The Definition of Unwarranted: Appreciating the Slow, Boring Star Trek Movie

It’s the big sci-fi movie of my childhood, the one against which all others are judged. Watching it still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s a whole hell of a lot, and I can quote lines or do entire scenes. I recognize that it’s a highly flawed movie, and for the most part I liked the rejiggered effects in the “Director’s Edition.” At least they didn’t try to shoehorn in bathroom jokes like the later, much suckier movies in the series.

Even if you haven’t already read the title or seen the accompanying picture, in this post-ironic age you’ve probably figured by now that I’m not talking about Star Wars. Instead, I refer without irony to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I can hear the witty rejoinders already: “You mean Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, don’t you?”

Yeah. That one.

Thanks to my family having remarkable taste (which also resulted in a lifelong love of The Beatles and Dylan), I’ve been a Star Trek fan from a very young age. Most of my fellow Generation X’ers hate the movie, though. As do Boomers. I haven’t asked any Millennials, but I’d gather that for them, Star Trek movies start with the Khan one, and they all kinda suck anyway. Story of my life, loving something everyone else hates.

Actually, I don’t know anyone who actively hates Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Though I imagine a few haters will chime in in the comments section. Hello, haters!) Most people just dismiss it as “the slow and boring first movie,” even if they haven’t seen it in a decade or three. It doesn’t raise the well-deserved ire of the underbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, or the overbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek Nemesis, the latter being the one Trek movie I cannot sit through. Gods, Nemesis was horrible, so talky and unwatchable. (Irony alert: many people feel that way about The Motion Picture.) At least The Final Frontier has a certain ramshackle charm to its badness. Watching it can be like a parlor game: there’s something wrong with practically every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue. See if you can spot them all! Just be sure it isn’t a drinking game, lest you have alcohol poisoning by the time Spock plays “Row Your Boat” on his lyre. It’s like the Turkish Star Trek with a thirty million dollar budget, and I mean that as the highest praise.

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Your Pocket Vibrator and You

Cheating! That’s what I like, and it’s what I’m going to do right now. Three months back when I was still writing about Second Life, I tangented on the subject of text-messaging:

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in American or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

The obvious punchline is that I’m now a text-messaging addict. A junkie. A filthy carpal-thumbed 160-character whore, I am. I got my first cell phone in October 2005 for use during a well-intended if poorly-attended book tour. (If you ever want to read to six rows of empty folding chairs near the Canadian border, drive to Bellingham, Washington. Builds character.) Empirically speaking I would still be alive right now, but emotionally I suspect the trip would have killed me if not for text-messaging. Waking up to messages from my girlfriend Vash made waking up seem worth the effort at all, and furiously thumbtyping back and forth with a friend during a particularly rough patch somewhere between Portland and Seattle was an excellent outlet.

Damn, quoting myself like that was all meta ‘n shit, wasn’t it? And certainly not narcissistic. It’s all true, though, and the ensuing quarter of a year has done nothing to diminish my love of the textiness.

A lot of people call it impersonal. I think it’s like any other form of communication: it’s as personal as you care to make it. Some of the coldest, most meaningless conversations I’ve ever had have been face to face, and I’ve been known to get teary standing on a streetcorner clutching my vaguely communicator-esque phone, SMSing away. (Last Saturday night around half past ten at Church and Market in San Francisco, dressed in black, long blonde pigtails, smeary eyeliner? That was me.) Language is too powerful to be entirely stymied just because it’s on a screen 1.25″ wide and 1.5″ tall. If they have a personal context, the word no can be devastating or yes uplifting or vice versa no matter how they’re conveyed.
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Sometimes My Arms Bend Back: A Personal History of Twin Peaks

Do you remember where you were on June 10, 1991? Me, I was at a Black Crowes concert in Fresno. I remember this because it was precisely where I did not want to be. My girlfriend Kim was a fan and had already bought the tickets, so we went, but why did it have to be the same night as the series finale of Twin Peaks, our mutual favorite show?

We bonded over Twin Peaks early in our courtship, marathoning through the seven-episode first season on my birthday in 1990 while my father was out of town. Admittedly, we were kinda distracted and didn’t start watching it in earnest until Jim and his girlfriend showed up, but hey, I was newly seventeen and Kim was sixteen, and the carpet was quite comfy.

When the series finale approached almost exactly a year later, Kim reasonably pointed out that we could tape it and watch it the next day. Well, yes, sure, I taped every episode of the show for keeps anyway but feh, I wanted to watch it now, or at least as close to now as was possible. It wasn’t out of spoiler fear; school was out and neither us of had to work for the next few days, so there was no buzz to avoid. Semantically speaking, this was before the word “spoiler” was invented. I simply referred to it as “not wanting to know what happens next.” I didn’t watch the previews for Star Trek: The Next Generation, a practice which continues today with the new Galactica.

But this was Twin Peaks, damnit. A teevee show produced by David Lynch, my favorite director, an episode directed by him, those were always the best, and after this there would be no more. Then again, there was no telling when Kim would get another chance to sing along live with Chris Robinson to “She Talks to Angels,” and the correct decision was made. We went to the concert, watched the episode the next morning, and it was all good.

Hardly anybody else watched the show anymore, and those who did were vocal in their disappointment. Most people tuned out by a few episodes into the second season, maybe returning for the heavily-hyped episode in which the Laura Palmer storyline was finally resolved. The result was a major backlash, evolving from the minor backlash which started brewing when the murder wasn’t solved five minutes into the second season.
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Second Life and the Vision Thing

I’m wrong. A lot.

I fully admit it. I’m not an especially deep thinker, and I can’t predict the future for shit. Like everyone else, I was hoping for flying cars by now. Not to mention robots, though I suppose the longer we have to wait on that one, the better.

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in America or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

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That’s What I Like: Remastered Analog Music

As a teenager, I was seldom without my Walkman. Among my more prominent memories of 1986 is of sitting on the bus on the way home from summer school (frackin’ Algebra), listening to the MCA cassette of The Who’s Odds and Sods, trying to decipher the lyrics to “Put the Money Down.” It was one of my favorite Who songs; I loved the synth line, the peculiar rhythm, the sense of longing that was conveyed by the emotions of the vocal. The words themselves surely meant something deep and profound, the way that most of Pete Townshend’s music felt to me at the troubled age of thirteen, but I couldn’t figure out what Daltrey was singing most of the time, no matter how loud I played it. And I played it loud, right into my fragile aural canal. Is someone’s phone ringing, or is that just me?

It wasn’t just Daltrey’s phrasing and/or Townshend’s frequently obtuse imagery keeping me from unlocking the mysteries of this particular universe. Hell, it could have been a spoken word piece done in a perfect Northwest Fresno dialect and I probably still wouldn’t have understood, so muddy was the sound of the store-bought tape. Based on what little has been written about the song—as usual, nobody else likes it as much as I do—”Put the Money Down” is another in a very long line of Townshend songs about the travails of being a rock’n'roll star. A life which bore no resemblence to mine, to be sure, yet I connected with it in that way that most depressive teenagers do. (Oh, the spin that Pink Floyd’s even more alien The Wall would put me into shortly thereafter!) That I didn’t pick up on the recurring theme is why I could never be a rock critic. For that matter, I’m still surprised whenever I discover that a Neil Young song uses a C-D-G chord progression, even though they all do. It’s all one song.
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