Does Star Trek: the Original Series belong on this blog?

Alas, that's what I'm thinking about these days.

This year I am teaching much the same courses as I've been teaching for the last four years. My teaching, thinking about basic facts and concepts that should be presented to my students, is a major source for much of my blogging. Then there are current events. Right now I find little to inspire original thought in the news. I don't have such respect for my own opinions as to think that my readers will be interested in hearing me go on about American politics, Canadian politics, or even Middle Eastern politics. I find all these developing stories to be stalled in patterns that I have either talked about before or are just as obvious to interested readers as they are to me. I am not interested in being another political ranter, not unless I have a really good rant to trot out.

Similarly, I don't have much new to say about chivalry or deeds of arms right now. I should have a book out this spring on Charny's Men at Arms, and I continue to work on the Chronicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon, but I'm at the stage where I really can't offer up new material from either  source.

I am working away on various projects but I am not reading really interesting material of the right size and complexity to be described in a blog entry. My thoughts recently tend to be suitable for a Facebook post. Namely, a couple of sentences of reaction linked to an article that has something to do with current events.

Which leaves me with my TV watching habits, especially my use of Netflix to look over and reevaluate some of the more interesting popular phenomena of my lifetime. One of these, one of the most important really given its great popularity, is Star Trek. What does Star Trek tell us about the last half-century?

I have put a little bit of this material in the blog already, in part because I was pleasantly surprised by how good average and above average television series are when seen through Netflix, without commercial interruption, and at a pace set by the viewer – who if he or she is really interested will not wait a week to see the next episode of the series that really appeals.

So what about Star Trek? As I expected Star Trek: the Next Generation was really entertaining when seen through Netflix. I was rather surprised to see that Deep Space 9 was far better when viewed rapidly than it was in its original presentation, which caused me to give up on it early in its second season. I was very impressed by most of what I saw on my recent viewing.

So what about the original series? My memory of the original series is that it was not really very good. I was only about 15 when it came on, but I'd already read a lot of high-quality science fiction in print, and I thought that the TV show was not really giving the best selection of science-fiction ideas available. The series was better than most of what was on TV, but most of what was on TV was pretty lame.

Part of me wondered why the series had such a tremendous impact. I knew plenty of people who really loved it.

Well, re-watching the first season of the original series has confirmed me in these opinions:

It was pretty lame.

At least, the first half of the first season was really leaden. The characters are poorly drawn and poorly presented.

A good half of that season focused on exactly one idea, which is not really much of a science fictional idea as much as a horror genre idea. That idea is that universe is filled with things that look like human beings that are actually monsters; or alternatively things that started out as human beings have turned into monsters, sometimes only moral monsters. There's a lot of betrayal and menace in those early episodes, and they're not really very good episodes otherwise.

But about halfway through that first season, what people have loved about this series begins to emerge. By that I mean the characters and the interactions between the characters on the ship and particularly on the bridge of the ship start making you really care about what goes on with them.

What really surprised me was that I liked the first season James T Kirk. I have always been someone who put James T Kirk down as a borderline maniac whose prominence in Starfleet reveals a weakness in their whole system, especially the recruiting efforts.. My image of Kirk is a rather smug character who relies on his physical charisma (which did not really speak to me) to get his way. But the first season Kirk is not really like that. He's trimmer, fitter, handsomer and – can't believe I'm saying this – more intelligent and more philosophical than he was later on in the series or in the movies. He says a lot of things are actually smart. He looks smarter than Spock!

Is there any historical point to be made from this material? Well, I do now have a more sympathetic view of the popular influence of the series. And if any of you are watching the old Star Trek, you might keep an eye out for the awe and discomfort that the characters have for anything to do with computerization.

The Grateful Dead Archive

Thanks to a fascinating article in the New Yorker, I am now aware of  the vast archive of Grateful Dead concert recordings at  archive.org.  Well over 2000 concerts exist, and a huge number are there, free for  the taking.

I am astonished to think of the sheer physical energy required to produce that much music. A magnificent obsession? And the determination of fans to preserve all that music – the mind boggles.

I've always had a lot of respect for the Grateful Dead, even though I don't qualify as anything but the most casual fan. Listening to some of these concerts however I understand both their limitations and their genius. The music can seem a bit monotonous but then there are these amazing moments where you sit up straight and say, "what was THAT?" or "that's IT!"

Image: The front cover of "Live Dead," an early commercial release.

QMS demo tape (1967)!

The visuals, of course, are later, but reasonably appropriate for a psychedelic band.

Another nighttime treat

... waiting for Jonathan Jarret's return from Leeds. And for all the rest of my readers.



John Cipollina was the phenomenal talent of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Nick Gravenites produced the first QMS album, which was pretty close to perfect. See also: Pride of Man.

Quicksilver Messenger Service - Fresh Air - The Fillmore, 1971

Never saw them live, but even on vinyl they were phenomenal.

Unhappy; or, what's the matter with kids today?

A certain number of people in France think they are unhappy about Muslim immigrants and their children for not fitting in to the French way of life. I am not so sure that their self-diagnosis is correct.

The issue that everyone is talking about is the government policy forbidding women -- Muslim women -- from wearing in many public places veils of various sorts and more concealing garments like the burqa. Although there are about 5 million Muslims in France, it is estimated that only a few thousand or maybe even a few hundred women actually wear these things. Yet the government is rolling out the big guns against them.

It was when I read the Globe and Mail report about the wider context of this move that I began to doubt that Islam is really that central to this feeling of France is on the wrong track. Look at these quotations and you tell me:

The public hearing [part of a government-sponsored national debate] was called to discuss one question: What does it mean to be French? It got off to a rocky start...

The next speaker wanted to talk about globalization. “Kids today,” he said, as people around him rolled their eyes, “identify more with Michael Jackson and Madonna than with France."

...

The French have also been uninhibited in their response to the call for debate, with more than 40,000 comments posted in the first month on the government's national identity website. About 6 per cent, according to the Immigration Ministry, were racist or hateful enough to be removed.

The posts that remain run the gamut from quotations from 19th-century French philosophers to rants about immigrants.

“France has become a colony of Africa,” wrote one contributor. To be truly French, wrote another, one must have “French blood” from both parents “and going back several generations.” Others said all schoolchildren should be required to memorize the Marseillaise and to sing it, on pain of punishment, at least once a week.
...

Nadine Morano, the junior minister for family affairs, has tried to backtrack for days after she was filmed at another debate advising young French Muslims how to fit in. “What I want,” she said, “is that they love France when they live in this country, they get a job, they not use slang … and not wear their caps back to front.”

I absolutely love the junior minister's remarks about the characteristics of all powerful, unstoppable, heritage-endangering Islam. If you somehow missed that in the last paragraph, that dangerous foreign religion apparently consists of:

Hating France

Not getting a job

Using slang

Wearing [baseball] caps back to front.

Straight out of the Arabian desert in the seventh century! I might buy some of this had I not been a teenager in the 60s, when I was told that wearing jeans to school and growing your hair too long made you some kind of outlaw. Same, same.

Phil Ochs

One of the most distinctive voices of the protest folk music of the 1960s, Phil Ochs is pretty much forgotten now. The song I was talking about in the last post, "The War is Over," starts about 6:10.