Leaving that aside, though, I had THIS to say to Bob:

See, for the last… um… six months, anyway… since the middle of april… eight months, rather… I’ve had very little to do. Oodles of free time. Plenty o’boredom. A note offering me a project like this would have been very welcome.

Suddenly, I have a job, and… POW! Someone wants to publish my book, which means I have to do all kinds of shit and have no time, and now someone else wants me to do a column on Silver Age comics, and… jesus!

It’s a good thing attractive women loathe me. If I had a girlfriend right now I’d really be going nuts.

I’ve watched the Director’s Version of Wrath of Khan. Nicholas Meyers really didn’t add a whole lot to it… a few lines of dialogue here and there. It’s better, but not markedly so, and a spirited tirade by young Peter Preston in which he says Admiral Kirk is as blind as a Tyrelian bat had me groaning. Kirk’s response… “Why, Ensign… you’re a tiger!”… made me wonder if Kirk was about to ask Preston out on a date, or just order the lad to report to the Admiral’s quarters. Hmph. A bisexual Kirk for the late 23rd Century… now that would be a Director’s Cut worth watching.

I’m currently about halfway through Meyers’ commentary track. Meyers seems like an interesting person. He doesn’t dish much at all, and is obviously exercising great care not to say anything that might piss off Paramount, or any of the actors, all that much. So he doesn’t come out and say “Bill Shatner is a huge pain in the ass”, but he does mention on a couple of occasions that to get Shatner’s best work (which clearly he did get in this movie; Shatner has never ever come close to being this good anywhere else) he evolved the technique of making Shatner do a scene over and over again until Shatner got bored and stopped ‘acting’ and simply delivered the dialogue. Meyer also says that Montelban’s original reading on Khan was wildly megalomaniacal and over the top, and he directed him to reign it in so he’d be more menacing, and Montelban responded to that very eagerly. In another spot, Meyer notes that Gene Hackman once told him that the best acting takes place in small spaces, so, overall, Meyer seems to very much try to take a naturalistic, minimalist approach to his work… which probably has a great deal to do with why Star Trek II is the only moment in the entire monstrously voluminous Star Trek canon where that particular fictional continuum, and the characters that populate it, seem at all three dimensional and credible to me. Under other writers and directors, the Trek universe is often exciting and occasionally even interesting, but this movie is the only place I’ve ever found it to be even remotely believable.

Meyer says a lot of other interesting stuff on the commentary track. It turns out he isn’t a huge Star Trek fan; he wasn’t particularly interested in the franchise prior to getting the assignment and he’s not overly enamored of it now. This, again, is probably why his work on this movie is so successful; a Trek zealot could never have brought themselves to treat this world with such good humor, nor could an ST fanatic have ever managed to treat the characters as less than godlike icons.

All of this is on Disk 1 of the two disk set Scott loaned me. I doubt I’ll check out the second disk, although there is an interview with Meyer, and one with Harve Bennett, the producer, that might be interesting. I couldn’t care less what Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelly have to say about the movie, though.

Let me say two things, and then I’m out of here for the night, and probably for a few days at least:

Star Trek III sucked.

I mean, profoundly. And one of the reasons it sucked, if not THE reason it sucked, was that the entire purpose of III seemed to be undoing every cool thing established as part of Star Trek canon in II. The original crew are aging gracefully and ready to be replaced by a new generation of Starfleet officers and adventurers? Fuck that, dump ‘em. The Enterprise is so obsolete they’re using it as a training vessel? Well, blow it up so we can give them a new one a movie later. Kirk has an adult son? Oh, no, that makes him too old and undermines his galactic gigolo status… kill the bastard. There’s a new Vulcan character and she’s young and hot? Well, recast her homely and then dump her.

Worst of all… Spock is dead? In what is probably the greatest heroic sacrifice scene in the history of heroic fantasy? Oh, no, can’t have that, let’s undo it.

I cannot tell you… there are literally no words in the English language adequate to the task… how much I loathe Star Trek III.

And the second thing is that I find it very hard to believe that Paramount didn’t put the original Khan episode (“Space Seed”) onto this two disc set somewhere. I mean, you’d think that would be a pretty obvious move, wouldn’t you? The two disc Unforgiven set Scott loaned me has an episode of Maverick on it, for Christ’s sake.

Okay, I’m a tired Darren. I say bye bye.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.