Booth and the Double Button

My former teacher at the University of Chicago, Wayne Booth, wrote an essay entitled, “Is There Any Knowledge that a Man Must Have?” In it, he discussed the aims of liberal education, and while I suspect he didn’t have in mind such a mundane task as sewing a button, Mr. Booth possessed a breadth of interests that surprised most.

On a recent winter trip to Seattle, in the midst of uncommonly cold weather (as confirmed/alleged by various longtime locals I happened to come across), I recalled Mr. Booth’s question when the buttons of my overcoat (the only coat I had brought for this weeks-long trip) started popping off.

The coat was barely adequate to fend off the chill in the first place, and it would certainly be useless to me if it couldn’t close. At the same time, I had never in my life sewn a button. I think my only sewing experience of any kind was a crafts project in elementary school. I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my trip indoors or furiously hugging myself to keep my coat closed. (Nor did my budget or temperament allow for the purchase of a new garment.) So I had a choice: take the coat to someone to fix the buttons, or sew them myself.

How hard could it be? I thought. So I bought a rudimentary sewing kit at Walgreen’s and, with the internet as my guide, I got to work. Here are the malefactors (shown with size references):

You can see that there is not only the main, larger button for the front of the coat, but also a smaller (let’s call it an anchor) button that attaches to the interior side. I didn’t fancy the idea of cutting my teeth on this pernicious “double button,” but I figured that one doesn’t choose the crisis, only the response.

Once I got going, I realized that it was indeed a simple operation, though none of the videos and guides I initially consulted made clear how to accomplish the final knot that the button required. So I improvised a little, and though my technique wasn’t entirely orthodox, the button held well enough. I tackled a second button with more assurance, but left too narrow a shank this time, meaning that the gap between button and fabric was barely wide enough to accommodate easy buttoning. But it worked. And voila! The coat, she is done:

I returned to the question: is there any knowledge that a man must have? (Or as Mr. Booth revised at a later, more politically correct time: what knowledge, if any, should everybody pursue?) Specifically, is sewing a button a skill that everyone should learn? Once I had done it, I had to say no, I didn’t need to have this particular knowledge, and if I had a personal handmaiden to sew my buttons and darn my socks till the end of days, I wouldn’t feel like I had lost some crucial piece of my humanity.

But the question is not about specific fragments of knowledge. Rather, it asks of each of us what it is that we need to know in order to be truly free as human beings. I wouldn’t say that learning to sew a button was an Olympian achievement, but I did enjoy the small freedom I felt in doing it myself, and knowing that when the time comes, I could do it again.

As soon as I join the ranks of professional seamstresses (we really need a masculine form of that word), I will announce the pricing for my services.

* * *

Wayne Booth was a great man, a great humanist. I was proud to know him, and only regret that I never got to know him well. Though the academy has a reputation for snootiness, I never knew a professor so at ease with bringing together the prosaic and the divine. I trust he would not begrudge me the use of his good name and good words in pursuit of matters sartorial.

“A man can be ignorant even of Shakespeare, Aristotle, Beethoven, and Einstein, and be a man for a’ that – if he has learned how to think his own thoughts, experience beauty for himself, and choose his own actions.” – Wayne Booth

It's a-you? It's a-me!

Mario has achieved the top of the flagpole! Hooray! 5,000 points!

(Totem pole at Victor Steinbreuck Park, Seattle)

“My name is Ozymandias . . .”

On April 15, 2006, the Hotel San Diego was demolished to make way for an empty hole. The official story is that the feds wanted the downtown site at 339 W. Broadway for an expansion of some courthouse. Thanks to typical gubment alacrity, the site remains a dirt lot almost five years after the wrecking crew turned one of downtown’s few distinctive buildings into a heap of rubble. (To be fair, I recently noted some stirrings on the site, so construction may be visible soon.)

Though it wasn’t a bad looking piece of architecture, I had no special affection for the Hotel San Diego, and I wasn’t in the audience the morning it collapsed upon its own ghosts. In the ensuing years, whenever I drove past the site, I would casually notice the vacant space where the hotel once stood, and wonder at the wisdom of destroying a city’s heritage only to make way for a bigger jail. San Diego doesn’t have nearly the quantity of grand old buildings of a city like Detroit, nor does it have the same level of urban blight. You would think a city like San Diego would have the luxury of taking more care with its historical buildings.

Fast forward to 2010. A few months ago, I was driving through Liberty Station in Point Loma. In 2006, this was home to the nicely cleaned-up remnants of the Naval Training Center. Acres of old buildings stood empty, and what once housed navy personnel was being prepared for a second life as home to freshly painted offices, art studios, galleries, and retail stores. Today, Liberty Station is starting to fulfill its original promise as a tidy village of pedestrian traffic, bland commercialism, and artistic endeavor.

So imagine my surprise as I drove up a random street within the complex and slowed to examine a hulking mass of metal on the side of the road, sitting on a lawn, shaded by trees. Upside-down and laid low as it was, I recognized the name and shape as soon as I saw the front - it was the original sign from atop the Hotel San Diego:

I had thought the sign would be scrap metal somewhere by now, and yet here it was, intact, a little rusty, but functional, a sign without a building. Why was it kept, and why here, out in the open, vulnerable to any vandal with a mind to befoul it? It’s a little ironic that a remnant of a dead era should be casually dumped in a place intended for revitalization and nostalgic restoration.

Just about a week ago, I was at Liberty Station again, and the sign remains on the same patch of grass. If I had more of the journalist in me, I might dig for a story of what’s to become of it. If I do learn of anything, I’ll revisit this in a future post. Until then, I am thankful for this little curiosity on the side of a road, and a few lines of verse it called to mind:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Wait, Tron is a dude???

No, not The Dude. That’s Kevin Flynn, aka Jeff Bridges, aka this guy:

No, I’m talking about Tron, aka Bruce Boxleitner, aka this guy:

[SPOILERS ahead – be warned!]

I saw the original Tron only very recently for the first time, even though it was a name and property that I’ve known for as long as I can remember. That futuristic name, Tron, conjured images of light-cycles, of course, trailed by glowing colored lines. But I had never had even an abridged viewing of the movie, and when I finally watched it, I remember being shocked at finding out that Tron was a character. I had always thought it signified a place (Tron World) or an idea (computer consciousness?). But what a character he turned out to be!

Despite the title, Tron is not really the story of Tron the character. Tron is told through the perspective of the bumbling sidekick, Kevin Flynn, rather than that of the archetypal hero, Tron. I guess they named the movie Tron because it was the cooler name. I mean, they couldn’t very well have called the movie, Kevin.

Most of the movie had me wondering, “What the hell is this?” Not with an ironic smile, but with an uncomfortable grimace. The electric palette, the unfocused narrative, the way the Recognizer ships looked like pieces of paper floating through a stage from Zaxxon – it honestly made me wonder why this movie gained such a cult following and even mainstream name recognition over the past three decades, when other similarly bad, youth-friendly, video-game-oriented movies from the era, say, Cloak and Dagger or Wargames (both starring Dabney Coleman, by the way, though I only watched the first one . . . many times), languish in obscurity. Was it the signature look? Was it the light cycles? Or was it the fact that Bruce Boxleitner could kick Dabney Coleman’s hindquarters any day of the week, and twice on Sundays, mustache be damned?

To me, the best thing about Tron the property is Tron the character. He’s a brave warrior, a straight shooter with a soft spot for his lady, and a true believer in his cause and the Users. The gravity that Boxleitner brings to the role stands in stark contrast to the corny performances by the rest of the actors and the slapdash feel of the entire production. Tron, who “fights for the Users,” also seems to fight for the dignity of the movie, and very nearly has you believing that the movie walks a fine line between awful and awesome (it doesn’t, falling sadly on the side of the former).

The irony is that this landmark property’s namesake is a relatively uncelebrated actor. Think of any iconic title character, and you’ll usually find a legendary star in the role.

Judah Ben-Hur. Well that’s Charlton Heston, of course.

Citizen Kane. That’s the majestic Orson “Unicron” Welles.

Rocky. Sly Stallone.

Rambo. Ditto.

Tron. . . . Bruce Boxleitner? Who’s Bruce Boxleitner?

If you don’t know Tron, perhaps you know Bruce Boxleitner as the star of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a mid-80s television series that I never watched, but had at least heard of. To my grade-school, daycare mind, it seemed to inhabit the same grandmotherly china cabinet as Murder, She Wrote and St. Elsewhere (no, I never took those china plates out of the cabinet either). He was a celebrity at just about eye level with Hollywood Squares or, more recently, Dancing with the Stars. Like Morgan Fairchild or Suzanne Pleshette, you’ve probably heard the name, but you wouldn’t know the career.

Having starred in Tron, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Babylon 5 (never saw that either), I don’t think anyone could say he hasn’t had a respectable career. But I’m sure it’s been a long time since Mr. Boxleitner’s phone rang with any plum roles. For God’s sake, he starred in 2009’s direct-to-video Transmorphers: Fall of Man. Mercifully, I’ve never seen this “film,” but not only is it of the breed of notoriously cheesy and exploitative mockbusters (of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, itself a disgrace of a movie), but it is also the second Transmorphers movie, following a first movie that had zero recognizable names! For Bruce Boxleitner to fall this far, even considering the modest heights of his career, is disheartening, and there should have been no indication that he would have any future in Hollywood’s limelight ever again.

And so it amuses me to imagine how he would have reacted to the call telling him that they were going to revive Tron, and they wanted him back. “Me? Play Tron again? But I don’t know if I’ll still fit in that suit.” Much hay has been made in the media of the CG used to create the younger Jeff Bridges (clearly the much bigger star and centerpiece of both this and the first movie), but I suspect the same tech was used to portray Tron in flashbacks, making Boxleitner look like a young man again. Whatever the technique, I found it much more convincing, and certainly much more touching to see Tron back again, still young, still heroic, but without the hockey helmet, and sporting a stylish haircut.

I’m glad that Tron creator Stephen Lisberger’s unprecedented vision has finally met the technological muscle to make it look as beautiful as it did in his mind. I don’t know how people, both critics and audience members, thought the movie looked good even in 1982, just as I’m not sure why some people today think that the CG “young Kevin Flynn” looks realistic, rather than what it really is, which is a creepy monstrosity.

I’m exceedingly glad that I saw the original Tron before seeing Tron: Legacy, because I don’t think I could have appreciated the sequel nearly as much without being at least somewhat attached to the first film.

And finally, in token of my admiration for Bruce Boxleitner, despite his dozens upon dozens of roles I’ve never seen and never will see, let’s hear it for Tron himself, perhaps the noblest hero in movie-dom.

Boy Stuff

A female friend of mine was asking for movie recommendations recently, and I suggested Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams’s 2009 reboot of the legendary but flagging franchise. She promptly scoffed, “That’s boy stuff.”

Boy stuff? Now hold the mascara there, sugarlips, and don’t get your panties all in a bunch. I mean, I didn’t know we still lived in a society where science fiction was treated as strictly the domain of the penis-bearing half of our species. Why, then, did women watch Avatar or Back to the Future or Lost? Perhaps, then, it’s the “spaceships and lasers” subgenre of sci-fi that must toil under the perception of offering nothing to the female mind or heart.

Now, I am aware that boys and girls are different and have different sensibilities. I am aware that you give pink blankets to newborn girls and blue blankets to newborn boys. I am aware that said newborn boys are heralded by the sharing of cigars, whereas you greet the birth of a girl by distributing Virginia Slims. And I am aware that if you give your son Barbies to play with when he’s a toddler, then you should be locked up in Gitmo, and he will most assuredly grow up to become a headline to be ripped for a “very special episode” of Law and Order: SVU (preferably guest starring Henry Ian Cusick as the pedo). But even acknowledging all this, shouldn’t a good movie be accessible to both (all?) sexes, regardless of genre or content?

Granted, this “boy stuff” statement was uttered by one person, but I’ve known many women in my day (“known” in the normal sense of the word*), and by and large, they share a similarly dim view of space operas. You love Captain Jack Sparrow, but you don’t love Ferengi scoundrels or organ harvesters in space. What gives?

Frankly, my dears, you make me sad. Put me on the flip side of this scenario, and I would be more just. In fact, as much as space-blazing is calculated to appeal to young men, there is a genre that just as narrowly caters to young (and old?) women: the romantic comedy. And I can honestly say that I’ve seen good rom-coms and I’ve seen dreadful ones. But I don’t dismiss the genre outright, and, unless the example in question stars Jennifer Aniston, I’ve never said, “Oh, it’s a romantic comedy? I don’t want to watch that. That’s GIRL STUFF.” (Cue armpit farting and, I don’t know, real farting?)

Maybe the problem with much space sci-fi is that it’s too testosteronerous (and the romantic subplots that often get shoehorned into those movies seem too much like a pandering, calculated attempt to draw in a desirable but hardly necessary female audience). But by this reasoning, would women not enjoy Moby-Dick either, a book almost devoid of the fairer sex, and obscenely preoccupied by an epically, nay, Biblically(!) phallic whale?

But perhaps the problem with lesser romantic comedies is that they’re too lady-centric. They view the world through a heroine’s eyes, to pull exclusively on distaff heartstrings. I think any work of art that eschews general humanism in favor of baiting one sex or another with lazy bromides will find itself disagreeable to those of us, men and women, who are looking for something genuinely moving.

As for me, I prefer both science fiction and romantic comedies that represent the human face of hope, struggle, longing, joy. Maybe a dash of angst.

Oh, who am I kidding? Let’s get back to the grand old tradition of male charm, female coquetry, and romance from a man’s point of view.
______

*Drum roll, cymbal crash, and joke credit go to Professor Peter Dembowski of the University of Chicago.

Star Trek: The Underappreciated Motion Picture

I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but it being Thanksgiving and all, I wanted to give thanks for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, truly an underappreciated masterpiece. It is a far better film than the laughably overrated 2001: A Space Odyssey, with which it shares the esteemed “special photographic effects director,” Douglas Trumbull. It is better even than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the proverbial “best” Star Trek film.

But let’s set aside for the moment questions of what is better than what (as these can only be addressed here by morbid opinions). Having recently watched this now 30-year-old film for the first time, I’m far more interested in talking about what I think the filmmakers were intending, and why this film stands in such stark contrast to the rest of the Star Trek oeuvre (and consequently, why it tends to suffer in comparison).

Having been told by various sources that the first Star Trek movie was utter codswallop and not worthy of its successors, I could only think it’s no wonder the movie has been forgotten by most, and summarily dismissed by those unlucky few who remember it. But as a lifelong Star Trek fan, I figured I owed it to myself to watch the one Star Trek film I had missed entirely.

What I saw charmed me with its familiarity, but even more so, it shocked me with a vision of Star Trek that differed from almost every other rendition I had seen – in tone, in pacing, in aesthetics, Star Trek: TMP paints with an entirely different palette, a different set of brushes. Star Trek, in its various incarnations, is sometimes as exquisitely detailed as a Fabergé egg, sometimes as imposing as Picasso’s Guernica. TMP is like a fresco or a tapestry; that is to say, very old-looking, but also vast and ambitious.

This is a movie made in the old Hollywood style, but just at the moment that the new style, ushered in by Star Wars and the 70s auteurs, was becoming dominant, and in fact, making the old style look “old.” I imagine there were intense labor pains as this picture struggled to get born, as it simultaneously tried to look as technologically advanced as Star Wars, but was consciously harkening back to a filmmaking vocabulary more reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia. (Star Wars itself was in some ways a throwback, but with far more action and whimsy than the brooding TMP).

How old-school is this movie? When I popped in the DVD and hit “Play,” I and my fellow viewers were greeted with a star field and the ambient strains of a wistful version of the Star Trek theme. As this near-blank screen dragged on for about a minute, I wondered if the DVD had glitched, since nothing was happening. I finally hit the forward button and the DVD seemed to reach an actual scene, and from that point, all seemed well. Only later on, after I had watched the entire film and gone back to review various scenes for this article did I realize that the star field was the “Overture” to the movie, a three-minute overture, to boot. Following this was a “Main Title” sequence, which I had also unwittingly skipped, consisting of a more amped-up version of the title theme accompanying the opening credits. I had managed to skip the first two segments of the movie without even realizing it (and in so doing, shaved about five minutes off the run time). I can’t imagine this sort of opening playing well to today’s impatient audiences, and even in 1980, this must have seemed old-fashioned. The only surprise now was that there was no intermission.

Of course, this was a calculated blast from the past; just look at the director they chose. Robert Wise had proven his sci-fi chops with The Day the Earth Stood Still, a well-known though poorly remembered film from 1951 (tragically remade in 2008 with Keanu Reeves in a suit borrowed from Men in Black and a personality borrowed from, well, any of his other characters . . . sorry, was that too easy?). At the height of his career, Wise helmed such epic entertainments as The Sound of Music and West Side Story. His first directorial efforts were cheesy horror flicks. And before any of this, he was the editor of a little movie called Citizen Kane, and worked with Orson Welles again on The Magnificent Ambersons.

Star Trek: TMP shows a little bit of all these influences – the message-based science fiction, the ominous tone of the horror milieu, the grand panoramas and centrality of music in telling the story. It does, perhaps, show its distance from the economical Wellesian style, but Wise learned his craft well, and there is nothing sloppy about the way TMP is put together.

Not much needs to be said about the actors and their iconic characters. They are and always have been pitch-perfect in their roles. But in this film, you see what a Star Trek movie is like when the characters are put in the service of a story, rather than having the story revolve around their large personalities. The movie seems to acknowledge the legendary quality of these characters – Kirk usurping the captaincy of the Enterprise, to the great pleasure of his adoring crew, Spock arriving on board like a Roman statue – and then carries them almost like passengers along an adventure that ultimately allows them little agency over how things play out.

For me, it was one particular scene, perhaps the most controversial scene in the movie, that made me appreciate the complicated soul of this film – the unveiling of the new starship Enterprise. This enormously important and impossibly lengthy scene, set to Jerry Goldsmith’s glorious music, is the first time that both the viewers and the characters in the movie see the Enterprise in all her beauty and immensity. Standing seemingly at Kirk’s shoulder, we move at a glacial pace across dry dock, gazing languorously at the USS Enterprise, an achingly detailed scale model shot to look as big as the galaxy. Lingering fetish shots of the starship alternate with glances at Kirk and Scotty in their puny shuttle, and after lord knows how many cuts back and forth, the two men look like they don’t know how else to play to the camera. About seven minutes later, we finally complete our zero-gravity pilgrimage, and Kirk and Scotty exchange a priceless look, thoroughly bemused, as if they were watching a Vulcan who couldn’t comprehend “Row, row, row your boat.”

Even for a patient chap like me, this was a bit much, and without Goldsmith’s score to anchor this scene, it would have been unbearable. But I think of it this way. This is the very first time anyone had ever seen the Enterprise on the big screen, with big budget technology to bring it to life. Anyone who has ever seen the original Star Trek TV series, especially from this many decades away, knows how hopelessly lame the special effects were on that show, and especially the plastic toy that was the Enterprise. I have no doubt that Gene Roddenberry and Robert Wise wanted the big reveal of the Enterprise to be a defining moment of this movie, a chance for all those fans who had waited so many years for this movie to get to see the Enterprise exactly the way they always wanted it to look – huge, gorgeous, shiny and glowing, covered with twinkling lights, branded with house-sized letters, a real vessel that real future people could board, a ship worthy of a beloved crew, a monument to the ingenuity of the human race and to Roddenberry’s imagination.

On the audio commentary, Wise says of the scene’s mixed reception, with his typical understated wit: “Some people have very strong feelings about that.” It is too long, it is old-fashioned, and it almost doesn’t even work, thanks to Kirk and Scotty looking like goofballs, but despite it all, it is a Star Trek moment through and through. It was a riskier choice than the later films would tend to make, but the later films also didn’t have the momentousness of this occasion to fulfill. Wise: “Gene really wanted to finally show the Enterprise the way the fans wanted to see it. He wanted it to look big and real.” By that measure, the scene succeeds.

Douglas Trumbull, as the supreme artist of the special effects on TMP, is perhaps even more responsible for this and numerous other extremely long, slow scenes in the film. He’s on record in the commentary expressing his displeasure with the current style of action-oriented filmmaking with its quick cuts and dialogue-heavy explanations.

The later Star Trek films would take us on more jaunty, though I would argue, less poetic journeys through space. The Wrath of Khan, for instance, which I also recently watched, though certainly very engaging, plays almost like a double-length episode of a television show. It’s almost too snappy, and at the risk of inciting many a nerdlinger to an “Amok Time” style fight to the death, I must say that Wrath of Khan simply looks and feels like a smaller, less daring movie than TMP.

Of course, there’s no practical reason to pit the movies against each other when they are all worth watching. What’s remarkable to me is that, given all the grief that avowed Star Trek fans have heaped on TMP, consider that if this movie had failed at the box office or otherwise incurred the wrath of the studio execs, Star Trek as a big screen franchise would likely have died in the womb. Whatever one’s thoughts on its artistic merits, it was the success of this first Star Trek movie that made all the other movies possible. And without that revival of the brand, would we have seen the offshoot Star Trek: The Next Generation television series, and all the subsequent TV Star Treks to follow?

They never made another Star Trek movie as contemplative as the first one, but I see hints of its philosophical style in many of the episodes of the various TV series, especially Next Generation. Most of the Q episodes, Data’s quest to become more human, the existentialism of the Borg, even the groan-worthy “Kes evolves” subplot of Star Trek: Voyager – these are all explorations of purpose and identity, and the terrible and glorious ways in which they intertwine. As Spock says in TMP, “Each of us at some time in our lives turns to someone, a father, a brother, a god, and asks, ‘Why am I here, what was I meant to be?’”

If Star Wars is the apotheosis of the hero myth in science fiction, Star Trek is its counterpart, showing us not heroes, but the men and women within, journeying through a universe they scarcely understand in search of the new, and ultimately coming face to face with themselves.

San Diego in Pictures

Is it redundant to promote oneself within one’s own blog? Please take a look at my photographs of San Diego at the Life Panoramic website.

Note: I am not trying to unduly impress anyone or suggest that I won some kind of competition. As far as I can tell, there was no extensive selection process before my photographs were published. In fact, all I did was submit my photos, and the next day, I noticed they were up on the site. I was never contacted by the site. For what it’s worth, I think my photos are pretty good, and I think this website has an admirable goal, which is to have people document the places they live in.