Friday, November 14, 2008

Continuing the QoS and Star Trek Rant...

Ok, to finish with a few thoughts:

What really bothers me about the new Star Trek movie is how airbrushed it is, as shown by this example. It's not dirty enough, and these boys look like they're about 19. Quinto doesn't look only 2 years younger than me. He's too smooth.

I've really been thinking how my love for Spock got me into that godawful marriage. I thought I found cool, beautiful, and brilliant, but I found hateful and abusive instead. However, this is certainly not to imply that I believe Spock to be abusive. That was just the emotional thing on the show that made him distant. The coolness was real, not manufactured. That, and my ex is a violent douchebag. And Spock/Leonard actually has a nice ass. Not so much the case with my ex...

Oh, and whatever SciFi Winona Ryder has ever been in has SUCKED. Fantasy she's good with. But she's wearing a kryptonite strap-on dildo for sci-fi, and this shit's gonna hurt.

We'll have to see.

OK, so the Bond movie... Bad ass! Daniel Craig is officially my favorite Bond! The Jack White/Alicia Keys song was ok, and rocking. The villain could have been stronger, but I thought the plot was excellent. I get the feeling they're gearing up for something pretty nuts for the next film. The film was action-packed, and I'm trying to remember when I've seen a better posse walk - especially since Bond has no posse! And I like the depth that this new Bond has. He's not a "fuck 'em all, and let M sort 'em out" kind of Bond. Yeah, he gets busy. He's Bond. But it wasn't flashy or gratuitous. It wasn't like Roger Moore who schkeezed on every skirt that passed.

I love Judi Dench as M even more now. She is made of iron. I wanna bet that plucky and awesome, and she's got a few years on me. I'd trade!

Just once, though, I'd love it if they got a Bond girl who wasn't a size 4 or smaller. Just once. Juice is where it's at, yo! Bring the jiggle!

On Daniel Craig, I am continually startled at how he moves with speed and grace AND strength. I'm not into blondes, but DAMN! Just Damn!

Go on and see it kiddies! :D

In which I rant about the new Star Trek trailer and gush over Quantum of Solace...

Ok, so it worked out where Gabriel and I got to see Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond film last night at midnight. I was pumped about the trailers, too, since the new trailers for both Watchmen and Star Trek were to be included also.

The trailer for Watchmen wasn't up. Goddammit. I'm reserving judgement on what I perceive to be an unnecessary sin of Hollywood, but I accept that it is unstoppable. So I want to see the trailer. Is that too much to ask, you AMC fuckers??? Word to the wise: if there is a highly anticipated movie, and the studios release that its trailer is to be put before a certain film, PUT IT THERE! Assholes. A lot of fans were expecting to see this trailer. I am perturbed that I did not get to.

New movie about Nazis... I was watching amazing Brit actor after amazing Brit actor crawl across the screen. My interest was piqued. And then Tom Cruise, er, cruised onscreen, and I got the feminine equivalent of dickshrivel. He's a wonderful actor, yes. Why he can't bother to have the same accent as anyone else in the film, I don't know. But he's gone too weird. I have a hard time watching him, and the campy-looking eye patch in the flick. It's called Valkyrie, by the way. It reminded me of other stuff that was fantastic once you scraped the turd off the top and ignored its existence.

There was a new Adam Sandler film that I won't be seeing.

But the new Star Trek trailer was first. It's a reboot of the Original Trek from the sixties. As someone who abhors the constant retconning in comics (where the writers decide to start over and pretend that a lot of history just doesn't exist so that they can skip the whole creativity part), I reject the idea.

J.J. Abrams touches something and it turns to gold, usually, so we'll see. If this flick ends up being successful, I imagine we'll be subjected to more of them with random new directors. I shudder at the thought of Michael Bay or Jonathan Frakes at the helm.

The writers have written for Alias (which I never watched), but also committed the sin of writing the new Transformers movie (which kinda blew goats, though that's not all the writers' faults), MI:III (moderately ok). Worse, most of that Hercules and Xena shit was their doing. GAH! Those were so campy and awful and inaccurate, I hardly have hope for Star Trek. The dudes who wrote The Island? Come on, that's hardly amazing enough cred for Trek!

So, the trailer shows Kirk as a kid, then teen in Iowa. Ok, not bad. Chris Pine looks ok as Kirk, although Kirk was never the attractor for me. I'd need to see the film and an old Trek episode next to each other to see. But he's got the posing, arrogance, and posturing right.

Not sure if I buy the kid from "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" as Sulu.

Didn't see hair or hide of Karl Urban as McCoy, at least not a devoted shot as such.

There was, however, a devoted shot of Uhura getting undressed, white bra and all. Zoe Saldana is quite pretty, but way too thin to be Uhura. It's like they succumbed to current skinny-model trends in the retcon. Grrrr... She's a fine actress, but not what I was hoping for. I'm sure she'll do fine, it's just the stereotyping that if you're attractive, you must also be skinny. I hate that. But here's Nichelle Nichols as Uhura Statuesque and voluptuous. A little big for a film star today. You'll see what I mean when you see all of Zoe's ribs and abs when she's taking her shirt off. Covering her face, even. You know, Nichelle once told Dr. Martin Luther King that she wanted to leave the Trek show while it was filming. He told her she shouldn't, because what she was doing for African-Americans was important. The idea of a black female Lieutenant on a flagship for the entire world was an important one, especially since she couldn't have sat in the front of the bus at the time. Star Trek was pivotal in gradually turning racism on its ear. Pop culture laid the groundwork for fighting racism, and Gene Roddenberry (bless him!) saw the future as it should be: raceless. If they reduce Uhura to T&A in this film, I shall be disappointed, just because it ignores the character as a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. More than disappointed. Angered.

Oh, and the last bit: Spock. Oh, where to begin? I suppose you'd have to begin with me as a child to understand my point of view. Small girl, poor, in suburbarural Atlanta in a mixed-race tiny town. At home, white people doing white things. Family of firemen, truckers, dentists and artists. Music everywhere. Broke-down cars and banana pudding, farming at my grandparents' place, and at that damn Christian cult several times a week. And poor. Deciding to feed us or the dog poor. Turning on the oven for heat poor. Living in grandpa's old house poor. Library books, network tv on a tiny black and white set (in the late seventies, color had been out a WHILE), and my imagination as toys poor. I was happy, so I'm not complaining.

But when you compare that to the show, my mind was blown. I was around other races, so Uhura and Sulu were real to me. I had black friends and asian friends. I had white friends, full of bluster like Kirk, and full of earnest help like McCoy. But I'd never seen ANYTHING like Spock. Not just the ears and brows, but the soul, the aching clarity of the self. A man trapped between two worlds (I don't think I had any mixed-race classmates), brilliantly intelligent, strong, tall, secure. He was the first man I fell in love with. Not a sexual love, since I was too little to think that way yet, though he is certainly very attractive also. Not Leonard, either, since I didn't have the fortune to know him. But Spock, the character. I wanted a man like him.

Enter my doom. I once told my girlfriends in high school that my male ideal had a big nose. Tall, dark hair, preferably mussed, broad-shouldered, narrow waist. Brilliantly intelligent. They looked at me like I was nuts and gave me Tom Cruise movies to watch (remember the aforementioned feminine dickshrivel? There ya go). If I saw a man like that, I wanted. If he were distant, I wanted more. I totally missed the point that Spock is completely distant emotionally, and would never open up. Hoo, boy.

Every relationship got me closer to that ideal until my disaster of a marriage with the most "perfect" man: He was actually a cesspool of imperfections. That unavailable thing reeled me in like a goddamn trout. I didn't see the hell I was wrapping myself into. And hell it was. I was a tool. In the words of Nick Cave, "I feel like a vacuum cleaner - a complete sucker!" Glad to be out of that!

It took me forever to see my problem. It also took me forever to find out Leonard was Jewish. Apparently, a lot of Jewish men have big noses and dark, mussed hair. Oh. Funnily enough, I'm with a sexy man of Jewish descent. He's like a mix of Spock and Joe McIntyre from New Kids: Big nose, mussy hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks. I'm in heaven.

So, you can see the loaded history for me with Spock. The boy had damn well better be right if he's going to play young Spock. And he looks like Leonard is the thing! But I don't know if that cool brilliance is there from the trailer. I am completely unconvinced that anyone can deliver that. The times were so poignant and the costs so much, that there is only one Spock.

I am unenthralled. I hope I'm wrong.

And I'm late for work! GAH! I'll pop back in for the Quantum of Solace bit later....

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Newfangledness and lettuce.



Well, hi all!

This is a photo of my new lettuce and garlic bin! Pretty tasty looking, huh? I planted some lovely heirloom garlic cloves, then scattered seeds over the top. I have a mixed sweet greens & reds, Paris mesclun mix, an Asian mesclun that's good for stir-fries, and spicy micro greens. YUM! Yes, they're planted thickly. I figured I'd just thin right into my salad bowl, which is working great so far!

Unfortunately, the dreaded cabbage moth has visited. It's a pretty little white butterfly. It lays zillions of eggs on your greens. The eggs hatch and hungry little monster-pillars come out and munchmunchmunch. I've resorted to the BT again. *sigh*

Here's a shot of the intro to my garden:



Yeah, I know. It looks white trash-tastic. But it works. Here's the second half:




I've cleaned up since this photo, and put in another lettuce and garlic bin (with the wilting lettuce needed to be transplanted from the earlier photo). I've also destroyed both the grow-outs of the Purple Haze tester. I'm about half a second away from doing the same on the Power's Heirloom, since it has not once set fruit.

The black prince and black plum are producing nicely. Hopefully, they will ripen before any frost. Unfortunately, those don't taste as great as I'd like them to. The first black prince (picked and eaten in a lovely salad November 2nd) actually tasted kind of lame. It thought about tasting like a tomato, honestly, but I'd already swallowed by then. However, it was far better than the atrocious excuse for a tomato that was on a sandwich I bought today. If I'm paying $6.95 for a tomato-basil-mozzerella panini, shouldn't the tomato be amazing? I mean, it's only 33% of the sandwich ingredients. At an expensive bakery, no less. Actually, the basil was tough and lackluster, too. I need a panini press...

What I'm finding is that I'm excited by the thought of a tomato. That is, until I get a tomato that I didn't grow, or I didn't get from a market myself. Food service tomatoes are SHIT. No wonder I spent my early life thinking I hated tomatoes! I *do* hate tomatoes, at least the readily available ones! A real, flavorful, juicy heirloom tomato? Now that's where it's at! Some restaurants have the tomato thing took care of: P.F. Chang's, Claim Jumper, Twist in Atlanta... but they are few and far between. We need more tomato lovers!!!

Which brings me to this: I have begun a new blog. A Southerner's Guide to (surviving) Los Angeles. In it, I will detail the search for Southernness in the greater L.A. area. Good food and recipes and locales, hoo-ah! Come on over!

Monday, November 3, 2008

On the Finishing of my Novel...

So last night, I finished writing my novel. I was approximately 2.5 days late in doing so, but I did it! I'm SO happy with it! Borders does not serve champagne. I celebrated with a root beer float instead.

Tuesday and the Moon :Tuesday's fiancee is missing!! When she tries to find him, she ends up on another planet between the Earth and the Moon, and discovers that he's not all he said he was.

I'll start to talk more about the experience soon. I am starting a rewrite class, so a full beta reader version should be ready at the end of December.

I worry that I don't really feel any different. I'm still me, but I just accomplished this massive goal. Given my current worries, I feel this huge pressure to make writing profitable, but the money is only there for a lucky few. Since when have I ever been that lucky? I learned a long time ago that luck isn't my strong suit. Hard work is.

I write because I have to. It is in me to write these tales. They want to come out! There are 36 more in the wings. Hopefully, somebody likes one of them.

The joy has been dampened, however. Today, my fish is dying, my new cat is missing, and one of my turtles is dead (RIP, dear Herakleitus). All this happened since I finished, so there has been little time for joy. That, and the fact that I need a lot of money fast. I really hope things turn around soon. I also hope that both my grandfathers get better.

Life. So full of joys and miseries. I'm getting a whole lotta both right now.