Second Star From The Right

And Straight On 'Till Morning
Leonard Nimoy  1931 - 2015

Not all that many people affect a wider world; the number that have a positive influence are even smaller.

El Rog (that's pronounced "Raj") The Magnificent at my Place Of Witless Labor™ spoke over the Great Wall Of Cubicle a while ago and advised Leonard Nimoy has died. The visual image which immediately popped into my mind was the character he made immortal, Spock, as he'd appeared in the first JJ Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise, and so my first thought was Spock, dead? No; that's not possible. It took a few seconds to remember Nimoy in any other way, and then the news seemed not only possible but not unexpected. Now He Knows What We Do Not.

As Lynda Barry tells it, television was role model, teacher, and refuge for several generations. It was all those for me, and due to an odd twist of pre-frontal cortex which allows me to recall the complete dialogue of specific films nearly intact, I would remember the faces of character actors who appeared in films and different television series (which would lead to posts like this, and this, and this one).

I watched Star Trek when it was new in 1966, and a new concept for television -- a science fiction episodic television program (the audience could 'get involved' with the lives of its characters, and their relationship with each other, to create a backstory to support the arc of the series).  It's true that 'The Twilight Zone' had appeared in 1959, and One Step Beyond not long after; then "Outer Limits" in 1964, but each of their episodes were separate presentations, a series of short stories.

Star Trek was the first of its kind, and it made all the other series that followed, Star Trek-related or not, possible -- ST Next Generation; ST Deep Space Nine; ST Voyager; Starship Enterprise; Babylon 5; Stargate; Battlestar Galactica (original, and the remake); Space 1999; even the Saturday morning Thunderbirds! marionette series.

It also made possible a long string of other sci-fi and fantasy-related programs that we take for granted, today, from X-Files and Roswell to the SciFi Channel. 

The crew of the NCC 1701 were a family, and Leonard Nimoy's rendition of the science officer and XO was spot on, right from the beginning; I can't imagine another actor in 1966 who could have brought more to the role (Try and imagine it. Go ahead). The series was a popular success, but even with a large write-in campaign from fans, NBC cancelled it; episodes in the spring of 1968 were the last.

In the1970's Nimoy joined the cast of Mission: Impossible, replacing Martin Landau (who ended up as the star of -- yes; 'Space 1999', with his MI co-star and then-wife, Barbara Bain).  When Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, finally received financial backing to produce "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", Nimoy returned to his Spock role. But, the movie had a poor showing when it was released in 1979 and for a time it wasn't clear whether there would be any sequels. Nimoy began looking for other ways to reinvent his career -- as a writer, an artist, as a stage actor.

Four years later, with a different director and script, The Wrath Of Khan (with another decent character actor, Ricardo Montalban) appeared, and was a success -- even when the unexpected happened; Spock sacrifices himself to save his ship, its crew, and the officers on it that were his family.
  

 "I was, and always shall be, your friend." If you saw the film when it was released,

tell me you didn't feel just a little misty when he spoke that line. 

There would be another four star Trek films with the original cast  -- two of them written, and directed, by Nimoy. In 1987, he directed Three Men and A Baby for Disney Studios -- a big hit, financially. Nimoy continued directing other productions until 1995.

Over the last twenty years, Nimoy had been candid that as a person, it hadn't all been a bed of roses; he had suffered with an alcohol addiction since the late 1960's, but had conquered it. Even as he grew older he continued to do what he did best, to act -- his appearance as the reclusive Dr. Bell on the series, Fringe, and reprising Spock in the 2012 Star Trek reboot, were his last hurrahs as an actor.

Nimoy and Zachary Quinto at the opening of Abram's Star Trek (2012)

Through the original series and the motion pictures, Spock's character was about resolving inner conflict, the Path Of Logic versus human instincts. But Nimoy's character, which he did a good deal to shape, was also about loyalty, compassion, and Right Action.

For generations of people who grew up watching Nimoy as Spock, the character showed a bridge between our illogical selves and Something Larger, in a positive way.  The planet Vulcan may not exist, but that there might be a choice between instinctive or unconscious behavior, and some level of clarity achieved through discipline, does. No matter how that is internalized, it's a powerful message.

And, it's not a stretch to say that Nimoy's role as (arguably) Star Trek's most popular character helped to popularize science fiction on television. This was different from the B-Film sci-fi that was churned out in the 50's and 60's  -- it made science fiction acceptable as a dramatic form, The Human Dilemma in the vast reaches of space. Without Trek on television and in film, there might have been a very different and less nuanced 'Star Wars' (all six of them), or Blade Runner, Alien, or "Interstellar".

So, another Mensch leaves us -- I hope, for another continuing adventure.

Kirk:  I think its about time we got underway ourselves. 
Uhura:  Captain, I have orders from Starfleet Command. We're to put back to Spacedock immediately ... to be decommissioned. 
Spock:  If I were human, I believe my response would be, "go to Hell" -- if I were human.
Uhura:  What are your orders, sir?.
Kirk:  Second star on the right -- and straight on 'till morning.

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Not Funny

Robin Williams, 1951 - 2014

Last night, I looked out at the sunset over The City as the marine layer slid in, thinking: Robin Williams doesn't get to see this. He doesn't get to see another one of these.

One more Mensch gone; what a world. At least we had him in it, for a while.

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Turning

Pete Seeger (1919 - 2014)

©Andrew Sullivan / New York Times

I think he would want us to sing. And to resist -- not fight -- but to sit down in a place not far from Wall Street and decline to be moved; to stand in front of the tank; to call things that are happening by their right names -- and remember a lesson that The Few would like The Many to forget: That we are all family, trying to do the best we can, and that the highest thing we can do is make the journey easier for each other.

Now he knows what we do not. Stand up, and sing.

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More Than Meets The Eye

Jean Giraud / Moebius (1938 - 2012)

Le Bal (Limited Edition Serigraph print, 2002)

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (known by his nom de plume, Moebius) passed away one year ago today in Paris.  He was one of the last Franco-Belgian illustrators of the bandes dessinées tradition -- literally, "drawn strips" -- whose most famous member was Belgian artist Hérge, the creator of 'TinTin'.

Giraud began his career in the 1950's, where he created, together with writer Jean-Michele Charlier, a daily strip and eventually full-fledged comics about Lieutenant Blueberry, a U.S. cavalry officer; Alan Delon meets the Old West.  Occasionally, he would illustrate  other Western tales Charlier developed outside the Blueberry story line -- which Giraud would sign "Gir".

 Original first page of "Missip[p]i River", 1967; 

Giraud's artistic style echoed pen and brushwork of American and

British comics in the mid-1960's (Click on image to enlarge. Easy! Fun!)

In America, the artistic style of mainstream comic illustration was bounded by DC Comics (Superman, Batman, Justice League) or the more recent Marvel Superheroes, and alternative-but-still-mainstream publications like MAD Magazine  -- specifically the pen-and-ink artist Mort Drucker.  Comics in the UK likewise had developed a distinctive style that borrowed from DC or Marvel, but also rooted in British-only comics like Bingo.

Comparison of styles between American Mort Drucker (left)

and Giraud's work in the mid-1980's on Blueberry (right).

Drucker used a nib pen, and was more inclined to caricature;

Giraud was a realist who favored brushes and Rapidograph technical pens.

In the Counterculture of the middle Sixties to the mid-70's, America's 'Underground' comics developed their own artistic styles far removed from those of DC or Marvel. They were a Fuck You delivered to America's Puritan cultural traditions around sexuality and materialism, first, and only secondarily an attempt to push the boundaries of illustration. It would take the development of graphic novels, and the work of American artists like Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, the Brothers Hernandez and Art Spiegelman to change that.

Meanwhile, in Europe, artists like Giraud saw their medium as dominated by America's "Superhero" format, and hidebound with traditions established before the First World War.  More than in America's underground comics, European illustrators were producing images influenced by the 'psychedelic revolution' -- expanding personal consciousness to touch the Universal; having experiences which provided glimpses of 'other', alternate realities.

 Jimmy Hendrix's Psychedelic Lunch (Virtual Meltdown, 1976)

The most accessible, commercial version of these visions was exemplified by Peter Max -- his colorful deconstructions of reality were simple, beautiful; but not too complex or ambiguous for the viewer.  It didn't really challenge their preconceptions of reality, just enhanced them in a non-threatening, cartoon manner -- as in Yellow Submarine.

In 1974, Giraud joined two other French artists -- Phillipe Drullet and Jean-Pierre Dionnet -- and a businessman, Bernard Farkas, forming Les Humanoïdes Associés (The United Humanoids), to publish a quarterly magazine of cutting-edge 'adult' illustration, Metal Hurlant (literally, "Screaming Metal").

Metal Hurlant, Issue No. 1, December 1974 (Wikipedia Commons). 

The first issue was released in December, 1974, and included work not just by Giraud and Drullet but included work by American Richard Corben. Later issues would feature another American cartoonist, Vaughn Bodé (creator of Cheech Wizard, and Junkwaffel), along with Brazilian Sergio Macedo, Swiss artist Daniel Ceppi, and the Dutch illustrator Joost Swarte,whose work carries on the traditions of the bandes dessinées and 20th-century Dutch design (Swarte's work appears heavily influenced by Herge's TinTin). 

Not in Mort Drucker's style: Before the first Star Wars,

Giraud was creating pen-and-ink aliens in France's Metal Hurlant.

This 1975 illustration, 'The Usual Suspects', shows some Moebius standards -- 

Arzach [center, back row], Major Grubert [second row left, in spiked helmet],

and Malvina [second row, far right, with rifle] of The Airtight Garage;

and Giraud [front row, right], with glasses (Click on image -- yes; for the Fun).

Metal Hurlant published stories with science fiction or fantasy themes -- the most natural channels for this new imagery.  But Giraud's work was so singular and unique that it took the reader / viewer into places where space, time, and scenery twined around each other: Part Oz, part Yaqui Way Of Knowledge, and part comic strip.

Giraud's major illustrated works include Arzach, the adventures of a humanoid with a tall hat, who rides the back of a creature like a prehistoric Pertodactyl through landscapes that resemble Bryce Canyon, or the mountains of Morocco. Like the rest of Giraud / Moebius' creations, there is spare dialog but no sound effects; Arzach's world is starkly beautiful, populated by strange beings and amazing beasts, but often silent.

First episode of Arzach; Metal Hurlant, 1975-76

(Click On Image to Bigger Buh Buh Buh Bleep.)

In the episodic "Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius", Giraud presents a world existing in different dimensions, like interlocking computer simulations, each of which can be accessed if you know the secret passages. Each lower level is unaware they are part of that chain, yet still affecting (and affected by) the others. 

 Major Grubert, guest of the Wascally Wabbits and their Big Crystal Skull.

(Clickety Click Click Click.)

Major Grubert, an agent for the first level, is trying to thwart a plot to unify all levels. A resident of a lower level, Jerry Cornelius, appears to be central to the plan; Grubert keeps looking for but never quite catches him, all the while threatened by conspiratorial forces, wacky rabbits, and The Bakelite.

Grubert survives an assassination attempt while meeting an agent

in a crowded 2nd level bar (The Airtight Garage, 1975)

The Incal was an episodic story written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, with a group of adventurers moving through an Oz-like universe, batted about over the fate of the Light Incal and Dark Incal, crystals of enormous power.

 The Incal, volume 4

(Clicky-Clicky)

(Note:  Moebius and Jodorowsky sued Luc Besson, director of The Fifth Element, claiming that the film used aspects of The Incal in the script without permission; they lost the suit.)

Giraud's last major works were Inside Moebius (titled in English for the French original), and 40 Days dans le desert B (Forty days in desert B).  Inside was several volumes of autobiographical writing and illustration.

Moebius' perception of Disney's effect upon culture:

The Wrath Of The Mouse (Click To See Larger Horrible Mouse)

"Forty Days" depicted a number of Giraud's themes about the effect of our consciousness on the world around us. The meditating traveler in 40 Days certainly does that.

I began looking at Giraud / Moebius' work in 1975, when the company which published 'National Lampoon' began reprinting Metal Hurlant in the United States, with English translations, as Heavy Metal. I was stunned at how good, how imaginative it was -- incredible, rich, detailed and sure; there wasn't a sense of hesitation in a single line.

The worlds he created were complete -- from its architecture and equipment, to strange little creatures or background flora, down to the rubbish in the street. It was like looking at sketches, made while on vacation in another dimension, which Giraud had brought back to show us.  And it wasn't a terrible or totally unfamiliar, nightmarish place. Even the incredible events he depicted seemed completely comprehensible, given where we were. They were places that vibrated with a sense of adventure and amazement.

And the best art does that -- surprise and amaze; show us something we only dimly and incompletely saw, like furniture in a dark room. That kind of art literally brings some new thing into the open, and changes how we perceive the world, and what's possible in it.  Moebius' work did all of that.

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I Dunno; Whadda You Wanna Do Tonight?

Ernest Borgnine (1917 - 2012)


The Legendary Drew and Josh Alan Friedman's Any Resemblance
To Persons Living Or Dead, 1986 (Fantagraphics)

Ernest Borgnine, born Ermes Effron Borgnino, passed away earlier this week. In case no one noticed.

It would have been different if Borgnine believed himself to be a towering talent, his career frustrated by lesser mortals (god knows there are plenty of card-carrying SAG and AFTRA members today who think that's true for them) -- but Borgnine was more realistic than that, about himself and his career.


Borgnine with a copy of Josh Alan Friedman's 2011
Autobiographical "Black Cracker" (Borgnine)

It's not easy to play a heavy; ask the actors who've made a living doing it. But in the Best Picture Oscar-winner for 1953, From Here To Eternity, Borgnine made Master Sargent "Fatso" Judson, the brutal stockade NCO (he beats Frank Sinatra to death in the third reel) into a believable figure -- the sort of man you hope you never find yourself at the mercy of.

And he made you suspend your disbelief enough that when he loses that knife fight in a Honolulu alley to Montgomery Cliff, you watch the narrow, sadistic character Borgnine created roll over, and lie still, and find yourself thinking Good; that asshole had it coming.


Judson Brandishes His Knife: Borgnine's First Career Move
In Fred Zinneman's From Here To Eternity (1953);
George Reeves Of Teevee 'Superman' Fame In Background

He followed Eternity up by playing in the sword-and-sandals 1954 costume drama, "Demetrius and The Gladiators", but his portrayal of Judson led director John Sturgis to cast Borgnine as another supporting heavy in the 1955 Bad Day At Black Rock. His Coley Trimble is another sadistic bully, one of three men in a tiny desert town who murdered a local Japanese man after Pearl Harbor -- but unlike Fatso Judson, this character is deeply disturbed, barely held together by bad dreams and manic laughter.


Little More Hot Sauce For Your Coffee; Borgnine And
Spencer Tracy In Bad Day At Black Rock (1954)

In 1953, Playwright Paddy Chayefsky's television screenplay, Marty, was broadcast with a rising star, Rod Steiger (later of The Pawnbroker), in the title role as a blue-collar butcher and lonely bachelor in Yonkers, battling his own self-image and family ties to break through to happiness, and a stronger sense of himself. When casting was being done for a film version in 1955, Borgnine was chosen for the title role, and it led to his being awarded the Oscar for Best Actor in 1956.

Any actor will tell you that the Craft is also a Job, and if you're not making a paycheck it doesn't matter how talented you think you are. Borgnine worked steadily in film and television in the next fifty-six years following his only Oscar (when he died, he was the voice of Mermaid Man on Spongebob Square Pants), and it was steady work -- I remember him in Flight Of The Phoenix; The Poseidon Adventure; The Dirty Dozen; The Wild Bunch; Escape From New York, among others. As a character actor, he was a fixture.

And naturally, I remember him from McHale's Navy (1963 -1967) -- his real signature role, much as Andy Griffith (who died a few days before Borgnine) will always be known as the television sheriff of Mayberry.


My Cartoon Tribute To Borgnine (1995)

Borgnine did not have a wide range, but he was a decent actor. The proof was in his portrayals of Fatso Judson and Coley Trimble -- evil, but not completely two-dimensional characters whom we recognized -- and distinct opposites from Ernest Borgnine the man, who from all reports was kind, engaging and genuine.

Borgnine the actor persuaded us to accept the likes of Judson and Trimble. You wouldn't cast him as Thomas Moore in 'A Man For All Seasons'; you wouldn't find him in a play by Stoppard or Beckett or O'Neill, but he might have done justice to Willy Loman. He would have been a decent Coach Bob in Hotel New Hampshire, and Borgnine definitely could have played Don Ciccio, the Sicilian mafioso who kills the father of the young Don Corleone, in The Godfather, Part II.

He was a perfect choice to play Chayefsky's Marty because the character could have been Borgnine's next-door neighbor, back in the day. He knew Marty's neighborhood, because he had grown up in one almost identical to it, leaving it during WW2 as a seaman and returning to it after VJ Day. But for different life choices, Borgnine might have gone on to become a regular in that neighborhood much like Marty, and he probably knew it.

Where life did take him were places nearly everyone he grew up with in his old neighborhood had never gone and could never go; he knew he'd been lucky, and never pretended otherwise -- in the 1980's, he made a film, Borgnine On The Bus, about driving across America in a Winnebago; no matter how painful it may be to more sophisticated tastes to watch, it was Borgnine's celebration at being alive, and he gently mocked his own 'stardom' in the process.



It's easy to be cynical; believe me, I know -- but Ernie was a Mensch, and a class act.

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John Neville (1925-2011)

The Age Of Reason: Tuesday

Neville As Karl August Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Munchausen

The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson: It seems to me, sir, that you have rather a weak grasp of reality.

Baron von Munchausen: Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash -- and I'm delighted to say I have no grasp of it, whatsoever!

--  Johnathan Pryce, John Neville, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Dir: Terry Gillam

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Peter Falk, 1927 - 2011

I can't see ya, but I know you're here.

Ex-Angel: Falk As Himself In Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire (1987)

(Photo: The Unstoppable dvdBeaver: Sing 'O Canada'. Right Now.)

He's on the other side of the fence, now, and for real. Those writing his obituary can fill in details of his career. I'll remember Falk for Columbo (which made him a household name, after nearly twenty years of paying his dues as an actor). But I also remember him for cameos, like the grandfather in The Princess Bride; and, particularly since he appears in one of my favorite films, Wings Of Desire.

Falk's appearance was a bit like Columbo's, an Everyman conjured up out of clay as common as yours or mine. He always seemed to pay his audiences the best compliment through characters that reminded us of our humanity -- that we face the same struggles in a world we don't know the meaning of; rumpled and preoccupied, but in a self-mocking, genial way.

Spazieren; that's what grandma would've said; 'Go spazieren'...

And, frankly: In a film, who else would you cast to portray a former angel but someone who seemed to have knocked about (and been knocked around) a bit; trustworthy, streetwise, but not cynical: Look, pal; we're all just tryin' to get by, here; so don't worry. We'll take care of it, whatever it is. Now, where did I put -- oh, it's here ; ah, good. Yeah. Now; where were we? Oh, right...

So another Mensch leaves us. And as I've observed before, the world has a limited supply of Mensches.

“This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction ‘Columbo’ offers us,” Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973: “the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it.”

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Benoît Mandelbrot, 1924 - 2010

Mandelbrot: Mathematician, Teacher, Mensch
(Photo from a University Of Umeå, Sweden, website
[Whose owner enjoys photographing the famous while
holding a large, stuffed Peeps], 2006. Go figure.)

Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term “fractal” for mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic irregularities found in nature, died today in Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 85.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot (oddly, the middle initial was something he adopted; he had no middle name, and the 'B' doesn't stand for anything known publicly) was born on November 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936, his family emigrated to France, living first in Paris and then fleeing to the south after the German invasion in 1940. Unoccupied Vichy was a bit slower (but not by much) to follow the anti-Jewish ordinances of the occupied north; as a teenager, Mandelbrot tended horses and fixed tools.

The Germans moved to occupy the south of France after the American invasion of North Africa in the winter of 1942. It's not known how he and his family survived in the south until the Allied invasions in the summer of 1944; luckily, they did.


Fractals Exist In Nature, And Our Mimicking It: Book Of Kells

In an obituary by Jascha Hoffmann of the New York Times, " 'Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,' said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. '[Mandelbrot] was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.'


Fractals: Not Just For Acid Trips Any More

"In a seminal book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as 'monstrous' and 'pathological.' Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now 'be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.' "

Use of fractals is now common in too many branches of study to count, and its practical effect on engineering and manufacturing processes, on understanding the world we live in, has been immense.

Mandelbrot was known as a polymath, a lecturer and teacher for whom every conversation or class was an opportunity to "talk about something different", with an infectious sense of humor; broadly human, passionate about his work (which expanded the frontiers of human knowledge), and willing to allow himself to be photographed while holding a ridiculous stuffed duck.

Another Mensch leaves us. I'm only a Dog, but I have a good enough nose to understand that the supply of Mensches in this world is limited.

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