If I should die in a wombat zone

A response to this article in the New York Times magazine. I can understand why Ms. Schwarzbaum (Riff, December 22, 2013) is somewhat put off at the wave of “ingratiating geezer group project” movies featuring aging male characters trying to recapture “one last victory before coming to terms with...death...routine, responsibility, commitment.” It's a trend I find just as irritating for its hackneyed, single-story drumbeat. However, unlike Ms. Schwarzbaum, I don't find it surprising.  Society prepares girls, from the moment they are born, to be future-looking – the baby dolls and toy cookware they are given train them to take on, to embrace, responsibility. As they grow, they are praised for quietly taking on roles of nurturance, and criticized should they demand space or voice for themselves. As they become women, their challenge is to not fear their own independence, to dare to depart from their role as caretakers and maintainers if they so choose. Boys seem to face an...

My review of Star Trek: Into Darkness (re-posted from my old blog) It is a sign of my age that I saw this film on “standard” opening night, as opposed to late-nite sneak preview opening night two days earlier...and saw it in the company of ten teenagers students who are barely more than a third my age, and from whom my casual statement that I saw the original Wrath of Khan when it came out in theaters elicited gasps of awe...although whether pitying or reverent, I chose not to examine too closely. I will say that, as with JJ Abrams' handling of its predecessor film, St:ID was a fun ride that did not in any way defecate on the near-holy phenomenon that Trek has become to so many people of (brr, dare I say it?) “my generation.” Leaving aside the proliferation of modern colloquialisms (everyone curses with “shit,” uses expressions like “throwing me under the bus”...I realize we use plenty of far-outdated expressions in our language today, but it's just a shift fro...

I suppose in these days of the socio-facebo-tumblo-tweet-sphere, keeping a blog is some lost archaic art, like curating and maintaining linotype machines , but all the better, then, for fitting in with the theme of today's ruminations. (My old blogs, until livejournal deletes them, can still be found here ) I'm at a Star Trek convention, the first I've attended in...geez...well, I think since 1996. It can't help but feel to me like the twilight of the Phenomenon that once provided both backdrop and horizon for so much of my adolescence and early college years.  In that very (post?)modern way in which the halflife of a given anything is now measured in months if not weeks, and the comparatively recent gets relegated as ancient, it's now hard to recall a time when any science fiction could possibly present a believable, much less wildly popular, vision of the future as one where humanity's better instincts rule them and the thirst for adventure and discovery ...