Author Archives: Tom Crippen

The Ambitious Colonel; or, Wiki Trek

Posted on by

A British colonel under the Raj fell captive to mountain tribes. When he tried to escape, he fell down a mountain ravine and was crippled for life. Villagers carried him to their hut, where they fed him scraps and kept him alive in a basket.

Years later a visiting group of British officials discovered the colonel. They were astonished by all aspects of his story, but especially by what he had done during his captivity. The man had begged and scrounged the stems of local fruit and knotted them together to form tiny busts of characters from Dickens. Seventy-four of these characters stood in a row on the shelf above the colonel’s basket, and he was on the lookout for likely stems from which he could form particular characters he still had in mind. One end of his basket had been slashed open so that he could reach over and sort stems into small mounds according to their size and manageability.

It was the colonel’s ambition to model every character Dickens had ever invented, and he was desperate for his visitors to fill the gaps in his memory of the novelist’s work. The officials were taken aback.
“My God, man,” one asked at last, “but why? Why fashion a miniature bust of fruit stems for every character that Dickens ever invented?”
The colonel lay in his basket and thought for a moment, then for another moment. Then he gave his answer. “I like to keep busy,” he said.

Kennedy’s lasting achievement

Posted on by
I followed the news back in the 1970s, and I remember that then-President Carter proposed a system of government health insurance that would cover everyone but just for top-dollar health needs — prolonged hospitalization, etc.  Don’t know what the proposal’s kick-in point would have been, what dollar figure. The idea was that no one would have to go bankrupt because of health costs, but they might still be paying a lot to the family doctor or the pharmaceutical companies. 
Kennedy and Carter were circling around each other because Carter sucked at being president and Kennedy thought he might take the job from him. When Carter pushed for catastrophic care, Kennedy pushed for universal care. A lot of Democrats laughed at Carter’s proposal as warmed-over Republicanism. What a silly name too — “catastrophic” health care insurance, boy, that must be some lousy insurance.
Too bad we don’t have catastrophic care now. But Carter’s proposal died, as usually happened with Carter proposals, and Kennedy’s proposal got nowhere, as was very frequently proving the case for liberal proposals during the late 1970s. And soon enough we had Reagan, and now people are still going bankrupt because of their hospital bills.
I guess Kennedy did a lot behind the scenes to advance good causes. Legislative work is highly technical and also tends to have incremental ends. Judging somebody’s value at the work isn’t possible unless you have a lot of knowledge and a nuanced sense of what counts as a worthwhile result. People who know Congress have said for decades that Kennedy did good work and accomplished worthwhile things. Okay, fine.
But in the late 197os we had a chance to take a step forward, and Kennedy got in the way instead of making it happen. It’s too bad.

Wiki Trek: “Elaan of Troyius”

Posted on by

Some production facts from Mem Alpha, just because they interest me:

… Similarly to “The Corbomite Maneuver“, this episode was filmed early in the season, but aired much later because of the many, newly created special effect shots which took lot of time to be filmed and added in post-production.

… more costume changes than any other TOS character with the exception of Barbara Anderson (Lenore Karidian) in “The Conscience of the King.” Guest star France Nuyen’s costumes are far more revealing, however: the purple halter top, the silver flowered thing on black mesh, the orange dress, and the blue wedding gown with no sides.

This episode marks the first appearance of the Matt Jefferies-designed Klingon ship ... The new emblem of the Klingon Empire is seen on the model …



Photobucket


War vessel. Like people say, Matt Jefferies did great work. He designed the Enterprise and the bridge, both of which are magnificent, then followed himself with the Klingons’ war ship, also a triumph. The ship is oddly beautiful: kind of scary and off looking, like an alien warship should be, but in subtle ways, and at the same time it draws the eye: the ship is uncomfortable to look at but also pleasing to look at. I think it outclasses everything else about the old-series Klingons: the make-up, the dumb names (“Klingon” itself is kind of dumb). In fact I’d say it was better than the show’s Vulcan stuff, even better than Mr. Spock’s ears. The Klingon ship is old Star Trek‘s best go at representing alienness, a pretty fundamental mission for the series. 

Shatner’s enemy.  MemAlpha mentioned France Nuyen‘s outfits. She was born 1939, Marseilles; original name: France-Nguyen Van-Nga. The wig is copied off the cover painting of a science fiction magazine from a good ways back.

Photobucket

Per Wiki, Nuyen’s father was Vietnamese, mother was a French gypsy. When she was a teen somebody photographed her on the beach and she became a starlet.

In 1958 Nuyen and Bill Shatner starred in the Broadway adaptation of a hit novel, The World of Suzie Wong. Shatner says the play was sold out for months in advance because of mass theater parties booked from out of town. He claims that the result was a disaster because Nuyen was incompetent and impossible, a temperamental brat, somebody who couldn’t be trusted even to deliver her lines or do what the stage directions said.

The play would just fall apart, night after night, and Shatner had to stay alive up there somehow. So he began bending his lines; he twisted their delivery, sent the emphasis where it wasn’t expected. That way he could give the audience something to pay attention to. This is the origin story for the famous Shatner delivery, the crosswire rat-a-tat-tat everyone parodies. (“Man … was meant … to try,” and on “to” his voice goes up, and on “try” it goes down, throws the word away.)  He learned those tricks so he could survive France Nuyen. Sources: Up Till Now and Neal Pollack’s comments during Shatner’s Comedy Central roast, though I don’t advise watching the roast unless you’re some kind of moron. ( update, Not Neal Pollack. It was Kevin Pollak. )

Eyerolling.  In “Elaan,” Nuyen is just fine. Every big scene has got her in it, she has to carry the episode, and she comes thru. Moues, eye rolling, bellowing, cooing: she puts some life into the business, and it’s not just noise, there’s a performance. Some people you are really happy to see when you’re watching old Trek, and she’s one of them. (This effect, I mean brightening at the sight of competence, gets stronger if you’re watching a lot of episodes in a row. Now that I’m a few weeks into doing this rundown, I have to remind myself that I’m not really a James Doohan fan, that I’m just very grateful whenever he shows up.)

Nuyen was a reg on St. Elsewhere, got a master’s in clinical psych in 1986 and started counseling battered women, women inmates. After three years someone gave her a “Woman of the Year” award. 

Ambassador, others.  The green ambassador (Petri), b. 1930, NYC. Wiki says he did a lot of “summer stock and repertory companies,” then Shakespeare on Broadway, first movie was The Robe (1953), played Caligula.

Photobucket

Mem Alpha: “After recovering from a drug addiction and a career-ruining jail sentence, Robinson returned to acting on television in the late 1960s, … Besides TOS, other TV series on which he has made guest appearances include Mannix, Bewitched, The Wild Wild West, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (with fellow TOS guest actor John Fiedler), The Waltons, Barney Miller (with another TOS guest star, Lee Meriwether), and Murder, She Wrote.” Movie parts listed for 1970s to ’90s. In 1997-2000, hosted Beyond Bizarre for the Discovery Channel.

 Orange shoulders.  Big alien flunky, b. 1937, NYC. Married to the woman who played the pretty historian who falls for Khan, 1962-70, had a kid. First credits mentioned are movies in 1964, including Taggart, in which he starred. Last role was in Quantum Leap, decades later.

 During 1960s, Mem Alpha says, “guest appearances on such television series as The Virginian, Mannix, and Mission: Impossible, as well as Fantasy Island …”

 

Black redshirt. He has a couple of lines, pops up in a couple of scenes, though he doesn’t get to do anything useful. Was also Greg Morris’s stunt double on Mission: Impossible.

 Did a lot of small parts over the years, latest being a judge on Boston Legal.


 

Swamp Thing.  Alien bodyguard #1. He was born 1938, started as stunt double on Lost in Space in 1965, would eventually have speaking part on the ’70s Battlestar Galactica.

He was the guy in the Swamp Thing costume in Swamp Thing, The Return of Swamp Thing, and the Swamp Thing tv series. Mem Apha mentions movie credits in ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, in most cases decently budgeted films.

 



Viewscreen role. The Klingon, b. 1922. Mem Alpha: “Guest appearances on numerous television series, includingGunsmoke, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian, and Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant. … last appearance was in the 1972 pilot movie for the short-lived series The Delphi Bureau …”



Only known appearance:  The other alien bodyguard, another soul killed by Star Trek‘s wig deptartment:

 

Strange encounter

Posted on by
This happened last night. It’s a story only because I lead a quiet life; there’s no special payoff at the end.
I was sitting in Cafe Nuit and a large man came in followed by two others. The three of them were square, solid and big: you noticed their neck size, the table got crowded fast when they sat down, that kind of thing. 
I was sitting over by the window, doing a Star Trek post. My table was the third of three small tables lined up to the window. The men took the first two tables but left me the chair at table two where I had stowed my windbreaker and bag. That sort of thing is standard in cafes: you split up areas.
The men were dressed in jeans and open neck shirts with collars, polo shirts maybe. Not the same make of shirt, but the same type. My guess is they were security for one of the clubs. They had neatly cut hair and kept it short — that’s my impression from side glances, since you don’t look people over directly at a cafe.
They talked in French and I did my post. But I felt someone looking at me. This happens in cafes: you see someone and for whatever reason you look, but not when they know. If the other person looks up, the first person glances away and they both reset and go about their business.
In this case I looked up. The man sitting across the table from me, diagonally across, was giving me a hard once-over from the corner of his eye: his face to his buddies, one eye turned my way. The surprise was that he looked so mad, like somehow I really got under his skin. Which is not an expression you find a lot at cafes. People don’t go there looking for fights. 
When I looked at him, he almost fell into the normal routine of look away and reset. His eye flickered back to his buddies. But I kept looking at him, because I was surprised, and his eye held. He had tiny features hanging off a mountain slope of a profile, little baby lips.
I went back to my laptop. I felt pretty sure no one was going to hit me at Cafe Nuit, so at least I could stay where I was.
A minute later my friend Elezar saw me thru the window, waved hello and then rolled in thru the cafe’s door. Elezar is immense: “A gentle giant,” as our mutual friend Henri likes to call him. He’s from Ghana and very black, with what I take to be tribal scars here and there on his face. Elezar used to work in a warehouse, but that was 20 years ago and then he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since then he’s been on medication and has padded about from church to cafe to cafe to his room in the subsidized housing. People like him: he’s not especially cheerful, but he’s got a kind heart.
Elezar always gives me a big hello, so he called my name from the doorway and reached out over the men for a handshake. I saw them take him in. He was black and he was their size, maybe a bit larger, and they took special notice of that. Such was my read, anyway.
I got up from my table and walked a few feet from the group so Elezar and I could talk without crowding them. He gave me a second, proper handshake, because for him the moment has weight.
In the next minute or so the men finished their food — pizza slices, that kind of thing — and got up and left. Elezar and I sat down at my old table and we talked a while before I went back to my Star Trek post.
So that’s the story. As I said, it’s remarkable only because not much goes on in my life. I don’t think the truculent guy would have hit me. At worst he might have muttered something and I would have taken it. 
But it’s interesting how the story plays out. It’s such an ’80s teen-movie scenario. What do you do if a big white guy is making trouble? You get a big black guy and he’s the hero’s best friend! He just has to show himself and the white guys are scared! From that point of view, the incident played out very neatly.
The catch is that, in my life’s version of the episode, all the elements are de-weighted. The guy was not going to hit me; Elezar is not my best friend, he’s a character I bump into. And I didn’t get any girl, I just wrote my Star Trek post. So I lived a movie moment, but it had shrunk by the time it got to me.
Names were changed in this post.

Easy laugh

Posted on by

I told Griffy, my building’s janitor, that traditional Chinese medicine abhors masturbation on the grounds that the practice drains yang without an influx of yin (I think).

Griffy:  “Fuck traditional Chinese medicine.”
I’m still a sucker for that kind of line: “fuck” vehemently attached to some Margaret Dumont of a subject.

You talking about Chappaquidick, son?

Posted on by
Huck memorializes Ted Kennedy:

He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.

Ed Kilgore at TNR is mad because of what Huck alleges in the runup to that sentence, namely that President Obama wants sick old people like Ted Kennedy to go home and die so the government won’t have to pay for their operations. 
All right, but about my favorite sentence. Huck is gifted with words and has a good churchgoer’s streak of cattiness, so I suspect that the remark quoted above was designed to bounce off the one Ted Kennedy memory that his audience holds dear above all others.

Pauline Kael and Charles Murray

Posted on by

She’s the stooge for a rhetorical gimmick that is one of the right’s second-level favorites. Charles Murray hauled the gimmick out during a recent discussion when he referred to “Pauline Kael Syndrome.” The idea is that she was the movie critic for The New Yorker, so therefore in 1972 (the year of Nixon’s great landslide) she must have said the following:


“How can Nixon have won? No one I knew voted for him”


But she didn’t. She said the following:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” 


“Sort of the same thing, I know,” Charles Murray says hopefully. Sort of exactly not. Yes, either way you get somebody who doesn’t know too many people who voted for Nixon. But in the true quote, she realizes that this is not a normal state of affairs. In the doctored quote, the one the right has been batting around all these years, she’s living in a fool’s paradise — “How could Nixon have won?” She comes across as ditzy and conceited, off in her own little world of insular vanity. Which pretty much sums up the right’s view of liberals and “cultural elites.” As a gimmick Kael Syndrome is only one item amongst the right’s arsenal, but the gag grows from a key element of their world view. 

I know the true text of the quote because Murray was good enough to quote and cite Prof. John Pitney, who sent him an email to straighten him out.

Next-to-last point: Kael did a lot of sensing of Middle America while she sat in theaters and screening rooms; I always liked that side of her, and the baiting of respectable liberal opinion. In some cases I think she was on to something, in some cases it was just fun to watch her. But that business cut no ice with anyone who wasn’t reading The New Yorker. For all the rest of the world knew or cared, Kael might as well have been some well-meaning soul with big earrings and a long turquoise scarf.

To sum up. Anybody who knows anything about Kael knows that she realized the world was not the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She spent decades reminding the Upper West Side of this fact. Of course, most people don’t know much about Kael, but they’re willing not to talk about her. The exceptions are either undergrad film students or fellows of the American Enterprise Institute.

So, reflecting on Charles Murray and the rockhard integrity of his mental processes, I will now introduce my final point:

If you’re going to quote somebody — especially to make a point about that person— you ought to know something about her.