Voter ID

 

 

 

Come on, people now. Smile on your brother. Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now...

I voted for Amy Acton, and she won. I voted for Sherrod Brown, and he won. I voted for Brian Pointdexter, and he won.  And the political party of which I'm a member won back both houses of Congress. So you'll excuse me if I celebrate a bit.

To everything (Turn, turn, turn). There is a season (Turn, turn, turn). And a time for every purpose under heaven...

The UU church I attend likes to frame the central conflict in American life as that of Individualism vs Community, with the latter touted as being far superior to the former. I have to admit I've chafed against this characterization a bit in the past. If "individualism" is strictly meant as a synonym for selfishness and greed (which is what the church really is talking about), OK, I get that, those are bad things. Do away with them if you can. My problem is individualism may also mean independence of thought. I don't see why I have to hand THAT over to the community! I've expressed my concern about this not long ago and was told that instead of individualism maybe what I really mean is "individuality", which the church does encourage in one way or another. Fine. I'll take it.

There's nothing you can say that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game. All you need is love...

So what does any of this have to do with the 2026 election results? Well, it's occurred it me that democracy is not so much a conflict between individualism and community, but a combination thereof. Think about it. When you fill out your ballot, well, there's your individualism. Indulge in it all you want. Just hope it's all over and done with by the time the results come in. Why? Well, you want your candidate to win, don't you? For that to happen you need community.

Back in 2024, I cast my ballot, an act of individualism. And guess what? It remained an act of individualism for the next two years, WHICH I DID NOT LIKE ONE BIT!

That was then. This year I performed the same act of individualism, but fortunately it did not remain an act of individualism. In fact, I have left individualism behind me, and am now part of something much bigger than myself.

We are the world. We are the children...

For the next two years anyway.

. 

 

 

Vital Viewing (Where No Bard Has Gone Before Edition)

 

1940-2026

 Here's an interview the recently deceased actor Patrick Stewart gave on BBC television in 1988. Although Star Trek: The Next Generation had been on the air in the US for about a year, and was well on its way to becoming one of most popular syndicated TV series of all time, it had yet to make its debut in the UK, where Stewart was primarily known as a Shakespearean actor. The Brits were familiar with the original Trek, the one with Shatner and Nimoy, and like American audiences just a year earlier, wondered how a new version could possibly measure up. Stewart cheerful reassurance follows:

In addition to cheerfulness, dig how fast the man talks. Very unlike his taciturn TNG character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose every word out of his mouth seems painfully measured. Of course, there's a reason for that difference, what they call acting.

A decade ago on this blog, I posted a 15-part series on Star Trek. Inspired by the passing of Leonard Nimoy (yes, I know, what a gloomy source of inspiration) it mostly had to do with the original 1960s series but I did take some time out to write about its latter-day spinoff:

 

I haven't been able to find the exact quote on the Internet, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that when plans were announced for a new Star Trek TV series that would be subtitled The Next Generation, Leonard Nimoy publicly denounced the move, implying that it was a cynical attempt by Paramount Studios to further cash in on the beloved science fiction franchise. Well, of course it was! As was the Saturday morning animated series. And the paperback novels and comic books. And if Nimoy had really been honest with himself, the feature films, two of which he directed. For that matter, back in the 1960s when Gene Roddenberry brought the idea for a science fiction TV series to Lucille Ball, or more likely the person Ball hired to run Desilu on a day-to-day basis (before Paramount got into the act), that person probably thought to themselves that maybe it could be another Lost in Space, which at the time was doing reasonably well in the ratings. Maybe it could sell a few toys (which in fact it did.) That's just the nature of pop culture, mass media, mass entertainment, whatever you want to call it. It exists to make money. At least that's how the owners of the means of production--the television networks, movie studios, record companies, comic book publishers, etc--view it. The creative people that they hire--"hacks", I believe, is the proper term--are there to make sure it does make money. But every so often--and this is part of what fascinates me about pop culture--a hack decides to approach a product to be marketed not as a product to be marketed but as art meant to elevate. No one knows exactly why this happens. Did the hack have a nervous breakdown? Was the hack struck by lightning on the way to Damascus? Hard to say, but it happens. This is especially true of Star Trek, which seems to have a mesmerizing effect on any hack that gets too close to it. So it came to pass that a hack named Roddenberry and a hack named Gene L. Coon and a hack named Harve Bennett all took turns assuming the role of creative visionary, crossing their fingers that the suits wouldn't mind terribly much. After all, if the Medicis supported Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci...OK, so it's Hollywood and not medieval Florence, but I hear both places have similar climates. Anyway, the suits at Paramount picked a guy named Rick Berman to get the new Trek show off the ground. As was arguably the case with Roddenberry, Coon, and Bennett, there was really nothing particularly visionary about Berman's resume. He had started out making industrial films, segued into documentaries, became a producer for PBS, and then jumped from public to commercial television, from education to entertainment, from highbrow to lowbrow, and, naturally, from a lower tax bracket to a higher one. And he became a suit himself, Vice-President of Something-or-Other at Paramount Television (formerly Desilu Productions.) One conspiracy theory goes that he took a demotion of sorts to keep an eye on Executive Producer Roddenberry, who by 1987 saw himself as the Dali Lama of the entertainment industry. Whatever his motives, or those of the studio he worked for, Berman seems to have caught the same art-for-art's-sake bug as all the other hacks that booked a flight on the starship Enterprise. After a slow (sometimes literally slow) start, Star Trek: The Next Generation became one of the classiest, most well-written,  most well-produced science fiction shows in the history of the medium, one that earned a following all its own. Well-acted, too, with a cast that included Michael Dorn as the proud Klingon Worf, Brent Spiner as the amiable android Data, and, best of all, the Shakespearean-trained Patrick Stewart as the no-nonsense Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard. Stories differ, with everyone wanting to take credit, but Berman is said to have pushed to have Stewart, a well-regarded but at the time largely unknown British actor, cast as the lead in the new version. So, Berman, you done good. That said, I have to admit that I've never quite accepted or related to TNG as a continuation of the original '60s show. A point I've tried to stress throughout these series of posts is that for me personally, it's the characters, and the actors that bring those characters to life, that make Star Trek Star Trek. I like The Next Generation, but it has different characters played by different actors, so I've just always seen it as fundamentally different.

Except... 

...on the rare occasion that a cast member from the original series guest-starred on the new one.

I'm not going to show you that particular clip, as I want to avoid comparisons between characters from the old show and the new show, but I would like you to read this snippet of dialogue that has Nimoy's Spock making the comparison himself:

SPOCK: He intrigues me, this Picard.
DATA: In what manner, sir?

SPOCK: Remarkably analytical and dispassionate, for a human. I understand why my father chose to mind-meld with him. There's almost a Vulcan quality to the man. 

 

So what's Spock talking about? Jean-Luc Picard in action:

The Vulcan Romulan on the big screen was played by Mark Lenard, who also played the Romulan Vulcan Sarak, Spock's father, at various times in various episodes and movies.

OK, I've told you Stewart was originally an actor who specialized in Shakespeare. Well, then, it's only fair that I end this tribute with him quoting a little Shakespeare:

All the galaxy's a stage...

Quips and Quotations (All Hallows Evenhanded Edition)

 

 

But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie--is the vampire so bad?

--Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

 

 

Graphic Grandeur (Hip Hype Edition)

Graphic, and eventually, museum-and-gallery artist Peter Max was born on this day in 1937 (he died just this past September 14 at age 88.) Givin the brashness of his work, Max comes across as surprisingly soft-spoken in this interview from nine years ago. Watch: 

The social upheaval of the 1960s was matched, maybe even surpassed, by the aesthetic upheaval of the same period. Everything--book jackets, album covers, clothing, hair styles, dorm rooms--just looked different, way different, at the end of the decade than it did at the beginning, as the avant-garde became commonplace, and the whole world fell under the spell of Day-Glo. Chief among the conjurors was Peter Max, whose psychedelic incantations came to epitomize the counterculture. However, there was a catch. Though it's downplayed in the above video, Max was an adman, albeit a highly unconventional one. Much more conventional were the corporate clients who paid his keep. Just whose culture was being countered, anyway? Not that I lose sleep over any of this. While the goal of advertising may be to separate our wallets from our money in the pursuit of goods and services, the ads themselves remain free, and that made Max's own goods a bargain, at least as far as my bedazzled eyes are concerned. A trippy Dow Jones sampling of his work:

  

Carson's set looked a bit different by the end of the '60s, at least when Max was the guest.

A public service announcement:

The expo was held in Spokane that year.

Finally, as no client that I know of asked for it, this poster may qualify as art for art's sake:

  

 

For limited time only.

Quips and Quotations (Go Lightly and Carry a Big Jackhammer Edition)

 

 

Everybody has to feel superior to somebody[...] but it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.

--Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

 

Navel Maneuvers

 

Remember these two? 

Of course, there was another man in her life...

...and I ain't talkin' Greg Allman!

Bob Mackie, Fashion Designer 1939-2026

Quips and Quotations (A Whiz of a Ms if Ever a Ms There Was Edition)

 

1934-2026

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

None of us can be liberated if other groups are not.

--Gloria Steinem