Ordinary Day

The original Star Trek series was one of my very first introductions to science fiction–and to science fiction fandom. When I started going to conventions in the late eighties, I was delighted to discover that a group of fan performers, headed up by the redoutable Julia Ecklar as Captain Kirk, had done a couple of live musical parodies of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. They used, respectively, West Side Story and South Pacific–giving us Wrath Side Story and Spock Pacific.

Dara digitized our old copies of these, and you can find them on her YouTube channel here.

I mention this because to this day, Dara and I still periodically break into song snippets from these performances, and I always DID love the opening number in particular: “WHAT AIN’T WE GOT? WE AIN’T GOT SPOCK!”

Now that line’s got a brand new poignance, since I am seeing the Internet explode with the news of the passing of Leonard Nimoy. The New York Times has an article here. Tor.com covers the story here. John Scalzi has a post up here.

I started watching Trek in my mid-teens, and at that age, I was totally bowled over by Captain Kirk. But as I grew older I developed much more of an appreciation for Spock, and a couple of my very favorite episodes of the series–“Journey to Babel” and “Amok Time”–are Spock-centric episodes. His ongoing struggle between his human side and his Vulcan side makes Spock, for me, a truly compelling character. And it’s played so beautiful in his contentious relationship with his father, from whom he gets his dry Vulcan snark QUITE honestly. Moreover, the way Spock’s face lights up when he realizes he didn’t kill Kirk after all at the end of “Amok Time” is beautiful.

Trek is a strong current in the filk music I came to love as well, particularly the songs by the aforementioned Julia Ecklar. Julia has a wrenching song in particular about the destruction of the Enterprise, one which makes me tear up every time I hear it. But she’s also got a delightful one from McCoy’s point of view: “He’s Dead Jim”. And yet another about the resurrection of Trek fandom when the movies came out. Trek meant a LOT to her in her music, and this shone through into my own development as a fan of Star Trek. I came to admire Spock as a character even more when I saw the hints of an early romance between him and Uhura in the initial episodes–and when I realized he was a musician as well.

So I may be a Kirk fangirl, but Spock is right behind him in my affections.

We lost DeForest Kelley in 1999, and now we’ve lost the second of the triad of the characters that were the heart of the original Star Trek.

But I think I speak for every Trek fan in the world when I say that all of us will be happy to stand in for Doctor McCoy, and provide a place for Spock’s katra to live forever.

Rest in peace, Mr. Nimoy. You lived long and prospered. We will miss you.

I leave you with this rousing chorus:

We’ve an admiral brave and daring, he’s the best the fleet has got!
We’ve a helmsman who’s named Sulu and an engineer named Scott
A Russian navigator and a slightly schizoid doc
But what ain’t we got? WE AIN’T GOT SPOCK!

There is nothing quite like Spock!
Nothing in the world
There is nothing you can grok
That is anything quite like Spock!

Editing to add:

And I also leave you with this.

Speaking of Julia Ecklar, here’s that song I mentioned above about the destruction of the Enterprise. This is “Fallen Angel”, from her album Divine Intervention. It brings me to tears every damn time I hear it, and I’m crying today as I transcribe the lyrics. And the solemn French horn that comes in at the line “there are stars before my eyes”, evocative of the Star Trek theme, particularly kills me.

You can find the album on iTunes, or from Prometheus Music here.

My god, what have I done? Is this what I had to do?
I paid to save six lives–was it worth the price of you?
I would take your spirit in me, to make you live again
But your fire dies across the sky
My god, is this the end?

My steel-and-stardrive lady, my soul’s death is at your hands
As your own death was at mine, love
Though even I can’t understand
Why we gods can’t live forever–why should legends have to die?
As you wail to sleep in glory, my heart still seeks the sky

There are stars before my eyes
But they pale to your dying
You swore we’d outlive time
Oh my love, were you, too, lying?
What’s my life without your singing?
When I’m naught but flesh and bone?
Where have I damned my lover’s soul
To wander all alone?

But this death I can’t deny, as you fade to distant ember
My need to steal from death cost you, love, but I’ll remember
And I long to burn there with you, to never live again
Forever we would light the sky–my god, is this the end?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Re-bought electronically from Diane Duane’s site:

• Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, by Diane Duane. Re-buy of a book previously owned in paperback. This is Ms. Duane’s take on urban fantasy, recently re-issued with new content. Picked this up because I’d been meaning to re-read it, and I’m curious to see how she changed it.

And, bought electronically from Kobo Books:

• Star Trek – Die Anfänge: Alle Romane in einem Band!. This is a German translation of three Star Trek novels, grabbed because I noticed Kobo’s site has got a lot of SF/F in German now, and I was curious about the translations. The novels included are Vonda McIntyre’s Enterprise: The First Adventure, Margaret Wander Bonanno’s Strangers from the Sky, and Diane Carey’s Final Frontier.

230 for the year.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Bwahahahaha! Spotted this over on Fandom Lounge on JournalFen: Ensign Sue Must Die! It’s a parody webcomic for the Trek Reboot!

And it is HY-LARIOUS. As the commenters on F_L observed, Trek fandom has really come full circle. :D

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

So I know most of the known universe will be going to see Star Trek when it comes out this weekend, but for once I'm actually going to be fairly booked up with social thingamabobbies, so the chances of wedging in a Trek trek (aheh) are slim.

But out of curiosity, is anyone (local) up for doing a group Trek viewing next weekend? If so, speak up! I'll be over here going "LALALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" meanwhile at everybody's movie posts until then. ;)

ETA: Turns out my Friday night plans have shifted, and we'll be shooting for a Friday night show after all. However, chances are high that I'll want to see this thing twice, so the question will stand for next weekend too!

I am so very ready for this movie. spazzkat and I were talking about how it'll be a very nice change of pace to get back to some "bright optimistic future" sort of SF, and Star Trek, when done right, delivers that in spades. Bring it on. Give me the "space is really, REALLY cool and we need to go explore it!" adventure!

And also, I hear from seimaisin, who got to see a sneak preview, that it was highly enjoyable indeed. So fingers crossed for failure to suck.

Also: I am stricken with an urge to break out "Banned from Argo" for this next Jam. If any occasion calls for resurrecting that, it's the release of a brand new franchise-rebooting Trek flick that hopefully won't actually suck. I think I even have the chords somewhere. Muahaha!

Y'all know this already, of course, but yay, back ahead of schedule! Here, have some linkage to celebrate.

I believe the correct word for this is "shiny".

Isn't blackaire's forthcoming cover for Street Magic breaking some sort of Law of Urban Fantasy Cover Art by actually having two figures? Who changed the Cover Art Law when I wasn't looking? (Props to mdhenry for sharing the goodness, though!)

And for the two or three of you out there who might not have actually seen it yet, the first full official trailer is out for the new Trek flick. I have to admit... I'm really rather geeking out about this now. From a worldbuilding standpoint I'm curious to see what they'll keep and what they'll change, and whether it is actually biologically possible for someone to play James T. Kirk and not channel William Shatner. Zachary Quinto looks like he's totally nailed Spock. And I want to see Simon Pegg being awesome as Scotty.

ETA 9:26pm: And in the admittedly cool even if it means your spam can follow you all the way to Mars kind of way, NASA is testing an early-stage interplanetary Internet.

Also, here, have a cat riding a Roomba!

Several folks have Friended me lately, so a big hello to logrusboy, iwondery, motherofpearl51, and serenalita. Welcome, and hope you enjoy my posts!

We're in the middle of a three day weekend here at the Murkworks, and so far it's been a fairly laid back and pleasant sort of thing. No particular plans have been made, but that's okay, there's something to be said for an easygoing and stress-free long weekend. solarbird and I spent some time today going through our media library--a lot of our old videotapes are screwed up since they'd been taped on a machine that decided it was going to invent its own format, so now we can't play them on anything else. And several others are things that we don't need anymore, since we've since purchased the same things on DVD. So we've built a sizeable stack of tapes we no longer need; anybody local need a bunch of videotapes? Let us know.

It's been fun looking at the stuff, though, and seeing which things we want to keep. Such as, for example, the movie for the eighth Doctor Who. Now that Ninth and Tenth Doctors have finally sold me on Who fandom, I need to watch this again some time soon and remind myself of Eighth Doctor.

It's also kind of amusing just thinking about how media has advanced so much in our lifetimes that we don't even really need videotapes much anymore. I still have a bit of a need for scratch tapes--as we speak, I've been taping the third season of Digging for the Truth for gerimaple since she's a huge fan and it's not airing in Canada yet, and this is the easiest way I have of getting episodes up to her. But other than that, it's been ages since I've wanted to tape anything.

I've also been poking around online trying to find out where I can buy CDs for various Atlantic Canadian artists' music. There's one more Fables CD I want, and some more Irish Descendants, and I keep hearing over and over that as a GBS fan, I probably will like the Punters as well. None of whom are downloadable on iTunes. Sniff. I have found atlanticcanadianmusic.com; any Canadian folks or otherwise fans of Canadian music out there have any experience with this site? Is it reliable?

On the other hand, I have noted with pleasure that the most recent Paperboys CD, The Road to Ellenside, is in fact downloadable via iTunes. Yay! And I was really stunned to see that there's a small assortment of filk on the iTunes store as well--including some Julia Ecklar and Heather Alexander. Soon as I have some music-buying budget built back up, I'm totally making another sweep through the iTunes store. There's some Seven Nations and Young Dubliners and Captain Tractor with my name all over 'em.

Until then, I am apparently going to be in a huge Carbon Leaf mood, since Ether-Electrified Porch Music has taken over my iPod; it's a very, very strong album. I've also been giving Love Loss Hope Repeat a few more listens--and as I'd expected it would, it's starting to grow on me. Something about it suddenly went click once I started catching the mandolin work in the background. It's a subtler album than earlier Carbon Leaf, but there's some serious goodness there, especially "The War Was In Color".

And oh yeah, it must also be noted that the remastered TOS episodes are kicking serious ass, if y'all haven't managed to catch them yet. We just caught "Amok Time" last night, and enjoyed the new effects and space shots quite a bit--suddenly, Vulcan has ice caps! And the wide-angle shots of Vulcan terrain, including a shot of Spock's hometown that's consistent with the animated Trek series, are really cool. The whole episode got me off onto an amused mental tangent about the story behind how Spock's parents got together; I mean, what possessed Amanda to decide, "Hmm, Vulcan! I want me some of that!" ;)

Hope everyone's weekends are going well!

Miles since the 8th: 26.3
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1773.8
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 464.8
Miles to Isengard: 19.2

gamera_spinning has a double-barrel shotgun blast of Star Trek-related amusement on his LJ today. Here we have one hell of a Photoshop job. Fair warning, if you're also a Star Wars fan, you may find yourself going "aaaaaaaah!" ;) Me, I am simultaneously amused and appalled. And kind of grinning, because I can vaguely sort of see that in some mutant alternate crossover universe, what's in that picture might actually happen. I am way, way more appalled by this word of the next Trek flick.

In other news, I must also bring you this kitten pile pic courtesy of cuteoverload.

I've picked up Click Here For Murder by donna_andrews and Pride and Prescience by Carrie Bebris (despite the huge fluffiness of Suspense and Suspensibility, I did actually kind of enjoy it, so I wanted to go back and read the first one). But I'm not reading any new paperbacks till I finish my sweep through lyonesse's book, which I hope to finish up some time this weekend. Once I do that, though, naominovik's Throne of Jade is probably going to shove aside all other contenders. Because it's coming out Very Soon, and after the joyful squee of His Majesty's Dragon (which included a preview chapter for Throne of Jade), I have got to have the next book. :D

(The writer in me wonders if Novik wrote all three of her series' books back to back, since Del Rey is plunking them out very close together... HMD came out at the tail end of March, we're getting ToJ very soon now, and the third one, Black Powder War, is due out at the end of May!)

Lastly, rumor has it I may be working this weekend. Oh joy oh glee! But the good parts of this are that the busses that get me downtown during the week do run on pretty much the same schedule on Saturday, so I can still get down here without having to drive. Also, overtime utterly Fails to Suck. (Though I did also mention to my lead that my weekends are my biggest writing time, so I would prefer to give him either Saturday or Sunday, but not both. We'll see what happens on Saturday and whether Sunday is also required.)

Wednesday evening miles: 2.4
Thursday miles: 3.45
Friday morning miles: 1.6
Miles out of Hobbiton: 897.1
Miles out of Rivendell: 439.1
Miles to Lothlórien: 24.9