Tag Archive: Star Trek


Quis custodiet ipsos numeros?

Filed under: Movies, Unbiased Opinions — Leave a comment
May 7, 2012

An emergency board meeting in Margin Call.

Margin Call, written and directed by J.C. Chandor, is a 2011 movie about the 2008 financial crisis that stars Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Zachary Quinto (who also produced).  It features a topical storyline, some strong, subtle performances (particularly from Irons and Tucci), interesting characters and key ethical questions to be asked about the spiritual worth of the pursuit of money.  It is also somewhat difficult to follow if you do not have experience in high finance.  Characters drop references to commercial securities, asset valuations and market fluctuations so fast, without pausing for a breath to catch the audience up, that you almost find yourself wishing for subtitles.  Even when characters make jokes about not being able to understand what they’re looking at, and plead for facts to be explained in plain English (or as Irons says at one point, as if one is speaking to a small child or dog), what follows remains untranslated biz jargon.  Cobbling together what you do comprehend, you conclude that a major investment firm has gotten too greedy and has purchased too many high-risk assets that, due to changes in the market, are about to become worthless, necessitating a massive pre-emptive sell-off that will, in itself, precipitate a further worldwide decline, but may, it is hoped, save a portion of the firm.  (I hope you got all that because I’m still trying to figure it out.)  The moment this becomes clear is when Irons puts it into colloquial terms, declaring, “The music is about to stop and we’ll be left holding a bag of odorous excrement.”

One cannot help but be reminded of the Star Trek trope where one character proposes a long technobabbling resolution to a crisis, summed up by someone else with a much simpler metaphor:  “If we reconfigure the deflector dish to emit a synchronous stream of alpha-wave positrons along a non-linear coefficient curve, we might be able to produce a stable gravimetric oscillation that would divert the asteroid’s course.”  “Like dropping pebbles into a pond… make it so!”  As tiresome as this became, it was done for a reason.  When setting any scene in a foreign environment – be it another country, another world or simply an exotic office – the writer has to walk a tightrope between being truthful to the environment and servicing the demands of drama.  The audience has to be able to relate to what’s going on in front of them, or it might as well indeed all be playing out in Mandarin Chinese.  Yet you don’t want to dumb things down for mass consumption, and you can’t succumb to the dreaded “As you know, Bob” epic fail:  characters stopping to explain things that they already know, and would have no reason to discuss given the course of their day.  If you’re an accountant, are you going to spend any time explaining to your veteran colleague what a trial balance is?  Is Alex Rodriguez going to pause mid-game for a five-minute exegesis with Derek Jeter on the infield fly rule?  Nor does it make any sense for these experienced brokers to sermonize on the basics of brokerage.  Usually a writer gets around this by introducing a “fresh-faced intern on his first day” who can ask the “business 101″ questions on behalf of us dummies watching.

There are no interns or other such clichés in Margin Call, which chooses not to explain its dialogue in digestible nuggets for the masses.  Characters in this glass-enclosed world debate, ruminate, decide what they have to do and proceed with their financial chicanery, complicit in what may turn out to be their own destruction.  And after scratching your head for an hour and a half, you discover that what is sneakily clever about Margin Call’s screenplay is how it turns the incomprehensibility of its subject matter into a revelation about its subjects – the wheelers and dealers of the Wall Street world, men and women who are as much prisoners of an impenetrable capitalist system as those of us who can scarcely be bothered to look at our mutual fund statement every month.  No one understands this stuff, not really; they just want it all to work seamlessly and invisibly to make them rich, which is part of what makes the system so vulnerable to collapse.  Depressingly, here in the real world, four years on, the same cycle of greed has circumvented the installation of proper safeguards to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated.  It’s too complicated, no one really gets it, they can’t be bothered, it’s trivial, that’s the other guy’s problem, the market will regulate itself as it always has.  But the genie is long out of the bottle.  In a moment of insight, Jeremy Irons’ character judges this world thus: “It’s just money; it’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat.” 

The problem is we are killing each other over these pieces of paper – we are letting the numbers control our lives, and as Margin Call demonstrates, no one is truly in control of the numbers.  It’s all gambling, and as any experienced gambler will tell you, no matter how well you play, in the end the house always wins.  I’m not sure who “the house” is in this case, but I’m fairly certain that it isn’t us.

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Grand Allusions or, Where Many Men Have Gone Before

Filed under: The Writing Life — 1 Comment
April 13, 2012

"I have been... and ever shall be... a metaphor."

I watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for probably the fiftieth time last Friday.  The significance of experiencing a movie about sacrifice and the promise of hope and resurrection on Good Friday did not escape me, either.  In a previous post I discussed the writing lessons learned from Gene Roddenberry, about the need for a story to always be about something; to that I’d add The Wrath of Khan as a further lesson, for not another science fiction film comes to mind with more of a pedigree so indebted to classical literature.  Where Star Wars is the most famous embodiment of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, The Wrath of Khan is steeped like the finest blended tea in the traditions of Shakespearean drama, and its famous finale borrows greatly from the story of Jesus Christ.  As writers we need to be aware of the traditions of storytelling, the recurrence of specific themes and motifs throughout history and the capacity of allusion to elicit powerful emotional reactions from our audience, for these notes will tend to seep into our own work whether we are conscious of it or not.

It is interesting to observe, as we delve into the Christian parallels at work in this particular tale, that The Wrath of Khan in many ways represents the “New Testament” of Star Trek, as it was the first Trek to be produced without Gene Roddenberry as its guiding hand.  He was removed from day-to-day supervision of the film by Paramount studio executives who blamed the massive cost overruns of Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Roddenberry’s working style.  The Wrath of Khan was instead produced by Harve Bennett, who came out of the penny-pinching tradition of 70’s television, and written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, a beginning filmmaker whose biggest success to that point had been a series of Sherlock Holmes continuation novels.  Meyer is a studied intellect with a well-stocked library, and he packed the screenplay with references to A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, the Horatio Hornblower novels, King Lear and Paradise Lost, eschewing complicated special effects unavailable to this movie’s reduced budget in favour of character development and deep thematic exploration.  As a result, even though the movie cost a third of what it took to mount the first one, it feels substantially more epic.  Meyer dared to tackle what tends to be taboo among movie stars forever worried about their image – growing older.  He elicited from the infamously hammy William Shatner tremendous depth, nuance and vulnerability, arguably the best performance Shatner has ever given.  Actors love Shakespeare, and Meyer gave his cast the next best thing – a brilliant pastiche, set, despite its futuristic trappings, firmly in the Bard’s thematic wheelhouse.  (On the DVD director’s commentary, Meyer relates how he tried to convince Ricardo Montalban that he would have been a magnificent Lear, and regrets that such a performance never came to be; I know I would have loved to see it.)  Although they never worked well together (or by any reports even liked each other that much), Meyer knew the same basic truth as Roddenberry, and by extension Shakespeare – that the weirdest, strangest, most alien people can be relatable on the basis of their emotions.  A laugh and a tear are literally universal.  This is where the use of allegory comes so strongly into play.

The best allegories operate invisibly.  We don’t exactly know why something we are reading or watching is resonating with us so much, other than it seems to appeal to something deeper in the unconscious mind, or in the heart.  The power of the story of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for mankind’s sins and his eventual resurrection touches the instinctual fear of death held by all living things, and to the human need to find nobility and purpose in what can seem like the meaningless end of life.  The three-act structure of drama parallels this instinct as well:  in the first act, you introduce your character(s), in the second, you drag them down to the lowest possible point of total collapse, and in the third, you show their climb from that abyss and ultimate triumph.  In this too we find the Greek concept of catharsis – the emotional release found in an audience’s experience of a character’s pain and suffering.  Interestingly, in the original cut of The Wrath of Khan, there was no hint that Spock’s death might somehow be overcome.  It was observed by the powers that be following an ambivalent test screening that the movie featured Good Friday, but not Easter morning.  The end of the film was then reshot (against the wishes of Meyer, it should be noted) to provide more uplift and hope, including a concluding shot of Spock’s coffin at rest in a Garden of Eden-like setting on the Biblically named Genesis Planet.  Whether or not one is Christian, the cycle of sacrifice and rebirth (whether that rebirth is literal, or metaphorical in terms of the reborn spirit of those left behind) has a primal appeal, and when one of the pieces is missing, as in Wrath of Khan’s original ending, things feel out of sorts – the emotional experience is incomplete.

The issue I have struggled with in my own writing is when does allusion and allegory venture over the line into imitation and duplication?  When so much of our creative world at present feels like karaoke, the value of true originality escalates into priceless.  Yet audiences both literary and cinematic have this need for the reassurance of the familiar, the sense of being able to connect with the story on a visceral level, that commonality of hope and fear shared by all of humanity.  Campbell observes that we have always been telling each other the same story over and over again; his titular hero of the thousand faces.  Writers need to accept this basic truth or they will never even get started:  they will be crippled, as South Park so wittily showed, with “Simpsons Already Did It” syndrome.  And not just accept it, but come to embrace the idea that by infusing these ageless themes into their own work, they are taking part in a tradition that dates back to cave paintings and the fireside tale, and deepening the emotional experience of their story for the reader who will bring to it those same instinctive feelings about life and death.  They will recognize the thread linking your words, their life, and the lives of all those who have come before and will come afterwards.  And your work will truly live long and prosper.

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Vroom, vroom, sputter

Filed under: The Writing Life — 3 Comments
March 7, 2012

As our civilization becomes more diverse, and more accepting, we still, like a man dangling from a cliff by his fingertips, cling to the traditional sense of what a man and a woman are supposed to be – what they like and don’t like and what they are supposed to be interested in and passionate about.  I wouldn’t under any circumstances suggest that I’m somehow breaking new ground myself – I’m a white guy who likes girls, it doesn’t get more mundane than that.  But I’ve always had cause to wonder why not being in to the same things that other guys of my generation are somehow makes me one of the “other people.”  What we like or don’t is still acceptable grounds for prejudging each other and defining how we stack up against the societal norm – whatever the hell that is.

I would think that for regular readers my nerdiness has been well heretofore established, what with innumerable references to Star Trek, Star Wars and those nefarious little ponies.  Conversely, I haven’t even a microscopic level of interest in football, hockey, boxing, wrestling, ultimate fighting, nachos, beer (beyond a good pint of Guinness every now and then) or, as I realized while waiting for mine to be fixed, cars.

Does nothing for me, sorry.

We do so love our magnificent machines, don’t we.  But not I.  I recall once walking with a group of friends, maybe four or five of them, from my house to some summertime event.  From moment one of this hourlong trek, the conversation did not deviate from engines, cams, rims, horsepower, makes, models, torque, valves, and god knows whatever else.  Every parked car we passed gave additional fuel – pardon the pun – to this ongoing, intellectually numbing dialogue where the underlying theme, if any, was one-upping each other with increasingly picayune displays of automobile expertise – the ultimate irony being that we were all too young to drive.  I think I got maybe one or two words in, likely nothing more profound than “Yeah” and its more insightful variation, ”Oh yeah.”  To me, a car has only ever been a necessary tool for getting from one place to another in a world where we’ve spread ourselves out too far.  I don’t enjoy the experience of driving whatsoever.  I’m impatient with other drivers, I’m always convinced I’m going to hit something, and every whiff of exhaust sends me into a mental tailspin about what we are doing to the planet.  If it has four wheels, sitting in it doesn’t feel like being confined in a decompression tank and it isn’t costing me my firstborn to keep running, I don’t care what it looks like or how many cylinders are blasting away under the hood.

I appreciate that everyone has his passions.  Some are passionate about food, about movies, about designer clothes.  I am most passionate about writing.  The major difference, as I see it, is that I don’t talk incessantly about what colour typewriter or paper stock Hemingway or Tolkien or Ian Fleming used and how many words you can get out of a single strand of typing ribbon (or, rather than dating myself, I don’t know – the accuracy of the Microsoft Word spell check?)  The passion of driving doesn’t compute for me – when you’re writing something you are on a journey of the soul to places and states of being unknown, but when you arrive at the end of a car trip, are you changed?  Have you had an enlightening experience?  Are you somehow physically different because of the type of car you drove up in?  No, you’re just there at your destination, whether you took a Ferrari or a jalopy, whether you experienced the rush of breakneck speed or waddled in at 2 mph.  I understand that there are people who love fixing cars, who love transforming rustbuckets into sleek machines.  That’s fine, and that’s something entirely different – that’s more along the lines of what writing is, the process of creation.  But I still can’t get behind an invention whose existence, like it or not, has led to most of the wars we’ve fought over the last hundred years (and consequently a great deal of our environmental degradation) so Susie can get to the beach in her sweet sixteen present.

It frustrates me that our society needs the car so much.  I accept that it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future.  I just don’t get why we should celebrate its trivialities at the same time, or why worship of all things automotive continues to be a prerequisite of masculinity.  And I find a bit of hypocrisy in the “racing fan” who is really just there to see those so-called beautiful machines crash and explode, or in the man who will chide his wife for the effort and money she spends on her hair and makeup while fretting lovingly over every stone chip and rubbing baby oil into his leather seats every night.  Perhaps this entire argument veers toward the curmudgeonly; perhaps one man’s passion will always be another man’s waste of time, no matter what it is.  But there is one major difference.  Drunken writing gave us some of the greatest and most spiritually transformative classics of modern literature.  Drunken driving just kills people.

So there.

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An aggravating post

Filed under: The Writing Life — 2 Comments
February 2, 2012

As I’ve discussed before, language, and particularly the English language, is in continuous motion.  While I’m all in favour of conjuring new words and phrases as our little rock spins silently around its mother sun, I’m not so keen on the ongoing mangling of the lexicon we already have.  What is most frustrating is how much of this misuse becomes societally acceptable and adopted into common parlance.  One grating example, timely with the summer Olympics unfolding in London later this year, is the transformation of the word “medal” into a verb.  As in, “the Canadian team is poised to medal in the fifth race,” when the proper phrasing would be “the Canadian team is poised to win a medal in the fifth race.”  I first encountered this malapropism during the broadcast of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and, though it was pointed out at the time as incorrect, to my chagrin “medal-as-a-verb” managed to infect all subsequent television coverage of Olympic events.  I can’t quite figure out why this usage arose – were the colour commentators simply too lazy to say two syllables, “win a,” or was it a conscious decision to remove the element of competition from this, you know, athletic competition?  Like how they now always say “And the Oscar goes to,” instead of “And the winner is,” because being nominated alone is supposedly enough of a win.  (Tell that to the runner-up in every election in history.)  The endgame of this will be, of course, the use of the individual medal colours as verbs.  “Schmidt silvered in the downhill yesterday, this is a disappointment from when he golded four years ago.”  So the bronzer I buy at the drugstore will, apparently, now help me win Olympic third-place medals.  Perhaps – if I’m competing on Jersey Shore.

I’m really not that much of a grammatical Puritan.  In fact if you go back and read through these 55 posts so far you’re likely to find plenty of split infinitives, dangling modifiers, lapses of British versus American English and even the occasional occurrence of E. Henry Thripshaw’s disease (Google it).  But if there’s a common thread running through everything I write, it is my desire for us to do better as a species – to always aim for the greatest heights.  If we fall short, it shouldn’t be because we didn’t try hard enough.  Which is why the lazy use of language infuriates me – it’s the sign of an unengaged intellect.  I’m not talking about slang, that’s a different category altogether.  I’m more concerned with writing and dramatic presentations that are full of amateur mistakes, from people who should know better.  Few cinematic experiences are as disappointing as watching accomplished Shakespearean performers reciting dialogue that is just plain wrong.  The 90′s Star Trek shows were horrific offenders in this regard.  One episode of The Next Generation had a scene where Captain Picard was talking about the Borg and he said something along the lines of “their entire existence was centered around acquiring cultures and technology.”  Centered around.  So many shows make this mistake.  You can’t center around something.  You can center on it, but not around it.  But even that doesn’t compare to the most egregiously misused word, one that causes my blood pressure to rise several points every time it emerges, like sandpaper against skin, from an actor’s mouth:  Aggravating.

You might be thinking, “What’s wrong with that?  That guy who cut me off on the highway this morning was really aggravating.  My co-worker forgetting to refill the photocopier really aggravates me.”  For the love of Oscar Wilde, no!  What you mean to say is irritating.  Aggravating means to exacerbate, to make something worse, like, “Eating hot peppers aggravates my heartburn.”  If bad drivers or your co-worker’s laziness are getting up your back, it’s irritating you.  I suspect what has happened is that people have latched onto the “gra..ting” part of aggravating and confused it with grating, resulting in this strange substitution of one word for the other.  And, like “medal-as-a-verb,” “aggravating-as-irritating” seems to be finding more and more societal acceptance.  I hear it from the mouths of colleagues, superiors, friends, and in almost all of my favourite TV programs.  I daresay it’s almost a lost cause at this point – but I’m doing my part to try and reclaim its proper meaning, without being that guy who’s smugly correcting everyone else’s grammar.  Otherwise, all the irritation I feel at the misuse of aggravation and its variations will be fruitless stress, and there are much bigger things to worry about.

Like the many other mysteries of English, including why incense can be thought of as calming, while to be incensed is to be utterly outraged.  Then again, that’s what the ad wizards live for.  “Feeling incensed?  Try incense!”

May your day be free of irritation and “aggravation.”

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Decision points

Filed under: Life, The Universe and Everything — 1 Comment
January 3, 2012

Yes, I’m aware of the irony of titling my first post of 2012 after George W. Bush’s autobiography.  Decisiveness is one of those traits highly valued in leaders, that they are firm and resolute in their convictions.  Strangely enough it seems immaterial what those convictions are, as long as they are unwavering – someone who takes the time to examine an issue thoroughly before committing to a course of action is dismissed as a ditherer.  It’s assigning total vindication to the concept of leaping before you look, inasmuch as it matters less that the leap will actually kill you than it does that you were certain about leaping in the first place.  I’ve chosen this topic for my 2012 leadoff slot because it relates to my sole New Year’s Resolution:  to be more decisive.  Which is not to imply that I’m advocating the abandonment of sound judgment; it is certainly not to suggest substituting recklessness for reason.  Rather, it is the idea of committing fully to a course of action instead of hemming and hawing and gaming out all possible failing scenarios first.  Acting the latter is the equivalent of standing on the side of a busy roadway watching cars race by, when you really should be in that race.  You should have been in it eighty-three laps ago, but you’re waiting for an elusive “perfect moment” to jump in.  Truthfully, you’re not waiting for a perfect moment.  It’s a fable you’ve conjured to rationalize your unwillingness to shift into gear and step on the gas.  It is the eternal lament of the coward who has resigned himself to never trying.

We can sit back on our couches and slam the politician with the redneck opinions, the auto-tuned singer of dubious talents but ample cleavage, the latest hack vampire novelist, the hopelessly wooden thespian, the football team that never wins.  But every single one of those people chose to stand up and try.  It doesn’t matter that they may have succeeded because of how they look or who they knew or just plain dumb luck.  They could have stayed home and kept to themselves, settled for a less than ordinary life.  Something compelled them to take that fateful step into traffic.  Ambition is not a vice; indeed, it is the driving force at the heart of all human progress since the beginning of time.  I’m writing this on a computer and sharing it with the world because someone long ago decided they wanted something other than pen and paper.  And before that someone decided they wanted something other than chisels and stone tablets, or charcoal and cave walls upon which to record their thoughts and stories.  Star Trek was never about going timidly where thousands had gone already, if, you know, it was perfectly safe to do so and no one else would be upset by it.  Hard to imagine getting excited about a television series like that, isn’t it.  As it is hard to imagine getting excited about a life of hesitation and half-heartedness.  Those who make a mark on the world use their whole heart.  One shudders, like Ebenezer Scrooge confronted by the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, at the prospect of looking back from the tail end of life at endless opportunities forsaken and dreams that never got off the ground.  That beautiful girl you never had the courage to ask out.  The trip you never took.  The jobs you didn’t apply for, the promotions you didn’t chase after.  The novel you never submitted to a publisher.  The treasures locked inside your soul that you never chose to share with anyone else.  What then are you taking with you as you shuffle off this mortal coil?  What are you leaving behind?  Someone, I think it was Mark Twain, had a great quote about being more disappointed twenty years from now by the things you didn’t do, than by the things you did – regardless of whether you succeeded at them or not.  Regret is the most burdensome of Jacob Marley’s chains.

My promise to myself for this year, then, is to charge at life.  If I am to fail, then I want to fail with a huge Graham-shaped hole left in the wall I just ploughed into at full speed.  (Full credit to Aaron Sorkin for that delightful metaphor.)  Moreover, I hope to never again answer the question, “What do you want to do?” with “I dunno, what do you wanna do?”  That is giving up one of your most precious freedoms as a human being – the freedom to decide the course of your own life.  Even in matters as seemingly nonchalant as what to have for dinner.  2012 for me, is to be a year with no regrets, and no chances passed up.  That is the stuff of living itself.

Oh yes.  And I also promise to blog more.

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Writing Lessons from Gene Roddenberry

Filed under: The Writing Life — 4 Comments
October 26, 2011

Writers are often asked who their influences are.  The most literate of us will rattle off a multitude of the classical masters - Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Hugo, Kafka, Flaubert, Joyce, Proust; others will offer more contemporary choices like Melville, Hemingway, Kerouac, Fitzgerald, Marquez.  Still others will rely on the latter half of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st:  DeLillo, Morrison, Franzen, even J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.  You’ll of course have the hipsters who will proclaim their allegiance to some underground deconstructionism theorist you’ve never heard of.  But for all of us, inspiration is where we find it, even if it’s in a dime-store potboiler by a forgotten hack that you simply can’t put down.

I’ve decided to devote a few blog posts to talking about the influences on my writing.  I’ve wanted a career in writing of some form or another ever since I was young.  As a junior reader I devoured Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, and my first effort at a “novel” was a forty-page hand-written knockoff called A Champion is Born.  I had great plans for that little book.  It was going to be published and make me a literary sensation at the tender age of 9.  I even had five or six sequels plotted out before puberty set in and my interest in horse racing abated in favour of a fascination with those far more mysterious and wonderful creatures, girls.  There is probably still a copy of A Champion is Born packed away in a box somewhere, best left as a memory of a simpler time.  Not to be too hard on a 9-year-old, but the biggest problem with that story, aside from its lack of originality, was that it wasn’t about anything.  It was the story of a rich kid with no problems who inherits a horse and ends up winning the Kentucky Derby.  You’re asleep already.

About the same time girls were becoming less icky and more ensorcelling, I discovered Star Trek.  An English writer named James Blish had novelized most of the episodes of the original series and these adaptations were bound into four “Star Trek Readers” that had been the property of my uncle and fell into my hands when my grandmother decided to do some spring cleaning.  I had flipped past the show without any great interest, thinking it “weird.”  But I loved those books.  That image of the kid under his bed with the flashlight?  That was me reading the tales of Kirk and Spock.  It wasn’t long before I decided I should see what these books were about.  At that time the only opportunity to see Trek on television was on CBC, Saturday mornings at 11.  You couldn’t tear me away.  Great screaming matches resulted if the parents attempted to insist on grocery shopping or other meaningless errands.

The story of the creation of the original Star Trek is a fascinating one.  Former police officer Gene Roddenberry wants to do a television series addressing topical issues like racism and the Vietnam War.  In the 1960′s, network executives want nothing to do with that.  Roddenberry’s solution is brilliant – set the show in outer space and tell those same stories as allegories and parables.  Instead of whites oppressing blacks, make it about blues oppressing greens.  Cast it with minorities in roles other than houseboy and comic relief.  Sneak the relevance past the network suits who can’t see beyond the weird makeup and special effects.  In ways that seem obvious to us now, Roddenberry breaks new ground and creates a series whose message resonates with millions of people so deeply that five spinoffs, eleven movies and hundreds of episodes later it has become far more than its creator ever could have imagined.  Why?  Well, the simplest answer is that it was about something.

Fundamentally, the purpose of all literature in whatever its form is to answer the question of what it means to be human.  Whatever I’m writing, I’m always mindful of that question – if I’m not, all I’m contributing is background noise.  Gene Roddenberry’s eyes were on the stars but his feet were on the ground.  That’s what made Star Trek work, and why it and not say, Lost in Space, became the classic it remains.  The lesson I take from him is that no matter what you are writing, no matter how out there the setting or how bizarre the characters seem, the story should always be about something.  The trick, as he showed with Star Trek, is to veil that “message” beneath a frame of entertainment.  People don’t want to be lectured.  They want to enjoy themselves.  To reach that audience then, there should be two levels to every story – what happens in it, and what it is about.  The two should be closely intertwined, but the latter should be hidden away, a treasure that must be unearthed, the nutrients beneath the sweet taste.  That, I believe, is what separates greatness from hackery and feasts from mere snacks.

Gene Roddenberry wasn’t the first person to figure this out, but it was his work that revealed it first to me.  For that I’m eternally grateful.  So if you read something here that you like, a tiny part of it is thanks to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Live long and prosper.

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The wisdom of Isaac Asimov

Filed under: Life, The Universe and Everything — Leave a comment
September 29, 2011

Something different this morning.  Offered without comment for your appreciation and reflection, the ageless wisdom of Isaac Asimov.  Hat tip to my friend Tadd.

“When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”

“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.”

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

And he was a Star Trek fan too.

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