The Songs of Johnny Go

I missed seeing two of my favorite comedians from my favorite comedy troupe performing live. One of them in particular is a performer I'd love to have in my own audience, someone with whom I suspect we share a wavelength, and someone I'd dearly enjoy taking out for drinks. At the very least, seeing him live would have been a personal thrill.

I missed and am missing Baltimore Comic Con, where I could have seen a rare, painfully rare panel appearance of my favorite creative team in comics, and subsequently I missed out on finally meeting my favorite among them, a man who happens to be my favorite comic writer. I was ready to finally tell him what I thought of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, a book which he charged me to read when we briefly corresponded in his blog's comments thread. I actually would have had something to talk about with this guy whose work has meant so much to me for almost twenty years. That's not even to mention the fact that I might have been able to finally get a drawing from a man who isn't just one of the finest creative minds at DC Comics, but also those closest thing there is to an official Two-Face artist. Owning a Harvey sketch from him would have been a crowning achievement.

I missed and am missing my favorite Fringe Festival, having made the unprecedented and horrible decision to cancel with just a week's notice. This is a Fringe populated by some of my best friends in the business, one in particular above all others, and the audiences are of the fleeting kind that remind me why I still do this. After a year of frustrating festivals, of disappointments both great (a couple) and small (too many), Indy Fringe would have felt like going back to the well and diving in headfirst. I didn't just want to be there. In some days, I needed it. I still need it.

I know that, if I had done the third, I couldn't have done the first and second favorite things. And yet, here they all are. All at once, these things which are more than diversions but events which are important to me on a personal level of all that drives me as a passionate fan and artist, separated from me only by a little bit of time and a little bit of money. Neither of which I have right now, or at least, neither of which I can spare. So here they are, yes. There they go. And there they've gone.

And yet... and yet again...

Instead of all that, I just spent the last hour with the main (but far from only) cause for why I missed all these things. This same cause ripped me out of my sleep yet again, screamed in my goddamn ears yet again, and puked up upon me yet again. And then I held him. And fed him. And heard his cries recede, his squirms settle down like head on a beer, as he stared up at me with that wide-eyed wonder he has as I read aloud some Harlan Ellison. After I couple pages, I glanced down to check on him, and saw that the pacifier had dropped out of his mouth, because his smile was just too damn big to hold it in.

Goddammit, Universe. You win. Worth it.

Ever since Henchgirl started getting me into Star Trek: The Original Series, we've been waiting for Netflix to put it on Instant, which they finally did just in time for the comings months of sleep-deprived babydom! But in a Hefnerian twist, it's only the remastered version with new CGI bits added in.

Is there anybody else out there that finds this to be like a more distractingly annoying version than George Lucas' "remastered" Star Wars editions? Because apparently, no one else seems to HATE this the way Henchgirl and I do. I just don't get why anyone saw the need to do this. The new effects won't make any of the other crappy effects look not-crappy. You can make the Enterprise all slick and panaroamic as you like, but that's still papier-mâché on the walls in the next scene.

Besides, from what I can tell based on the episodes of TOS I've seen so far, the effects aren't the point. It's the writing. It's the characters. It's the ideas. If you tried sprucing up The Twilight Zone with CGI, you'd be missing the point the same way. You're not going to make the Gremlin (On. The. WingofthePLANE.) look any less silly, and the silliness never kept the episode from being considered an all-time classic in the first place, so why bother? Who are you trying to impress? What are you trying to improve? It's the exact same thing with the remastered TOS.

As time has gone by, TOS honestly looks strangely not-dated, as if taking place in its very own special point in the past, with only the occasional female character's hairstyle giving the 60's-ness away. The CGI, on the other hand, screams 2007, and thus instantly dates this version of an increasingly timeless show.

Saddest part of all? We watched some of Star Trek: The Next Generation and found that the 20+ year old effects actually hold up WAY better than the CGI remastered TOS episodes, if only because the effects are consistent within the aesthetic of the show.

... And to think, I started writing this post with the intent to do a major Triple/Quadruple Feature essay on the TOS episode "The Doomsday Machine," compared to TNG's "Chain of Command, Pt. 1," (comparing Decker to Jellico and the sometimes-forgotten militaristic themes in ST), followed by a second essay which would compare "Chain of Command, Pt. 2" and the Babylon 5 episode, "Intersections in Real Time" (two of Sci-Fi's all-time great examinations at interrogation and torture).

That's what I meant to write, but yeah, didn't happen. How can I explain why in a way that's thematic appropriate to this post?





Ahhh yeah, that's the stuff.