The Search for Spock

Make no mistake, I am incredibly wary of J.J. Abrams at the helm of the new Star Trek movie set to be released Christmas of 2008. I don't trust him with it, and I don't like how dangerously close this treads to a "reboot" of the Star Trek universe in the same way that so many other franchises have done. That being said, I am slowly turning cautiously optimistic with more information that has been released.

First off I read an interview with one of the writers that pledged to keep a very close eye on continuity and make sure that elements of the franchise 40 years in the making would not be altered or forgotten. Sure, there has been some necessary retconning along the way, but there's a difference between retconning and blatantly ignoring or altering something.

Second, all of the rumours of big name stars and outrageous casting choices seem to be as false as the producers have always assured us they were. After a running list that included Ben Affleck and Adrian Brody as contenders for Spock, an announcement was just made at the San Diego Comic Con that Heroes actor Zachary Quinto (Gabriel Gray, AKA Sylar) will play the younger Spock. What's more, Leonard Nimoy has confirmed his involvement as Spock as well, signifying that a 24th Century (TNG-era) Spock will also make an appearance.

Looking at him in publicity shots and from roles other than Sylar, I think Quinto has the right look. Here's a picture of him off the set, not looking all creepy-Sylar like:

And since the movie is supposed to be set in the early days of Kirk and Spock serving together, here's what Spock looked like in the pilot "The Cage":



I'd say it's a pretty good match. We'll still have to wait to see who they find for Kirk, but overall I'm satisfied with their decision on Quinto and I have a little more faith in the project than I did before. I think Shatner is still in talks with the producers who are still trying to figure out a way to include him as an older Captain Kirk without ignoring the events of Star Trek Generations, though I would be even happier if they found a way to undue the character's poorly written death in that movie. Come on - between the Nexus, Genesis Planets, Guardians of Forever, time travel, and everything else, James T. Kirk is not supposed to go out like a chump. I doubt that they will change anything about that, but it's just a suggestion.

All that being said, I'm looking forward to Star Trek in 2008 just a little bit more now than I was before.

Boston is Wicked Cool

Though I hoped maybe I'd get a chance to head up (down? over? what direction is it?) there while I was in New York, I wasn't sure if I'd get a chance to visit Boston while I was here or not. Well, that question was answered this weekend and it was awesome. Or, as I was told is a colloquialism to native Bostonians, it was wicked cool.

For whatever reason, I have long held a certain fascination with Boston. Ever since elementary school the American Revolution and the colonial American time period has always been one of my favorite historical eras, and Boston certainly was at the center of that era. When I was in high school I got a recruitment brochure from Boston College as I was applying to colleges, and had the out of state tuition not been so prohibitively expensive I may have tried to convince my parents to let me go there. All of this was, keep in mind, regardless of the fact that prior to this weekend I had never been anywhere close to Boston, nor did I really know anyone who had.

Friday night we packed five guys into a Chevy Malibu and made the trek to Beantown, and it was a hell of a good time. As soon as we got to the friend's apartment we stayed in that night his girlfriend said something in a tell-tale Boston accent, and we were hooked. Everything was closed by the time we got into town, but we still walked through two of the squares in the Cambridge area just to get a look around town.

Saturday morning we got up and prepared for the most crucial aspect of our mission - the Sam Adams Brewery tour. We got to take the "T", listen to the conductor announce the stop for "Hahvahd Squahe" (Harvard Square) along the way, and arrived in Jamaica Plains without incident or delay. All of the suburban areas and outlying cities and towns around Boston proper reminded me a lot of Ann Arbor, which was very cool. I was expecting a large, industrial building when we headed towards the brewery, but was instead pleased to find a very old looking set of brick buildings that looked exactly like a brewery built in the late 1800s should look. The brewery has actually been in Jim Koch's, founder of Sam Adams Brewery, family since the 1880s, and was only renamed Sam Adams in 1985 when Jim Koch reopened the facility under the new label.

The brewery was very cool - the passion that Jim Koch has and has instilled into his employees is very rare to see in a business and actually seem genuine. The Sam Adams brewery in Boston is where things started off, but is now used primarily as a research and development center. New flavors and new brews are perfected there first, and then sent along to the larger breweries and bottling plants elsewhere in the country. After having been there and seen how much pride they take in their craft, I have definitely developed a new respect for Sam Adams, and will look forward to finding the different seasonal beers that they put out.

After the brewery we ventured out beyond the city into a smaller suburban area where one of our host's friends was having a graduation party for finally finishing his degree that he's been working on part time for so long. I may have, in the past, made disparaging comments about Boston fans and people from Boston, and I realize now that there is a big difference between real Bostonians and wannabe - fair weather - bandwagon Boston fans. Real Bostonians, at least the people we hung out with, were great. They gave one of our guys crap for wearing a Yankees hat, and it's great to see a real rivalry that people can be very passionate about, but not take themselves too seriously. Of course, Detroit is going to leave both the Yankees and the Red Sox behind come October, but I didn't tell them that.

At some point in the afternoon, I started picking up bits and pieces of a Boston accent. Unlike my friends who were trying to analyze and mimic certain words or phrases and deliberately force the accent, I just started saying things without even trying. One of our hosts actually commented on how good my accent was sounding, and I didn't even realize I was doing it. I gotta admit, though, I do like the Boston accent. As much fun as it is to make fun of, once you get going it's hard to stop. What's great is that you can just drop "r"s out of words and replace them with an "h" sound, and your words just flow so much easier. I'm sure I still sounded like a tourist, but it was fun either way.

We actually went down into the city on Sunday, and I gotta say that I like Boston more than New York as a city. Sure, New York has all the fancy stores and sights, but Boston just has so much more character to it. All through Boston Common and the surrounding area was a red line indicating the "freedom trail", marking Paul Revere's ride and other historic sights in Boston. We went along Beacon street and saw the bar that was the inspiration for "Cheers", now obviously turned into a theme restaurant with a gift shop and all that. We also went to one of the cemeteries in town where patriots such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock, and the victims of the Boston Massacre were buried, and it was just cool to be there. The history and legacy of Boston is just so much more visible than it is in New York City, and it made me more than a little sad that Detroit is also really lacking in that sort of living character and history. I love Detroit, but I couldn't think of analogous parts of town to the old parts of Boston like Faneuli Hall and Quincy Market. Really, the closest comparison I can think of would be Fort Michilimackinac and Mackinac Island, neither of which are actually in or even close to Detroit.

This spring there is going to be a large conference with a lot of job recruiting for student affairs and housing jobs in particular, and it just so happens the conference will be in Boston. I've still got my $250 award for the case study competition I won, so that's definitely being put towards a return trip to Beantown.

First, Best Destiny

At the beginning of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Admiral Kirk is listless and unfulfilled by his position at Starfleet Headquarters and the Enterprise is serving as a training vessel with Spock in command. When a crisis emerges and Kirk and Spock discuss whether or not Kirk should assume command of the Enterprise, Spock responds by telling Kirk:

"Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny... anything else is a waste of material."

I know it's a random, geeky introduction to a post, but it serves to set up the main idea of this entry. James T. Kirk was never satisfied as an admiral, sitting behind a desk at Command. His place was on the bridge of his ship, in that center chair, making a difference as captain of the Enterprise.

While I can only hope to compare myself to Jim Kirk so much, the point is that I have gained a much greater understanding of that sense of listlessness, of not belonging, of not being where one is supposed to be over the last few years. I thought that the day I left Ann Arbor for the last time as a student and moved back to Holland was the lowest I could feel, not knowing that my time in North Carolina lay ahead of me a year later. My year in Holland made me angry, resentful, bitter and cynical at the world for not giving me a chance to do what I wanted and make my place in the world. My year in North Carolina taught me what rock bottom really felt like, facing each day more hopeless, helpless, and worthless than I ever knew I could be.

Without realizing it, I compared every state of comfort, belonging, and purpose I either did or did not feel to those same feelings I had while I was in Ann Arbor. I always thought it was just looking back fondly on my college years and the opportunity and excitement they afforded me, a uniqueness to the time and the people that were my undergraduate experience. I had such a profound sense of loss when I was no longer a part of that, and I thought I could never recapture or recreate such a sense of meaning and belonging.

But as I have written about before, all of the despair and uncertainty that characterized my teaching career have been met with their polar opposites since I have returned to graduate school and the profession of student affairs. While certainly not recapturing what I was in Ann Arbor, my experiences have nonetheless been marked with the same sort of success and satisfaction I had felt in my brief exposure to student affairs at U of M. Now as I am more than halfway finished with my summer internship at Binghamton University, I now have been in three totally different positions at three very different institutions, and yet all have given me the same sort of feeling of purpose and satisfaction with what I am doing.

I never really understood the point of educational theory when I was a teacher, and my practice in the classroom almost always came as a result of luck or taking my best shot rather than from a confident execution. By contrast, I love the academic and research side of student affairs and higher education, and my positions as supervisor and advisor has followed from a supreme confidence not only in what I was doing, but that the way I was doing things was right and well-founded. And given the awards and recognition I earned in the past year on both fronts, it would appear that I'm doing something right.

As I said, I've only got about three weeks left at Binghamton, and I'm conflicted about it. On the one hand I miss my colleagues and the familiarity of the home that GVSU became for me in the last year. On the other hand, I really like everything I've seen here at Binghamton, I have been made to feel at home in my office from the first day I was there, and my staff for the summer has been terrific. My time during orientation here at Binghamton has filled me with the same sense of purpose and accomplishment that my time with orientation at U of M gave me. Seeing as my time working during orientation at U of M is what got me to pursue a graduate degree and career in student affairs, that's not a comparison I make lightly.

Just as the command of a starship was James T. Kirk's first, best destiny, maybe I have in fact found mine in higher education and student affairs.

If You Had Superpowers...

So since I've had some free time this week with the holiday I've been catching up on episodes of Heroes via NBC.com (and I've got 6 episodes left, so don't go blowing the season finale for me). I was always interested in the show, but got too far behind in watching the episodes this spring with everything that was going on. The X-Men and their mutant powers clearly had a great deal of influence on the show, which is not surprising given that Jeph Loeb, one of the creators, spent a bit of time writing for both X-Force and Wolverine in his comic career. That being said, watching the episodes of Heroes this week has raised in my mind once again the eternal question among fan boys...

If you could have any super-power, what would it be?

So now as I attempt to answer that question myself, I also put it to you, the commentators on this little corner of the World Wide Web.

For the sake of clarity and simplicity, let's confine ourselves to biologically based powers, i.e. the sorts of mutant abilities and/or gifts demonstrated in the X-Men and Heroes universes. Both refer to the character's abilities in similar terms, and seem to be of the same sort of genetic origin. Without such a caveat we start getting into the sort of powers granted through cosmic, alien, magical, mystical, or technological means and things just get messy.

So now, let's take a quick look at some of the powers exhibited in Heroes and The X-Men...

Claire Bennett (The Cheerleader) - accelerated healing and regeneration
Matt Parkman (The LAPD officer) - telepathy
Nathan Patrelli (The Congressional Candidate) - flight
Peter Patrelli - can copy/mimic others powers
Hiro Nakamura - spatial and temporal teleportation
Izaak (The Painter) - precognition
Nikki/Jessica - superhuman strength?
D.L (Nikki's husband) - intangibility
Sylar - telekinesis/power siphoning
Claude - Invisibility
Ted - radioactive energy release
Meredith (Claire's biological mother) - spontaneous pyro-kinetic generation

The mainstream appeal of the X-Men movies made the characters and their abilities much more in the popular understanding, but just in case we'll do a quick run through of the major characters and their abilities...

Professor X - Telepathy
Jean Greay - Telekinesis
Cyclops - Concussive optic force beams
Wolverine - accelerated healing and regeneration, heightened senses, claws
Storm - weather control, manipulation
Rogue - power siphoning
Iceman - temperature control, can draw moisture from the air and turn it into ice, manipulation of ice to form objects and projectiles
Colossus - can transform body into organic steel
Shadowcat - intangibility
Beast - heightened strength, agility, dexterity; blue fur
Angel - winged flight, bird-like physiology (hollow bones, protective covering over eyes during flight)
Nightcrawler - teleportation, prehensile tail
Magneto - control over magnetic fields and manipulation of metals
Mystique - shape shifting
Pyro - pyro-kinetic control

I'm not saying you have to chose one of the ones above, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what kinds of powers exist in the respective universes. As you can see, there's a lot of overlap (Claire/Wolverine, Matt Parkman/Professor X, Hiro/Nightcrawler, Shadowcat/D.L., Rogue/Peter Petrelli, etc.)

As for me, it's never been an easy choice. Thee have always been certain characters I liked more than others, but some characters have abilities I don't like and some characters I don't like have abilities I like, and so on. To narrow it down to a select few, here are my top 5 choices in no particular order:

1. Accelerated healing/regeneration. Obviously the ability to recover from any wound or injury, rather minor or fatal in a matter of seconds has its perks. There's a reason Wolverine is the best at what he does.

2. Telekinesis. How about the power to move you? (Thank you Tenacious D). Seriously, though, this ability has all the perks of super strength, the defensive qualities of things like force fields, and when directed towards oneself would allow for levitation or flight.

3. Magnetic Manipulation. Let's face it, Magneto is bad ass. In addition to all the control over metals he can levitate, create forcefields, and even manipulate the human body because of the iron in our blood. In one comic book story he even altered the tilt of the Earth's axis along the magnetic pole because of his ability to tap into Earth's magnetic field.

4. Create independent duplicates of myself. The character of Multiple Man, who appeared in X-Men 3, was always one of my favorites. How great would it be to have copies of yourself you could create and then reabsorb later? You could have a duplicate of yourself to go to work while another one did stuff for class, while another one was running errands, while another one was in a meeting, while you were playing video games. I mean, you'd have to switch off which duplicate did what so that one of you wasn't always stuck with the crap task, but just think of how much you could get done.

5. Concussive optic force beams. Not as practical or useful in everyday situations as some other powers, but I've just always thought they were cool. Plus, since I already wear my sunglasses all the time anyway, I'd be used to it. Too bad Cyclops got treated like a chump in the X-Men movies.

So, in thinking about these options, I would have to go with the magnetic manipulation. It's all almost all the perks of telekinesis, almost uncharted levels of power, and applications that would come in handy in everyday life given how much we rely on mechanical and electronic technology for everything that we do.

Of course, such a choice begs the follow up question... would I use my powers for good or for evil?

Independence Day

On this day, 231 years ago, American colonists decreed that they would be the masters of their own destiny. From a shaky beginning and an unsure footing we have since established ourselves as the most powerful, the most secure, the most free nation ever witnessed in all of human history. Granted we have had our stumbles and our shortcomings, but as Winston Churchill observed, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

So if at least some echo of patriotism doesn't stir in your disillusioned heart today, just remember that in many other places in the world you would not be allowed such a luxury of doubt and dissent.

My Favorite Band

Yesterday I went to a Six-Flags styled theme park with my roommate and his brother who was in town for the weekend. It was like a 2 1/2 hour drive to Pennsylvania, so we had lots of time on the road with my iPod. At one point as he looked through my music collection to find something to play my roommate asked me what my favorite band was, and I had to pause to think about my answer.

It's so hard for me to name a particular movie or musician/group as my "favorite" because I have so many that I enjoy so much. That being said, when I am forced to give an answer I think that my all-time favorite band, most consistently, year-in and year-out is the Gin Blossoms.

I have four Gin Blossoms CDs despite the fact that they only had two major releases. One of the additional CDs is a rough version of most of their later released songs, and the other is a 5 song EP that contains three songs not on their major releases. So all in all, including their single "Till I Hear it From You" from the Empire Records soundtrack and all the random songs from their pre-label releases, I had about three albums' worth of music from them. I have listened to those CDs on a regular basis for the last ten years, and still love every song on them.

So after identifying the Gin Blossoms to my roommate as my favorite band yesterday, I went on iTunes this afternoon and discovered that they released a new album in 2006. Their last CD came out in 1996, so it's been 10 years since there's been new music from them. I actually say them at the Muskegon Summer celebration back in '01 or '02, something I thought I'd never get a chance to do since they effectively broke up in 1997.

So all afternoon I've been listening to the new CD, and it's like they never left. Every track is golden, a natural continuation of their first two albums. No new vocalist, no new sound, no new producer trying to take them in a different direction.

It's like an old friend who you haven't seen or talked to in years just randomly showing up, and everything just seems right.

For more information, check out the Gin Blossoms' website.