A Star Trek: Discovery Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2 recap in question form.

Vague spoilers ahead.

My overall impression: favorable. Like the recent reboot movies, it is a Star Trek story for people who find actual Star Trek too boring. I have no real stock in timeline continuity or whatever, but as a Star Trek true-believer, I have some questions.

1. Her name is Michael?
2. What is it saying about a black woman (raised Vulcan(white)) who went from “You should get your own command” to save-the-day clever space acrobat to Fletcher Christian to starting a war with the actually-scary-people-of-color in two episodes?
3. Is the albino Klingon becoming the great white hope of the Empire, or is this a un-racist thing (“some see a mistake, I see a mirror”) or just generally racist like most Klingon characterizations are in Star Trek?
4. Why do Klingon ships otherwise in the Star Trek universe look like man-cave submarines filled with ogre pirates where these Klingons are a staging a Versace shoot in the gilded lobby of a Trump hotel? Is it because Klingons are Trump supporters? (don't click)
5. Why don’t the upright transporter gas burners transport everything in the room? Is it because it is just a show and I really should relax?
6. Why does Admiral Alpha Honky get to swing it around the room as a hologram while everyone else is on the TV? Can they get Frank Zappa's hologram on an episode?
7. Is Adobe After Effects a sponsor, given the amount of lens flare? Did Ginsu Knives pay to have the sliding doors sound like that?
8. Will Capt. Georgiou trade in her smart Starfleet tracksuit for Jedi spirit robes? Can she at least get a spirit sword or something? Michelle Yeoh used to do her own stunts in Hong Kong action movies. She could be the most badass captain ever. Put her in, Coach!
9. Will anyone finish making Lt. Saru’s face? Is he a Mummenschanz?
10. Why does The Orville feel more like a Star Trek show and ST:D feels more like 24: In Space?
11. Did no one consider the impact of the ST:D acronym on the level of discourse in the forums?
12. Will CBS: All Access provide non-glitched access to the show soon? I did sign up for a free trial, after all.
13. Will there be an episode written and directed by the @rikergoogling guy? I hope so.

when did starship viewscreens replace hologram calls

— Riker Googling (@RikerGoogling) September 25, 2017

100 words about Jupiter

The man at the observatory said it’s the cream dot over the treeline. There it was like all the others but then we curved the steps to look through the lens 130x bigger, more than these words, and that dot was striped, massive Jupiter, real and floating in lonely space. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto, clearly tagalong moons in almost tactile orbits and it is the kind of thing where you must keep looking and you want them to shut the hole in the dome: Jupiter is too real out there with nothing separating you except a billion stupid miles.

Avagadro's number and thoughts on MY STRUGGLE, Book One.

1. I finished book one of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle last night. I thought it was really good.
2. There was one point in it where he was talking about reading but not really understanding literary philosophers like Adorno, but how having read them or even having them on the shelf generated an energy in your mind. I haven't read Adorno, but I have friends who have and it is kind of like having that on the bookshelf of your life.
3. Since this massive book is about memory and intellectual triggers and the vastness of experience, I remembered a heady evening in my youth when I declared to my friends, "Everything is meaningful! Everything is a symbol!" and went off on how a puddle on the concrete was as significant as the ocean, depending on scale and where you are looking. I was probably a little drunk.
4. Then, last night, I wondered which is a larger number: the number of water molecules in a drop of water or the number of drops of water in the earths oceans.  
5. It all depends on Avogadro's number, which is 6.0221409e+23, or like 6 followed by 23 zeroes. This number is how many atoms or molecules are in a mole, and a mole is the amount of that substance that equals its atomic mass in grams. 
6. Water molecule has two hydrogens (atomic mass 1) and an oxygen (16) saying that 18 grams of pure water had 6.0221409e+23 water molecules in it.
7. This breakdown from Naked Scientists says that for every molecule in a drop of water, there is one liter of water on the earth. That seems significant.
8. All metric measurements are related. A cubic centimeter of water at zero centigrade has one millimeter in volume and weighs one gram. It's a beautiful system. 
9. Knausgaard, as portrayed in this sort-of memoir, is not plagued by such poetic, useless musings. In this first book, he isn't trying to connect anything. He's just trying to make it to a party and to make it through his father's death. Also, he isn't trying to solve the problem of himself, as revealed in his Charlie Rose appearance. He isn't trying to be happy. So metal.
10. He said he is emptying his writing of himself, but he also says he is just trying to feed his family and write books, because that is better than being happy.
11. One wants there to be a formula to life revealed in a 1500-page Struggle but what's revealed is only struggle. At least in the first 400 pages. 
12. I want Knausgaard to have an atomic mass of 1500 so that My Struggle becomes one mole of the human spirit.
13. But that's as goofy a notion as that of the Tao: that there are ten thousand things to the world. 
"When the ten thousand things have been seen in their unity, we return to the beginning and remain where we have always been" says the Tao
14. I want this list to go to 15 for 1500 pages. Also I wanted to write something, Its been since the summer that I write something here. Break that silence, which is all Knausgaard wanted to do. So, here it is.
15. Evidently, I should have posted this on October 23rd. From Wikipedia: In honor of the unit, some chemists celebrate October 23 (a reference to the 1023 part of the Avogadro constant) as "Mole Day".

dream + talking about dreams + song about dreams + apology

A still from Georges Méliès' Deux Cents Milles sous les mers ou le Cauchemar du pêcheur (20,000 Leagues Under the Seas parody), 1907

1. On the drive to work, I remembered my dream, which I almost never do: I was carrying a baby through this giant Victorian house: part Louisiana plantation house set-up, part Winchester House. There were a lot of steps and someone in the dream made a wisecrack about Escher. I was following this whole family as they ran through the house until we got to a pier. Another wing of the house had been built on the end of the pier but had fallen into the lake and was now submerged. The family shimmied out of their clothes like Europeans at the beach and all jumped in. I set the baby down on the pier and followed and the baby jumped in too. We went through a busted stained glass skylight and swam around the inside of the sunken house. I kept thinking, I better get this baby up to the surface for air, but he or she (don't remember) would swim by giggling up a cloud of bubbles, so we just kept swimming.
   
2. Last night, I met up some friends and one of them said he's been having vivid dreams, and another recounted a conversation with other mutual friends, saying the woman always hated it when the man would tell her his dream. I pictured an exaggerated, deflating sigh on her part, practically holding up a sign that said HERE WE GO AGAIN.
   
3. Just before that, I was messing around in the practice space and came up with a simple but kinda cool riff and just added some dumb lyrics about dreams to it, just to try it out and now I really like the song, so since you are so far indulging me...
   
4. 
   
   
5. I could have waited, waited a little longer
   If my heart, my heart had been a little stronger
   My dreams carry me away
   My dreams are stronger than I am
   
   I could have been your man, could've been your man a little longer
   If my willpower had been, willpower been a little stronger
   My dreams carry me away
   My dreams are stronger than I am
   
6. As I've said before, my dreams are stupid. I apologize to those following this dormant blog all this time and then here I appear talking about my dreams. Exaggerated sigh.
   
7. I was going to put the whole Georges Méliès movie mentioned above, but I came across another called "The Devil in a Convent" which sounds like much saucier dream material, so here you go, and again, I'm sorry.
   
   

soundtrack for remarks on the Mad Men finale

Robert Longo, Untitled, 1981 from Men in Cities, More here.

Father John Misty - Fear Fun
The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream
Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead

• You know you wanted him to jump off that cliff, not create a singalong on the hillside.
• But then his idea of "happiness" is like John Cage's concept of "silence" - a noisy thing constructed out of passively and openly consuming the noise/contentment of others and reframing it as your own.
• It made me mad last night, in both viewings. I watched this whole thing so he could create that Coke ad?
• But it is an acceptance of how the world works? Joan needs a second name on the marquis to make it hers, so she adds her own. That world's most desirable woman finds herself the most meaningful and fruitful partner. She becomes her own binary star around which she elliptically orbits. Not a boobs analogy, by the way.
• Did Meghan get killed by the Manson family? She became so unimportant once that check was slid across the table that I had to consult Wikipedia to see if she was alive. Did she only exist to birth her mother into this world? Is Roger bagging the mom the last triumph of the Greatest Generation? Is this really Benjamin Buttons?

The National - Alligator
Slowdive - Souvlaki
Faust - Faust IV

• The story goes that Bill Backer (similarly alliterative/descriptive kind of name as Don Draper) from the real McCann-Erickson had the Coke ad epiphany sitting in Shannon airport, watching a family lose it over flight delays until someone went and bought Cokes for everyone. He wrote "I want to buy the world a Coke" on a napkin and brought that back to the agency.
• I put a theory out there that Don Draper is Scarlett O'Hara - down to the wearing of drapes and making people not give a damn. I was going to say also: relying on the kindness of strangers, but that was Streetcar. If he'd eaten a turnip at the ashram, I'd have felt validated in having such a theory and would have gone directly to the Internet with it in proud hand.
• The race car on the salt flats? He already made a land speed record chasing the collapse of his myth from the tip of the Empire State Building, viewed in that sales meeting, to lotus sitting at the coast.
• I wanted Don to become King Kong with the Empire State Building bit. Or Andy Warhol. 
• Did Andy Warhol ever show up in the show at some point? I would have loved to see Peggy at a Factory party.

The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
Jimmy Cliff, The Harder the Come

• What is Don and Betty's other kid's name? He didn't even get scandalized, poor guy.
• I was going to say something profound about the importance of dish-washing in Mad Men but realized I was think about the dish-washing scenes in Olive Ketteridge, so never mind.
• I still do and will forever think about that time Don came back home late to Connecticut and all Betty had for his dinner was chicken salad and crackers and how good that plate of chicken salad and crackers looked. I want some chicken salad right now.
• Who got Lane's office after he died? Because, ew... And now somebody else will get that office without knowing, Remember how "this is home" they were being? Or was that even the same building? And does it matter when the trace of your death is as faint as the trace of your life?
• As people are saying Mad Men/ SCDP/advertising/the '60s/'70s is purgatory, are they all dead on arrival, only to be born in how they leave? Are the virtuous pagans in the penthouse tier of hell, gazing over the rim, waiting for a harrowing? Is McCann-Erickson an uprising in Hell? The devil just doing business? A tide in which their trickle of darkness becomes manifest? Is Pete Campbell the Orpheus that successfully got his wife out of the shadows forever? I kinda knew Trudy was going to win out in the end.

Playlist in Spotify

A barbed-wire maypole: Three Derek Jarman movies

"Jubilee (1977 film) poster" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Jubilee (1977)



Jubilee is Derek Jarman's wet kiss welcoming and also saying a last good bye to England during the economic despair that led to the punk movement. It has a Shakespearean cant to it - much of the dialog involves a wild-eyed seer making a speech to a gathering of dim bulbs until it is time to watch one of them light up and say their part. There is a time-travel plot involving the arrival of Elizabeth I into the ruins of Elizabeth II, but really, it is a cascade of punk apocalypse charm. The recurring theme throughout the film is scavenging among the dead. Car wreck victims, royalty, one poor girl (presumed dead) being trussed on the street by a barbed-wire maypole are stripped of their earrings and jewelry. Everything is ravaged. And over-acted.

If this sounds like too much of a downer, there is a healthy dose of groovy 70's nudity and the introduction of a baby-faced Adam Ant.

VHS Cover from Brainwashed

In the Shadow of the Sun (1974, finished and soundtracked in 1980)



I've always known of this film for the Throbbing Gristle soundtrack. Fittingly, the imagery of this 48-minute mood piece consists of layers of washed out film juxtaposed so you have slow-moving figures engaged in some kind of trance ritual mixed with anonymous car-window landscapes and people tapping on typewriters. Like how the noodling soundtrack never commits to a song, the film never commits to a vision and yet together the impression emerges. The world is layed waste not by politics or punks, but by a wearisome existence. All that is left is a ghost. If I'd seen this when I was nineteen, I would have declared it the greatest movie ever made and likely thrown a copy of Naked Lunch at you for disagreeing.

Blue (1993)



Jarman's last film is part conceptual art joke, part intimate poem. The filmmaker was in the final throes of AIDS related illnesses, rendered nearly blind, when he released this film consisting of a single shot of the color blue as a number of actors and musicians muse in an ethereal collage over the various meanings of blue: sadness, the sky, the planet Earth, the wind. The soundtrack is a compelling, stream-of-consciousness sound collage. It's easy to think the image isn't important, but I found myself turning to it as if I was going to miss something. I suspect Jarman felt the same way. It is a final joke on transformation, in that there isn't any.

A common misconception is that the blue in this film is International Klein Blue, the pigment created by avant-garde artist Yves Klein. It is a similar hue, inspired by Klein's color and his "leap into the void" as Jarman faced his own.

Enjoy!

Record Score: Remember Wynn, Pensacola, FL

Remember Wynn in Pensacola, FL has all the trappings of being a hipster vinyl haven - in a house in an off-the-beaten neighborhood, almost no social media presence - but

is actually the kind of store the true record nerd relishes and those for whom vinyl is a lifestyle enhancer might blanche at. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling Pac-Man maze of records. *This* shy of being a hoard. The owner, Jackie Seale, was setting out box after box of dollar records in which these were found:

He said Little Feat's WAITING FOR COLUMBUS was not supposed to be in there, but finders keepers. He plans to fill the front yard with vinyl come record store day. I've almost bought those Genya Ravan albums a bunch of times, so I let the price pull the trigger. Lou Reed plays on one of them, I think.

His prices are good to average. This $50 copy of Baton Rouge blues legend Silas Hogan's TROUBLE AT HOME was too rich for my blood, but he does mail order. He has the original  Lightnin' Slim ROOSTER BLUES as well, both on Excello.

The true record score:

Maya is way into The Doors and now I am too again. You can make up your own words while stuck in beach traffic.

I had a premonition that the Terry Riley record would be here and found it tucked away in the 60s section. He has things sorta organized by decade. The Howlin' Wolf is on the prestigious United-Superior label and the super score live nightclub Lightnin' Hopkins LP is on Guest Star. I love semi bootleg blues records.

Should this not be enough to get you to P-cola, the Al Fresco food truck court in their quaint downtown is what every food truck scene should be like. Meaning: the food is actually delicious, there are tables and no roar of gas generators.

And they have a beach.

Remember Wynn

7007 Lanier Dr.

Pensacola, FL 32504

(850) 476-8630