Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1157
Good morning. Hello. Sorry I am late. Jane went into massive resistance mode today. Thank god Emma was up, except Emma had no magic tricks. It was awful and exhausting and eventually we got her into the car, drove to school, and I luckily ran into the counsellor on her way in to the school so she came and talked to Jane for oh, 30 minutes, before Jane consented to go in. No special tricks from the counsellor but infinite patience, so that is somewhat reassuring. But whew. That was rough.
And I have a work call in about an hour.
I was so tired yesterday. It was making me cranky and I was not performing at My Best™. So I took a nap. It did not help. Just, like, oppressive exhaustion. And it was my bedtime night but Emma thankfully took the night and gave it to me off. Wherein I finished Halo the TV show which is better than you think possible, but also ended season 2 very confusingly. Of course, I’ve never played the game, so, you know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe it makes more sense to people who actually played the game. Except once at Barbarian I watched a bunch of dudes play the game on the Xbox on the big projector in the Boston office and it really just seemed like a lot of shooting of lizards so, not sure how much of this mythology is actually in the game or matters. No idea.
Anyway, I went to bed as early as I could, which was 9 PM. Except, of course, I couldn’t fall asleep for ages. But even with the delay I probably got 8 and a half, almost 9 hours of sleep, so that is nice. And today I feel… okay. Not great, not wide awake, but more awake. We’ll count that as a win.
Also had a really great dream that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel both got divorced (is Art married? He has to be. What a catch) and they moved back in with each other in a flophouse apartment in the West Village and I was their only friend and I would go over and we’d all just lazily jam out experimental, improvised psych rock. Paul Simon killer noise guitar player could really give Thurston a run for his money. Paul had a serious drinking problem, Art was worried about him, Paul and I would go to bars, I would promise Art I wouldn’t get him too drunk, I did my best, he always got too drunk. Mind you, they were still Simon & Garfunkel and very famous and this whole weird situation was widely known to the world. Everyone kept telling me it was my moral duty to get them back together for another Central Park reunion, and eventually they consented, so long as they only had to play instrumental psych rock and I would play bass. Naturally I said yes.
Sadly the alarm went off before we had a gig.
In my hellacious 30-minute bout of insomnia (I know, I am blessed), I was thinking about Star Trek and getting angry about it, as I do, since the modern producers of Star Trek, you know, fucked it all up by, among other things, not having it be optimistic. Modern Star Trek is a horrible symptom of modern pessimism, and its depressing tone is doing lasting damage to America.
Being the author of a relatively well-selling book about Star Trek, I’ve been asked several times in the last week what I think about this season of Discovery. I finally caught up. It is bad. There have been good seasons, there have been spectacular seasons, there have been abysmal (one S, who knew, thank you spell check) seasons. This one is not abysmal — the last episode with the Time Bug as actually pretty solid — but the larger plot structure is farcically absurd, and the overwrought acting and exposition is tiresome. But more than anything, I resent what they did with the future of the Federation. It misses me right the fuck off.
When I say this, some people sort of imply that this is how sci fi has to be: set in a dystopian world, because otherwise it’s boring. These people have never read Iain M Banks or Douglas Adams or Dan Simmons I guess.
I strongly believe that to be qualified as a sci fi writer in Hollywood, you ought to be given a test where you are required to write a single episode of any Trek series, wherein:
No one dies
No planet is at risk of being destroyed. Or Star system. Or Galaxy.
No war breaks out or threatens to break out
No capitalism rears its head
You are then judged by a panel of Trekkers. If you pass, you can write for Hollywood. If not, you have to live a life as a Twitter troll.
To that end, here are the three series of Nu Trek I propose that all meet these qualifications:
Star Trek: Prime Directive
An elite, high-functioning team of anthropologists, technologists, diplomats and counsellors roam around the galaxy acting as second contact with new planets. Sometimes these are planned second contacts (this has been alluded to as a task assigned to ships like the USS Cerritos on Lower Decks. So sometimes they establish diplomatic relations and scientific exchanges and whatnot, and sometimes they clean up the antics of loose cannons like Kirk where planets have inadvertently been “contaminated” by the Federation before they are ready. It’s an episodic show, takes place after TNG/Picard but before “The Burn.” Feels a little bit like Sliders: the crew can’t leave the planet till everything’s taken care of, which is determined by the team’s leader, a mysterious woman named Dana Vash, daughter of a former renowned-gone-rogue archeologist and a father who is unknown to her (ahem). This also gives us the opportunity to have ridiculous planets in Trek again like the Nazi world and whatnot. We don’t see enough of those absurd planets these days.
Star Trek: Traveler
A show starring Will Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, now thirty years into his journey with a mysterious advanced being known as the Travler. They have spanned galaxies, they have seen attack ships on fire, they have seen it all, man. This is heady, high-concept sci fi, space and time. Solaris. Inception. 2001. Last book of the 3 Body trilogy. Dark Forest stuff and folding space and higher and lower dimensional beings and what lies beyond the origin of the universe. You will, of course, recall that once or twice Wesley and the Traveler have popped in on our goings-on in normie Trek, and that might happen once or twice, to keep the fans happy, but mostly this is deeply abstract and pensive.
Star Trek: Reunion
Takes place on a single colony world. Not a federation member but a colony of a federation member, like those colonies you’d always see in TOS and TNG. Only this colony was just getting started a few years before the Burn. They were not fully settled before the Burn: some families hadn’t all yet arrived yet, for example, so were split up as dilithium went inert. And in the intervening 120 years or so of the Burn weird-ass stuff happened to the culture of this world as it struggled to survive alone, cut off from the rest of the federation, without all the supplies they planned to have, without galactic trade. And now Dilithium is back and the Federation is back and a ship arrives in the sky to tell them they are now connected to the outside galaxy again and this, of course, radically changes their society. Delicate inner balances are upset. Some people like the isolation that has resulted, some, obviously, want to go see their families. Kinda a Leftovers sort of affair. Intense human dramas. Highish stakes, but not to the point of civil war or anything. What will they do? What happens to this society?
There you go. Please produce one or all of these series before I die, you are welcome Paramount and/or Viacom I guess Viacom since it’s TV and not movies, but I guess they’re one in the same again and it’s been five years since they’re one and the same and they still haven’t announced a single Trek project that plausibly builds on that or takes advantage of it and that makes me very sad.
Today’s Media of the Day is a mix, justa mix, a mix of new stuff, the 235th mix of random stuff I have given you since the pandemic, NBD. OK fine the new Vampire Weekend is good. Learned about Raye from SNL cuz I am a normie. Don’t know where I learned about IAN SWEET but i love them. I have already raved to you about the new Mannequin Pussy. Oh right Bette Davis Eyes is on here because Sean and I were talking about it when I was up in Boston a few weeks ago. Great tune. I don’t remember King Blue Heron, Sepikka, or Heather Eatman but I am on a re-listen of my “To Investigate” queue right now, so maybe they will come back to me.
Have a lovely Tuesday and I will talk to you tomorrow.