If Eric Copland Wrote Star Trek Music

Right now I'm listening to music from an Original Series Star Trek episode that Eric Copland might have written.  So far we've had the good people have died opening, the bar fight scene, the majestic space-the-final-frontier moment, the pensive exposition, the beautiful girl's entrance, and a few mushy kissing scenes.  

At first The Child and I thought this was originally, "Grandma died of dysentery along the trail, but the rolling hills sure do make a majestic background for her gravesite, from which we will march, hand in hand, into the wilderness so that we might tame it" music.    Ooops, we're having another majestic voyage scene and possibly end-credits.   I'm waiting for Rocky at KWAX to tell us what we've been listening to, because it does sound like Copland, but it might be John Williams.  

And it's... Peter Boyer?  Symphony 1 (2012-13)?  Written in memory for Leonard Bernstein?   I might have to add it to my music to write by selection.

And now I'm imagining the the classic Star Trek fight music (da-da-daah, da-da-daah, da-da-daah daah daah daah daah da-da-daah daah) arranged for Copland's Rodeo.  

Why, You Might Be Selling Tribbles,Too

Let's see... things have gotten busier.

Writing:  The manuscript I thought was kind of ready is kind of broken.  Once again, John succumbs to pretty images, cool world building, and snappy dialog at the expense of characters with shallow, confusing motivation.  Oh, and a focus on the wrong details.  Anyway, I've got a few days to re-work the story so it's good enough to send in to Queers Destroy Science Fiction.  Luckily, Scrivener makes it easier to wade through the broken parts and keep the working parts.

Working-out.  I actually went for a mini-workout Monday night.  My stupid body has been bugging me the last week and a half, so I had been not going to the gym.  My doctor thinks I have a food allergy, the only thing I can think of is that it might be raisins.  In any case, since this seems not to be my liver or my kidneys, and I just turned fifty, I get to have a colonoscopy sooner rather than next fall.

On The Child front, this morning we had a fun moment on the way to school.

J:  (In William Shatner voice):  Why. Can't.  The English.  Teach.  Their.  Children.  How.  To Speak."

A:  Why are you singing that like Captain Kirk?

J:  I thought you wondered what "My Fair Lady Meets Star Trek" would sound like.

A:  I said, "Star Wars."

J:  Oh.  But it would still be funny.  (As William Shatner) "If you. Spock. Spoke.  The way.  She does.  Instead. Of. The way. You do.  Why, you might be. Selling.  Flowers.  Too."  (Dang, I should have said, "tribbles".)

A:  (Using Leonard Nimoy voice):   I fail to see the logic in your argument.

Dream: Yesterdays Mall of Tomorrow

Feeling a little under the weather the last few days.  It's a pain, because I feel a little hungery, or else I feel a little bloated.  I did a little bit of working out at home, but mostly I sat around writing and web surfing.

Writing - working on a new story for On The Premises.  It's a science fiction story with aliens.  It was fun putting together the basic parameters of the planet and thinking about aliens.  I'm about 2000 words in and I've strayed a little from the prompt, which is characters trying to learn something.  But I've got a good feel for the world and the aliens.  

Dream - We were watching an Original Series Star Trek that I had never seen before.  Although it was one of the last third sesaon episodes, the episode was in black and white, and the crew wore the sweater-style uniforms of the first season.  

The Enterprise was travelling back in time to the 1950's to build a futuristic shopping mall for starships.  Captain Kirk and Lt. Urhura were standing at a large table next to an architect's model of a really nice geodesic dome.  The dome had a gentle slope on the top, which became more curved near its edges, and in the graduated greys of the black-and-white format, it made a pleasing combination of tessalated morie patterns.   Underneath the dome was a plain, boxy mall building, and a parking lot with a model of the Enterprise in one of the parking stalls.

The Jim Kirk woman in the show was (I'm going to make up a name here) Jane McKenzie, head of construction security.  She had an all-woman squad of security officiers in perky "Yesterday's Tomorrow", Wilma Deering style body suits.  Jane had a little white dog, who supposedly was indiffrent to peole, but which I started playing with using the "let's play!" head-down, arms-out gesture.  I'm not sure when I transitioned from watching the show to being in it.  There was some campy inuendo with tangerines and the women's costumes.  By this time we'd gone back to color.

Then it turned into a 50's "Let's Put on a Show!" movie.  Jane was talkiing her girls on tour, and they were all lodging in a dormitory or hotel.  Jane got a little meaner, in a jail warden kind of way.  There was only one phone, so the women had to line up to use the phone, which was in a ciruclar lobby at the end of a hall.  

"Hello," said one woman, "I'd like to speak with Jim Smith.  Tell him this is Kate Jones.  Isn't he there?  He said to call him and that he could be... oh.  Well, could you take a message?"   I'm supposing this was one of the minor love-interest sub-plots.

There was a shift and I was a hardware store owner.  I might have been a tennant in the Shopping Mall Captian Kirk was building. I was also a rocket scientist.  We'd worked out a rocket design which was actually a folding, hinged uber car mechanic's skateboard.  It was supposed to be able to travel in a straight line, but there was a design flaw that made it turn one way or the other.  

Jimmy on the design team, thought he'd found the problem, and they wanted me to give a second opinion.  I got on the rolling wooden construction and after a few experimental rolls across the shop floor saw that there was a loose hinge that took the wheels out of alignment.  

There was a break of some sort, and I was riding in the back of a wagon at night.  The police women / show girls were singing a song, and I fell asleep, rocking in the wagon as it rolled underneath the stars.  

Journal

Wednesday Workout:  170 calories in about 13 minutes.  I was not able to focus so well on channeling my inner Stevie Nicks and have a Crystal Vision on the rowing machine; the best I could do was hold an Art Deco image of a serpent in my head based on some drawings I've done.   I mixed up my weight routine a little.

Writing:  About 45 minutes + about 10 minutes in the pre-Day-Jobbe parking lot.  Critiqued for roughly two hours.

Today's Original Series Star Trek Observation:  "The plot and dialog of "Spock's Brain," is structured for the maximal amount of times the characters can exclaim the phrase "Spock's brain!"  Extra points for pre-pending, "That's her!" or "That's the girl!"

...OK... that and pulling a phaser out of the frilly folds on the front of your extra-mini miniskirt and still managing to look and walk like you're not carrying a phaser between your thighs beforehand has got to be a statement of some kind.

Joanna Russ Kirk & Spock Slash Fiction

I managed to get to the Joanna Russ archives.  I looked through the holdings and saw holdings on HP Lovecraft, something called "Sword and the Poppy" and something called "Kirk / Spock."  I figured I'd start with Kirk and Spock.

The reading room is a wonderfully tall room, with corner molding of pyramids and disks, and old rectangular vases placed on darkly stained bookshelves.  The long wooden tables have foam book stands for holding old books open without straining their spines.  After a short wait, a librarian brought me some boxes and I found the folder I wanted.

I half-expected black and white photos of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in Star Fleet garb, or maybe a typed essay of some sort.  What instead came out of folder 13 was a loose collection of yellow legal-sized papers with a longhand draft of a Star Trek story on it.  The line edits and crossed out text gave insight to how she would introduce or develop ideas.

As I read, a very drunk Dr. McCoy walks in on a kinky (OMG!) domination scene (OMG!) between Kirk and Spock (OMG!), who, after four years of working together, have become lovers.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  The story follows Dr. McCoy's dealing with being the fifth wheel.  The Yesterday's Tomorrow's Homophobia was odd coming from McCoy, especially given the rest of the crew's acceptance.

One particular sex scene (OMG!) near the story's end struck me, as Russ wanted to make a connection with Spock as Pan and Kirk as a Golden Grain God.  Again, the cross-outs in the manuscript were instructive about how she wanted to introduce the idea.  

Russ managed to cast two gay male lovers as pagan gods, had managed to do it without it feeling like one of them was the Goddess in drag or a queer retelling of Lot's Daughters, or an artificial queer gloss over a heterersexual construction.  I'm guessing that it was written after Ursula Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness," which would date it no earlier than 1970, but it could be as late as 1980.  [Edit--it appears that Russ was introduced to K/S fiction between "Wrath of Khan" and "The Search for Spock", or 1982-1984.]  Queer Pagan God-lovers were  barely visible in 1985, and I can't imagine someone imagining them in the seventies.  But Russ did.  [Edit--Russ mentions some gay K/S fiction, or at least a story where Kirk and Spock are gay, but it's a tiny minority.]

I skipped the "Alternate Universe Naked Slaveboy Kirk in Chains on Barbarian Vulcan" story and went on to read the draft of the essay, "Women's Pornography and Star Trek." 

Apparently, in the early 1970's there were a number of 'zines devoted to stories written by women, for women, featuring Kirk and Spock as lovers.  They followed a standard romance formula--restraint & reticence, trauma induced holding, crisis, responsibility-shunting circumstance, and a lot of sex--which I recognized in Russ's story draft.  

Russ preferred to call all stories with sex in them pornography, in order to stay out of the "it's not pornography, it's erotica" debate--hence her essay's title.

I was blown away because, apparently, her short story was pornography by a woman for women.  The reading room closed before I could finish Russ's essay, but her reasoning went something like Kirk = Macho Man, Spock = Alien "Not-Man," therefore Spock = Figurative Woman; and therefore, Kirk and Spock's relationship can easily fit--if not more nobly fit--into the framework of a women's traditional romance story.

I'm not sure I agree.  Judging from my reactions as I read the hot throbbing parts, her story worked fairly well as gay porn for me (partially because I took on a Spock persona to survive elementary and middle school, and partially because William Shatner pushed my prepubescent buttons every time he lost his shirt).  But maybe this is one of those manifest content / latent content things, and maybe there's more in the twenty or so pages of Russ's essay that I didn't get to.

I'm sure there must have been some gay male Kirk/Spock slash fiction from the early 1970's, but the only thing I can think of is a passing comment between two characters who had such great sex that think they must have been Vulcans in a mind-meld.  And on additional reflection, gay  smut from the 1970's follows a different formula:  desire, discovery of mutual desire, entrance into a permissive space, slow disrobing, hot throbbing bits, post-coital kiss & summary.  Eighties and nineties, it gets more about safe-sex, caring, and pride.   

So the questions raised are, 1) Are Russ and the authors of 1970's Kirk/Spock slash fiction co-opting depictions of male-male sex to reinforce heteronormative notions of male and female roles in romance?  2) If an author says, "This writing is for women," does that preclude its consumption and enjoyment by a male audience?  3) Is pornography inherently the literature of gender and orientation essentialism?  And, 4) What about Batman and Robin?