"This movie is going to be filled with so much Ho!YAY it's going to make Torchwood look like Dragnet." -unbreakableburr

meh. maybe.

I can't get past ZQ's bulbous nose and how he looks like a stunned Kewpie. Pine has a lot of forehead but it works to set off the giant eyebrows.

Funny how excited some ppl are over this.
Of course, I'm going to be in the front row for the first showing; I'll probably pre-buy my ticket like a giant geek...

What if you gave each sexuality and gender its due consideration, and decided that primarily you're boy-crazy, and on top of that you're content with the female body of your birth: does that make you straight?
Even if you feel like you're in a closet around "real" straight people? (I have seen plenty of men who insist they're straight, but when you examine their behavior, it becomes clear they really don't like women's bodies much at all. And vice versa.)
And yet gays don't accept you because you don't know enough to fit yourself into their quaint little categories.
It's like everyone decides they have to take on a sexual identity, gay or straight, so they can know who they're supposed to be friends with and what their politics are going to be and what they're going to watch on TV. And then they let that control who they have sex with. Weird.

How dancing has evolved

I love this exuberant lindy hop, the exuberant horn section, the exuberant crowd. Everyone's having a great time! Aren't we glad someone figured out how to sync sound and motion pictures?

What IS "romantic" and does it always involve sex?

Selling your Harley to undo your vasectomy so your second wife can have a baby: not my choice but can definitely be considered romantic.

Selling your Harley when your best friend is going through a messy divorce and needs cash: also romantic? Or, that would never happen?

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Learning how to make chicken soup from scratch because your boyfriend has a cold: romantic.

Learning how to make chicken soup from scratch because your best friend has a cold: also romantic?

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Ballroom dancing: romantic.

Same-sex ballroom dancing: also romantic?

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I guess I'm asking, if best friends can also make grand gestures of love for each other, and can also be there to show support and have fun together day after day, then doesn't the same word apply? If there's a different word, what is it?

Maybe I just don't see the logic in considering a certain action to be in a whole different category of behaviors or from a whole different set of motivations merely because you have sexual feelings for the recipient.

We all get older and end up not having sexual feelings for anyone for long periods of time, but does that mean a loving gesture isn't romantic?

Blogger and LJ both bad alternatives

I realize all the K/S goes on on LJ but I have never been able to understand the navigation there. Blogger is actually clunky for posting. Meh. I don't like either choice.

How could anybody be okay with having the man they were in love with go off with someone else?

Spock and Kirk's relationship with each other is clearly the primary relationship in each man's life. In large part, the vagaries of 1960s television writing are the cause of that: there was no such thing as a story arc, so a spouse would either had to have been introduced as a character from the outset, or it would have been established that one of them was, for instance, a widower. But for whatever reason, the choice was made not to really address spouse/marriage issues for these characters who were in their mid-thirties. (Okay Spock had a failed marriage, basically; and Kirk had no time to find a woman, nor did he make much effort, and in fact he stopped complaining about it more or less after Naked Time.) And then the times they began to change and Stonewall happened and over the years it became more thinkable that if you analyze their situation with Ockham's razor, they were deriving their primary emotional support from each other.
Now I totally respect the opinion of people who say that may be the case but you can't assume a deep emotional relationship always leads ot sex. It does not, indeed. And if a person doesn't want to see it that way, there is no reason why they should have to. That, actually, is one of the clevernesses of 1960s television writing: like a set composed of abstract plywood shapes and colored lights, the storytelling left plenty of interstitial spaces that you could fill in your own creativity. (I'm so going to reuse this line in a later post.)
In the interstitial spaces I fill in, there is no reason why they wouldn't consummate their relationship. Although I have to ask myself if Kirk's two or three legitimate girlfriends during the five-year mission were not a little case of this:

I remember an older acquaintance, "Joe," who lived in Boston and had a lover we'll call Frank. … The two lived together, travelled together, the two seemed in every way a couple. …

On one trip to Boston I ran into Joe who told me that Frank had married a woman. He said he knew he liked women and was perfectly okay with it. How could anybody be okay with having the man they were in love with go off with someone else? I never did get all the facts. Was Frank bisexual, and did he prefer this woman (or perhaps more to the point, a straight life) to living with Joe? Had he only been using Joe (I mean, who was paying for their vacations together?) While I seriously doubt if Frank was totally straight, perhaps he -- and even Joe -- thought of himself as a heterosexual. Was Joe so in love, so lonely, that he'd take up with a "straight" guy, knowing all the while that he'd inevitably walk out on him? [Was Spock?] Was Joe invited to the wedding? Did he stand there pretending to be happy for the man he loved while his heart was breaking? Did he make any attempt to make Frank see that his marriage could merely have been an act of internalized homophobia? (Joe was not exactly an activist type, however.) We lost touch and I never got the answers to these questions, or learned how he ultimately dealt with losing his companion. I don't even know if he's alive.

Bill Samuels | J.A.T.G.A.B.
The progression of Jim and Spock's relationship begins to take shape: closeness forms after Gary Mitchell's death; they begin to see how much they mean to each other during and after Naked Time, but Jim continues to hurt Spock with these occasional girlfriends. While at first Spock felt he had no right assert a claim to Jim since he himself was claimed by T'Pring, after Amok Time, Spock begins to want Jim for himself but Jim still has these illusions that a woman somewhere is going to make a better partner for him, and eventually Spock is hurt enough that he goes to Gol, but they mature and are reunited.
But yeah, they do undeniably not act like out and proud gays. Now that may be because the 23rd century is post-gay as in there is not a sharp line between gay and straight and it's sort of irrelevant, but for purposes of thinking with the myth in present day it is problematic. Is this a myth that suits gay men in the real world? Or is it a myth that was suitable for the 60s through the end of the century but has been outstripped by reality?
As a child of the 60s I will always love it as an adventure and as a love story, but if it offers no suitable mythology for current times, then... we pack it up in tissue and smile when we remember it.

Myths are for thinking with

Storytelling is underpinned by myth. The characters in Beowulf, and in Henry James, and in Joel Schumacher's latest slam-bang movie extravaganza, all participate, with more or less elaborate variations, in archetype.

One of the first people to look into this systematically was a Russian folklorist called Vladimir Propp, whose book The Morphology of the Folk Tale sought to distil a sort of universal genome of myth. He got pretty far with it.

You don't have to be a crazed Jungian, a structural anthropologist, or a seven-basic-plots believer to agree that storytelling is something of universal importance in human experience, and something that exhibits deep and suggestive similarities across cultures.

Myths, it has been said, are "good to think with". Storytelling is a way of trying out situations imaginatively, of preserving knowledge and social value, of attesting to a commonality of experience.

Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die | Telegraph
This kind of illuminates my fascination with the Star Trek universe and the love story of Spock and Kirk that some of us see in that universe. The original Trek characters are archetypes. Not the same old archetypes of heroes from stories past, but brand new archetypes that are suitable for thinking with in modern times.

UGO: Are you familiar with the phenomenon of “Slash Fiction?”

WS: Slash?

UGO: It’s a sub-genre of literature, if you will, that was created, in a way, because of Captain Kirk. It comes from the phrase “Kirk/Spock.” Or “K/S”. It’s people who write their own fan versions of the show. And that’s fine...amateur writers having a good time. But of course there’s always some who take it to a prurient level. And there is a whole subdivision of love stories between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. And it’s expanded to everything with rabid fanbases. Harry Potter or, heck, the Simpsons. Have you ever heard of this?

WS: I’ve never heard of the word “slash,” but I have heard of the writings. And I think it’s basically wish-fulfillment. I think the fans see themselves in the hypothetical erotic behavior.

UGO: So, what are you doing this holiday season?

interview with WS