LIFE, VALIDATED or WHY I LIKE STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER BUT NOBODY ELSE DOES

What did everybody do when they weren't doing the strange and cool and funny and bizarre stuff, the stuff that shifted the story, the stuff that made things move?

That's what I wondered, when I was a kid, watching The Fall Guy and Three's Company and The Dark Crystal and Superman III. The shows on TV always showed you the exciting parts, the parts you needed to know to understand what, exactly, was going on. The movies existed on a level of pure dramatic or comedic tension; there was no boring, diluted middle ground.

But that, I realized, wasn't what life was all about. Life was all middle ground, as far as I could see. You got up and pissed and showered and ate, went to school, ignored the teachers as best as you good, partied at recess as best as you could, came home, watched TV, maybe did some homework, hit the sack. Period. End of story. Rise again, repeat again.

There was none of that shit in the movies or on the tube. Bo and Luke Duke were always getting into mischief; Marty McFly was always on the run, bopping through time, solving space-time paradoxes. Me? I was waiting in line at the cafeteria, hoping the burgers, drab as they were, hadn't been sold out.

I used to daydream a lot, and wish a lot, and hope that one day, some day, there would be a movie that featued all the cut-out parts. The real-life parts. I knew that it would be boring, and not much would happen, but that's what I wanted to see. All the mundane shit that I did, I wanted to see Luke Skywalker do. I wanted to see Darth Vader have to go for a piss, or Frank and Ponch from C*H*I*P*S get a flat tire, curse the ground, wait around for AAA to come bail them out.

All that time! That time that in life is always there, unavoidably so, but in movies is always gone, absent. Most of it so trivial; most of it ordinary. But because it was denied me, on the screen, inversely, or perhaps perversely, I wanted it. I wanted that silver screen to reflect my own life. It couldn't be, just couldn't, that only movies held the magic elixir of excitement and romance and intrigue. If it wasn't on the screen, in my mind, it wasn't valid. So that meant life, in a very real sense, wasn't valid.

I wanted to pay for my ticket and plunk my ass down in a chair and slurp my Coke and wait for the tediousness of everyday life to take hold. I would have watched, happily, Kirk and Spock just shoot the shit for hours on end. It's probably why I like Star Trek V and nobody else does (except for Canadian sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer.) We get to see Kirk and Spock and Bones camping. We get to see them arguing about nothing at all. We get to see them sing, or attempt to sing, old songs. Badly. We get to see life, the small parts of life, played out.

And by seeing them in that fictional form, on the big screen, life itself, or maybe just my life, became validated.

Which, depending on how you look at it, is kind of a cool thing or a sad thing.

A SEPARATE PEACE

Do we ever really change?

I ask because recently I checked out the new Michael Douglas secret-service thriller The Sentinel, and playing the part of one of the youngest members of his staff was an actor by the name of Josh Peace, who just happened to have been in my Grade 8 homeroom class at Dalewood Public School in St.Catharines, Ontario.

The kick of it for me is that guys from Mrs.Inneo's Grade 8 class are not supposed to be in movies starring Michael Douglas. And yet there he is, Josh Peace, having three, maybe four lines of dialogue, handing Michael Douglas a coffee in the beginning of the flick, good-naturedly giving his colleague the middle finger as he scratches his forehead, trying, unsuccessfully, to pick up Desperate Housewives' Eva Longoria, cracking jokes during a polygraph test. He plays the young, smart-ass agent. Which is entirely appropriate, because when I remember Josh Peace, he was young, and, yes, a smart-ass.

He was a funny, screamingly funny twelve year old. He was the class clown, a joker, always ready with a quip or a condom on the overhead machine. (Don't ask.) Later, throughout high school, me and my friends would wonder what ever happened to Peace, and recount tales of his off-colour jokes and wit. (Once, chuckling to himself at the back of French class, our teacher asked him what was so funny. "Oh, nothing," Peace said. "I was just thinking about women." Which, when you're twelve, is an astonishingly adult thing to say.) While I was in university I watched a TvOntario segment on young actors and boom, there he was. Since then, he has been featured in a number of Canadian movies, and even had the privilege of being shot to death by Marky-Mark (minus the Funky Bunch) in The Big Hit, where Peace played, big surprise, a snarky, pushy wise-ass.

Strange. How who we are twelve, still reeling from the onslaught of puberty, can carry over into our other, later lives. For all I know, Peace could have played Shakespeare and Chekhov and O'Neill and Miller; he could have had hard-core, serious thespian training.

But when I saw The Sentinel, and watched him play out his few lines in his own, distinctive, smart-ass way, I thought: Nothing changes. We are who we were.

Do we ever change, mature, accelerate? Is who we are at twelve consistent with who we are at thirty? That person deep inside of us, that core -- does it mutate, or simply evolve?

I don't know.

But it's fun to think about. Fun to wonder what life gives us at birth, and what it takes away, and what it sometimes, against all odds, allows us to retain enough of.

Enough to be cast alongside Michael Douglas, at any rate, which has gotta count for something in the grand scheme of things.

HOW TO KNOW YOU'RE IN A RELIGIOUS PLACE

When the signs on the edges of the highway do not feature the speed limit but, instead, offer The Ten Commandments, from one to ten, every few kilometres or so, you know you're in a religious place.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

I should be more psyched about Superman Returns. I should be counting down the days until it comes out. I should be stalking the theatre, demanding to see posters and props from the upcoming film. Given that I revered the Christopher Reeve films from the seventies and eighties, one would think that I'd be salivating at the relaunch of the franchise.

But perhaps that's part of the problem -- my love of the original films, that is. They formed the nucleus of my childhood. All four Superman films implanted something into my DNA that cannot be replicated or reproduced twenty some odd years later. That's what I'm realizing.

The new Superman movie will, I'm sure, rock. It even incorporates footage of Marlon Brando from the first picture, which is kind of cool, kind of scary. Because that fact, coupled with the fact that the new Superman, Brandon Routh, looks disturbingly like Christopher Reeve, makes me worry that the new flick will do nothing more than trade on our collective nostalgia for the earlier films. (Hell, the preview even features John Williams' original score, intact. Do I want to hear that again in Dolby sound? Hell yes. Does it scare me that the directors' are whoring out, in a sense, our collective goodwill from the first film? Hell yes.)

There's nothing wrong with nostalgia. I love it. Rewatching the original films makes me feel like an eight-year old again. But a new Superman should be just that -- new. When I watched the George Reeves' series from the 1950's as a kid, I liked the fact that it was different from the Christopher Reeve ones. (And am I the only one who finds it supremely, well, odd that the two major Supermans of the twentieth century had almost identical last names? I mean, what are the odds of that? 'Reeves' versus Reeve'. I don't know; I find it kind of cool, anyways.)

Everybody looked different, talked different, acted different in that old fifties show. It was old and odd and unique. The Superman mythos is valid enough and strong enough to sustain itself amidst a variety of different interpretations, from comic books to novels to cartoons to movies. (The same with the Batman character. The forties serials, Adam West's comedic version, Tim Burton's impressionistic rendering, Christopher Nolan's psychologically viable interpreation -- they're all great.) The various composions of Superman in various media are variations on a theme, that's all.

I worry, though, that the new Superman flick will not only be a variation on a theme, but a replaying of the theme itself, if you catch my drift. I'm sure the special-effects will rock. I'm sure it will tell the tale of Krypton's last son in a fresh, offbeat way. I hope that it's new enough to entice younger children into worshipping the Superman legend, and entertain us older geezers with a subtext of maturity and responsibility.

I guess I'm saying: I don't want the Christopher Reeve films, redone. If I want those flicks again, I'll tie my old Superman cape made by mother around my neck and fire up the DVD player, and lose myself again, and forget for a moment, that Reeve is dead and gone, that Margot Kidder went crazy for awhile, that a man can't truly fly. (Though watching those films, I do I do I do believe it is so...)

MARATHON MAN

Yesterday, while running my laps around the Baguio Hospital Parking Lot, I thought about an old Runner's World article I had recently read only a few days earlier that detailed Lance Armstrong's ex, Kristin, and her dream of finishing the New York City Marathon, and I started to think about Armstrong, and his retirement from cycling, and what an ultra-competitive guy like him actually does when he can no longer do what he always did, and I thought about that other excellent American cyclist from the eighties, Greg LeMond, and how he went into stock car racing, and I started to wonder if Armstrong would ever do something like that, or even if he would ever run a marathon, and take the risk of not only being possibly, in this event, average, but conceivably even finishing in a worse place and time than his ex-wife, and then I came home, washed, flipped on CNN, waited for Larry King, and saw the sportscaster announce that Lance Armstrong had decided he would run in this fall's New York City Marathon.

I don't know about you, and I don't know what this means, if anything, but it is fucking weird, is what I'm saying.

QUOTES I LIKE

The trouble with advice is that you don't know whether it's good or bad until you've taken it.

-- Frank Tyger


I get fascinated with anything I don't understand, and since I don't understand anything, I have a very busy life.

-- Joseph Esherck


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

-- Steven Wright

RICHARD NIXON IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR

Near the end of Woodward and Bernstein's fantastic book The Final Days, Richard Nixon, the soon-to-be-ex-president, sits himself down for a haircut. His last haircut. (As a president, that is.) His usual barber is summoned for the cut. They make small-talk for ten, fifteen minutes. And the whole exchange I found riveting, for two reasons: the fact that Nixon was getting ready to resign from the most powerful office on earth, and the fact that here, for a few moments, he was immobile. At someone else's mercy. Unable to move or write or do much of anything. In other words, the same way we all are, every one of us, whenever we place our asses down in that barber's chair.

Think about it. Getting a haircut is one of the few times in life, outside of meditation, where you have to just, well, sit. You can't read. You can't listen to music through your I-Pod. You can't watch TV, although some salons try to add that feature to their hairdressing experience, as you strain to see what's going on in the inverted images the mirror reflects back at you. You have to simply sit there, plain and simple, while some stranger with a sharp object cuts your little life away.

Every single time I sit myself down and set myself up for the sometimes subtle, often flagrant flicks and snips of a barber's blade, I find myself wondering about the person hovering over me like a benovelent, indifferent vulture. Who is he (or she)? How many heads have they cut today? How many heads have they cut total? What happens if they sneeze while the scissors are snipping my nosehairs? If the blade pierced through my nostrils, into my brain, would the pain be as instantaneous as the blood? (Yes, these are the kinds of things I think about...) Would I be able to sue them? How are they trained as barbers, anyways? Do they practice on models first -- plastic models, not Tyra-Banks models? My first day moving houses, I was told: "Don't tell anyone it's your first day." If I were to ask a barber how long they had been cutting hair and rinsing heads, and they replied that I was, in fact, their first customer, wish me luck, what would I say? What would I feel?

And I come back to that image of Nixon, in the barber's chair, getting his cut. I'm not sure why. It just seems so sad, almost pathetic. Most definitely human. Nothing for him to do but watch himself in the mirror. Ten, fifteen minutes of friendly chatting. His thoughts elsewhere. I think about Hitler, and Pol Pot, and Elvis Presley, and Brad Pitt, and Albert Einstein, and Wayne Gretzky, and that asshole at work you hate, the one with the bad jokes and even worse breath. At some point, every month or so, they're utterly placid. Almost alone. A sheet tied around their neck. Impotent, for all intents and purposes.

Whenever I'm intimidated by somebody's power or intellect, I just imagine them, alone, in the barber's chair, docile as a drugged-up child. Makes me feel calm, even connected to others. Perhaps only Nixon could have gone to China, yes, but even Nixon had to have a little off the sides, longer on top, every now and then.