/Spock: The Prize (or, The Whipped Cream Maneuver).

These hands...

2008-06-23T11:18:00.003-05:00

...taught me to make pasta when I was a kid.
I spent this past weekend in Milwaukee with my 83-year-old Sicilian auntie, whose hands these are. She gathered friends to celebrate Summer Solstice with drumming, dancing, and howling at the moon in her backyard .

Vulcan Politics

2008-06-22T14:58:00.016-05:00

Equating political candidates with heroes is dangerously sentimental and generally I eschew it.
Nevertheless, this post, Is Obama a Secret Vulcan? by Henry Jenkins, with the graphic (left) from Cafe Press "Politics for the Star Trek Fan" amused me.
Krista (Thinkery) sent it to me, and it helped maintain my sanity here in the Milwaukee airport, waiting with a crushing headache to fly home after a weekend with relatives...
(Helped too to drown out the repeated "homeland security" warning: "If a stranger approaches you about carrying a foreign object..." Like, a tribble?)

I don't think a Vulcan would make a good US president--look at what a crummy job Spock did with the Galileo 7 (until the last minute, when his irrational human side took over). Still, he's got to be better than McCain!

Marilyn, Reading

2008-06-21T16:52:00.005-05:00

When Sister saw the photo of Pamela Anderson reading, she reminded me of this photo of Marilyn Monroe, which she and SJG have hanging as a poster in their house.

The Pattern in Question

2008-06-19T14:14:00.006-05:00

What inquiring evolutionary psychologists [see comment on post below] want to see to aid their pattern recognition research.

From The Sun (UK). Pamela Anderson reading Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity, by Anne Elizabeth Moore, who asks, what happens when the underground becomes just another market?

Pattern Recognition

2008-06-19T10:18:00.011-05:00

After discussing whether Pamela Anderson is predator or prey (with R. on “Familiar Stranger” comments, below), I got thinking about how and why we recognize patterns (faces, expressions, etc.).

Here’re a handful of my condensed thoughts on the matter--or, my inital attempts to make a pattern out of the swirl stirred up in my brain.

1. It serves human survival (like, on the savannah where we evolved) to be able to recognize patterns:

zebra zebra zebra zebra
zebra zebra zebra zebra
zebra zebra lion zebra
zebra zebra zebra zebra

2. Behaviors that increase payoffs (such as food) and decrease cost (say, blood loss) we often experience as pleasure, as play.
Surprise, variation, and practice hone our pattern recognition skills.
Thus, we enjoy games based on pattern recognition:

Duck, duck, goose. (Or gray duck.)

1, 3, 5, 7…

3. Storytelling, which serves social bonding (and hence increases payoffs), also works with pattern recognition:

husband
wife
lover

4. When the pattern games get more complex and less easy fun (bigger payoffs, bigger costs), we call them something else.
For instance, the Olympics, calculus, literature:

husband
wife
lover
train

5. The less immediately recognizeable the patterns are (or the less equipped we are to read them), the more likely we are to find them threatening. Lion? Zebra?
And that's why some ill-equipped people don't like Pamela Anderson to read academic books while she wears a bikini.

Familiar Strangers

2008-06-18T08:46:00.019-05:00

Speaking of sensual [post below], here is an amazing little film clip from the 1940s:
Frida Kahlo Kisses Diego Rivera,
from the Tate Modern's 2005 Kahlo exhibit.
(If the film doesn't show up, as half the time it didn't for me in Safari, try it in Firefox.)

And speaking of famous Jews [ditto], for an examination of whether or not Kahlo was of Jewish descent (turns out, maybe not), read The Un-Chosen Artist from The Jewish Press.

The author, Menachem Wecker, quotes a phrase calling Kahlo a "multiply hyphenated artist."
Too right! She is one of those people in whom it is easy to see what you want to see.
I mean, what other foreign Communist could end up on a US postage stamp?

Wecker also writes about a sociological phenomenon called "familiar strangers."
This phrase is new to me, but catches something I've long noticed: our desire to claim someone--like Kahlo, or Shatner, or the person next to us at the coffee shop--as "one of our own," whatever our "own" happens to be (or, conversely, to claim an identity for ulterior motives--like Kahlo claiming Jewish ancestry perhaps primarily to align herself with anti-Nazism):

"In a 1972 study, Stanley Milgram found that “familiar strangers” who share a repeated experience (like riding the same bus every day) are likelier to communicate when cast into an unfamiliar setting, than are two strangers with no such shared experience.
Apparently, Milgram found, strangers recognize some form of “real” relationship in chance encounters, in which they do not communicate or even know each other’s name.

Perhaps Jews who seek to claim celebrities like Chagall hope to share a similarly “familiar” religious experience with him.
Many artists who are claimed as Jewish do not identify as such, like non-Jewish painters Paul Klee and Max Ernst, whom the Nazis denounced as Jewish “degenerate” artists.

Klee and Ernst would have preferred that Hitler not identify them as Jews, but Mexican-born painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) happily celebrated her “perceived” Jewish lineage...."

Lush Life

2008-06-17T13:10:00.021-05:00

.
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.
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.
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I already wrote in Captain Kirk's Parted Lips about the uncanny resemblance of William Shatner (above, right) to Shelley Winters.

This week, as I contemplate the beauty of flowers just past their peak (peonies, a couple posts back), Simone Signoret comes to mind, as she appeared at forty-four years old in Ship of Fools (1965, above, left). She also looks rather like Mr. Shatner. (And note those parted lips...)

Being plush is not in favor in the West these days, but comfort with sensual pleasure is part of these people's attractiveness. Signoret, anyway, famously got sexier as she aged, like an overblown rose. Rather old-fashioned, in this hard-bodied age.

For what it's worth, I also note that all three come from Eastern European Jewish backgrounds (Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine).

The First Weddings Are Rolling Out

2008-06-17T12:25:00.007-05:00

"San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, center, kisses Del Martin, left, as Martin’s partner Phyllis Lyon, right, looks on in a special ceremony at City Hall in San Francisco, Monday, June 16, 2008. Lyon and Martin became the first officially married same sex couple after California’s Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, Pool)"

Image snagged from The Wild Reed, who neatly proves that not all Catholic GLBT theology is in need of revamping...

I remember Martin and Lyon as old warhorses back when I was a young confused LBAQ.
I don't usually put initials after my name anymore (the list got too long!), but of all those available, at midlife I most strongly identify with Q.
No matter who I sleep with (or don't, these days), I have always been Queerish.

More from the net:
At the West Hollywood City Hall, George Takei — who played Sulu on the original "Star Trek" — beamed as he and his partner of 21 years, Brad Altman, obtained one of the new gender-neutral marriage licenses — with the words "Party A" and "Party B" instead of "bride" and "groom." They are planning a September wedding.

"I see before me people who personify love and commitment," a grinning Takei told the crowd. He flashed the Vulcan hand salute from "Star Trek" and, in a twist on the Vulcan greeting from the TV series, said: "May equality live long and prosper."