by Michael Jahn
Fred Thompson is running for President of the United States. At 6'6" and with an authoritarian demeanor, he at least looks presidential.
That's unlike George W. "Jar Jar" Bush, who looks like a cocker spaniel trying to get of out being whupped for leaving a pile on the carpet.
Thompson is more likely to be elected President than he was to have been elected Manhattan District Attorney, as was his character, Arthur Branch, in "Law & Order." A Southern senator with a drawl getting elected district attorney in New York City? How about Sacha Baron Cohen being elected president of the Southern Baptist Coalition?
Robert Morgenthau, who at last sighting was not a Southernor with a drawl, has been the real-life Manhattan DA since 1974. He was supposedly the model for the first "Law & Order" DA, Aaron Schiff, played by Arthur Hill.
Fred Thompson as Manhattan DA is not the only bizarre notion on "Law & Order." Another is their constantly threatening suspects with the death penalty and, further, the suspects and their attorneys keeping straight faces about it. The last time that the death penalty was carried out in New York State, the man in the White House was John F. Kennedy, not Fred Thompson. It's not likely to be carried out again until another Kennedy is in the White House, and we've kind of run out of them, haven't we?
If Thompson is elected President, it will be just the latest in a series of strongmen he has played, including presidents. I'm not counting his role in the 2005 Albert Brooks comedy, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."
Unable to find weapons of mass destruction, the United States sends someone out looking for laughs. But we already know what makes Muslims laugh -- what makes Al Queda laugh, anyway -- George W. Bush.
www.myspace.com/michael_jahn
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
-- War, Peace, and the Summer of Love
War, Peace, and the Summer of Love
by Michael Jahn
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, slightly more than one-quarter of the American population is crazy.* In other words, at any given moment roughly 75 million Americans are two meatballs short of a hero.
With that in mind, let's discuss the Summer of Love and the current celebration of its 40th anniversary.
The year 1967 is the year when it is generally accepted that a large number of the young - I would guess at 19 years being the average - turned on, tuned in, and became entranced with fashion and music that, with a number of famous exceptions, now is the just a tad on the cringeful side. Are you about 60 and want to feel older than you were made by seeing Paul McCartney's Irish mug on the cover of Modern Maturity? Put on a tie-dye tee shirt and listen Brian Wilson's should-have-stayed-unfinished "masterpiece" Smile.
If you survive his rendition of "My Favorite Vegetable," you are ready for the Nixon nostalgia that is sweeping the land. I never thought that HE would start to look good. At least old Tricky Dick KNEW that he was a crook -- and he never started a war.
Consider this. A bit more than a year ago Louis Menand wrote the following in The New Yorker about the late Timothy Leary, the greatest hippie guru:
"Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since."
Roger that.
Menand further wrote:
"Because of the spike in the birth rate that began in 1946, the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States grew from fifteen million in 1955 to twenty-five million in 1970; during the sixties, college enrollment more than doubled, from three and a half million students to just under eight million. Times were prosperous; these were the "go-go" years on Wall Street, the era of guns and butter, Vietnam and the Great Society. Government spending primed the pump. Young people dropped out because dropping out was economically sustainable, and because there were more of them in the pipeline than the system could absorb. The phenomenon was more complicated, of course -- social systems don't self-regulate quite so tidily -- but young people found it natural to renounce grownup ambitions in the nineteen-sixties, and they got their mantras from grownups like Leary."
In other words, in 1967 there were lots of kids with enough money to allow them to indulge themselves and a big justification for so doing -- to escape for a while their apparent options: death in nuclear holocaust or death in Vietnam. And they could afford to be nonchalant about money. One night that year I was with Abbie Hoffman in his apartment on St. Mark's Place in the then-dangerous East Village of Manhattan. He told me how he had just refused to participate in a lawsuit that was a sure win for him. "All I would have to do it put on a suit and I would get $10,000," he said. "You can live forever in the Haight on $10,000." He refused to put on a suit.
He put on an American flag shirt instead. Using the American flag as an item of clothing was seriously illegal in 1967. Now it adorns the backside of every other cheerleader.
The fact that the Haight is now dangerous and the East Village is yuppie paradise is interesting.
For those kids who DID land some of the money that was floating around, there were, as Menand wrote, a number of slightly unhinged grownups running around to give them pointers. Such as Timothy Leary. During the Summer of Love I was walking through the East Village with Richie Havens. We were talking about dropping acid. And he said of Leary, "the problem with old guys dropping acid is that they've never FELT before" and they can't handle it.
By "old guys" Richie meant those aged 40, which right now as I stare down a looming 64th birthday hurts more than listening to "Smile." Brian Wilson should have stayed in that sandbox he built in his living room and kept until Mrs. Wilson discovered that the dogs had discovered it.
By the way, I never, not once, wore tye dye. I hated the hippies. The entire bunch of what I call the New York Rock Critics Circle, the professional writers whose job it was to cover the counterculture, hated the hippies. We hated them for trivializing some really important concerns, mainly ending the Vietnam War. And we hated them for making it easy for "the straights" to make fun of everone under 30.
There was the same problem with the revered John Lennon, by the way. It was hard to sell peace to mass America when you had Lennon doing his press-conference-in-bed thing with Yoko.
Who is pretty cool, no matter what you have heard.
Of course, we were all 25 and the hippies were 19. When you are 25 the last person you want to have anything to do with is a 19-year-old.
I couldn't take the hippies then. I despise them now because so many people today who hear that you were a young person in 1967 assume you were a hippie and, therefore, in a position to give them drug advice. Nope, sorry ma'am. I worked for the New York Times during that era. When you work for the New York Times the heroin gets put away before you get in the door.
Also, I hate the hippies for tonsorial reasons. I'm losing hair down the middle of my head. Soon I will look as if my scalp were landscaped with parallel hedges. I have been telling people that I am planning to shave my head and get hair tatooed on. But what I would really like to do is have a ponytail. But I can't do it because people would think I'm an old hippie.
Here's a timeline to consider in light of Menand's obversations:
--1960. Introduction of the birth control pill. And John F. Kennedy, a young man with what at the time was considered long hair, is elected president. You will probably not see those two events as related, unless you are related to Marilyn Monroe.
--1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis and its consequent, very real possibility of nuclear war, scares the living shit out of everyone, especially young people, who worry that they will be sautéed before getting to enjoy the fruits of birth control pills. I organized an end-of-the-world party in the college parking lot. We drank beer and awaited the fireball. Our concern was mainly that we got to finish the case first.
--1963. John F. Kennedy is assassinated. So much for young person running the country. It was the death of whatever hope remained for the future after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
--1964, three months after the Kennedy Assassination to be precise, the Beatles arrive in America. They are fun. They are hip. They have long hair. They are from a country that has never dropped a nuclear bomb on anyone. They are smart. One of them, asked by a reporter how he finds America, replies "turn left at Greenland." Does anyone old enough to remember who Frankie Valli is think of him as either smart or funny? Three out of every four persons in America goes ape over the Beatles. The other 25%, as we now know, is crazy.
--1965. President Lyndon Johnson vastly escalates the Vietnam War. Those who didn't have the shit scared out of them by the the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination have the shit scared out of them by Vietnam.
Incidently, Johnson also is starting to look pretty good in retrospect. At least he had the decency and smarts to quit his job (by deciding not to run for a second term), when it became apparent that people didn't like having the shit scared out of them. This was long before "Nightmare on Elm Street." This was "Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue."
And at various points along this timeline, more so toward the end of it, young people discover that they don't have to take it anyone. Examples: the Free Speech Movement in Berkley, the Civil Rights Movement, and the antiwar movement. Especially, in my case, at Columbia, where I was double-parked at the time, where I only escaped a TPF (tactical police force) officer who was chasing me with a club, by diving over a hedge and landing on my ass looking up at the statue of Alexander Hamilton.
To the point we are considering here, in 1967 a number of young people discovered that a fun thing to do while waiting to get fried in nuclear holocaust, shot to death in Vietnam, or forced to remain celebate until marriage, was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Thus was born the Summer of Love. And just off the top of my head, I guess that somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 kids went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. This is nothing compared with the number of crazy people in America, but enough to show just HOW crazy a certain portion of the population was made.
They made the headlines. Still, 40 years later, they are making the headlines.
My point, at long last reached. Was the Summer of Love a mass movement, a wonderful and watershed moment in world history? Maybe. All in all, peace trumps war and we'd all be much better off with the hippies' goofy optimism than we are with the two Sith Lords currently running the country.
But viewed from another point of view, the Summer of Love was the equivalent of a bunch of guys today getting pissed off by this, that, and the other thing -- the war in Iraq, for example -- by taking a year off from their jobs to follow the NASCAR circuit. Or by taking a semester off to bicycle around Europe. In 1967 it was a bunch of people going crazy because the world was making them crazy and they took advantage of ready money and cheap rents -- or, in the case of the legendary crash pads, no rent -- to spend a summer doing drugs, having sex, and listening to "Sgt. Peppers" until they wore out their neighbors.
Better than spending it at Da Nang or Disneyland, wouldn't you say?
By the way, the hippie's much-celebrated "be-in" was not invented in California. It was invented by my old buddy Jean Shepherd, the New York based radio raconteur. In the late 1950s or early 1960s he created "the Mill," wherein a crowd of listeners would gather at a designated street corner to mill around with nothing in mind other than freaking out the straights.
Which often happened.
Did the Summer of Love illustrate a mass movement? No, it was small by all reasonable standards but got a lot of press because, like celebrity journalism and rock journalism today, it was fun, newspapers never had the excuse to publish photos of half-naked women before, and it gave reporters the excuse to try smoking pot. Did it accomplish anything in the long run?
Yes, actually, quite a bit. You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? It fostered opposition to unjust wars. And it promoted openness to sexual freedom and alternative lifestyles. Nobody lived together "out of wedlock" in 1966. After 1967, it seemed like everyone did. Also coming out of 1967 was the desire for healthy living and, before too long, organic food. And willingness to question the basic premises of our lives.
The Summer of Love also fostered some silly notions, such as levitating the Pentagon and as the rumor that reality doesn't exit. There was circulating the story that reality is an illusion and that everything is run by computers against which a small band of rebels is fighting. Think you invented the Matrix, Wachowski brothers? I first heard that yarn in 1967. In the East Village, come to think of it.
Is there take-home message on the Summer of Love and the ongoing celebration of its 40th anniversary? Yes, and you will love this, it's the familiar Republican refrain that market forces work. The second the gas consumption of an SUV became outrageous, the Prius became popular. That's the market operating -- If you threaten peoples' lives they will find new and perhaps revolutionary things to do. Sometimes it means sex, drugs, rock and roll, and really bad fashion ideas. Other times it means antiwar riots in the streets.
Are you listening, Washington? With or without flowers in your hair.
-------------
*The National Institute of Mental Health-sponsored National Comorbidity Survay found a few years ago that 28% of Americans had experienced psychotic symptoms at some point in their lives. European studies placed the percentage between 6% and 18%. Which does not explain the British obsession with hedgehogs and the French obsession with eating anything that walks, crawls, or flies.
by Michael Jahn
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, slightly more than one-quarter of the American population is crazy.* In other words, at any given moment roughly 75 million Americans are two meatballs short of a hero.
With that in mind, let's discuss the Summer of Love and the current celebration of its 40th anniversary.
The year 1967 is the year when it is generally accepted that a large number of the young - I would guess at 19 years being the average - turned on, tuned in, and became entranced with fashion and music that, with a number of famous exceptions, now is the just a tad on the cringeful side. Are you about 60 and want to feel older than you were made by seeing Paul McCartney's Irish mug on the cover of Modern Maturity? Put on a tie-dye tee shirt and listen Brian Wilson's should-have-stayed-unfinished "masterpiece" Smile.
If you survive his rendition of "My Favorite Vegetable," you are ready for the Nixon nostalgia that is sweeping the land. I never thought that HE would start to look good. At least old Tricky Dick KNEW that he was a crook -- and he never started a war.
Consider this. A bit more than a year ago Louis Menand wrote the following in The New Yorker about the late Timothy Leary, the greatest hippie guru:
"Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since."
Roger that.
Menand further wrote:
"Because of the spike in the birth rate that began in 1946, the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States grew from fifteen million in 1955 to twenty-five million in 1970; during the sixties, college enrollment more than doubled, from three and a half million students to just under eight million. Times were prosperous; these were the "go-go" years on Wall Street, the era of guns and butter, Vietnam and the Great Society. Government spending primed the pump. Young people dropped out because dropping out was economically sustainable, and because there were more of them in the pipeline than the system could absorb. The phenomenon was more complicated, of course -- social systems don't self-regulate quite so tidily -- but young people found it natural to renounce grownup ambitions in the nineteen-sixties, and they got their mantras from grownups like Leary."
In other words, in 1967 there were lots of kids with enough money to allow them to indulge themselves and a big justification for so doing -- to escape for a while their apparent options: death in nuclear holocaust or death in Vietnam. And they could afford to be nonchalant about money. One night that year I was with Abbie Hoffman in his apartment on St. Mark's Place in the then-dangerous East Village of Manhattan. He told me how he had just refused to participate in a lawsuit that was a sure win for him. "All I would have to do it put on a suit and I would get $10,000," he said. "You can live forever in the Haight on $10,000." He refused to put on a suit.
He put on an American flag shirt instead. Using the American flag as an item of clothing was seriously illegal in 1967. Now it adorns the backside of every other cheerleader.
The fact that the Haight is now dangerous and the East Village is yuppie paradise is interesting.
For those kids who DID land some of the money that was floating around, there were, as Menand wrote, a number of slightly unhinged grownups running around to give them pointers. Such as Timothy Leary. During the Summer of Love I was walking through the East Village with Richie Havens. We were talking about dropping acid. And he said of Leary, "the problem with old guys dropping acid is that they've never FELT before" and they can't handle it.
By "old guys" Richie meant those aged 40, which right now as I stare down a looming 64th birthday hurts more than listening to "Smile." Brian Wilson should have stayed in that sandbox he built in his living room and kept until Mrs. Wilson discovered that the dogs had discovered it.
By the way, I never, not once, wore tye dye. I hated the hippies. The entire bunch of what I call the New York Rock Critics Circle, the professional writers whose job it was to cover the counterculture, hated the hippies. We hated them for trivializing some really important concerns, mainly ending the Vietnam War. And we hated them for making it easy for "the straights" to make fun of everone under 30.
There was the same problem with the revered John Lennon, by the way. It was hard to sell peace to mass America when you had Lennon doing his press-conference-in-bed thing with Yoko.
Who is pretty cool, no matter what you have heard.
Of course, we were all 25 and the hippies were 19. When you are 25 the last person you want to have anything to do with is a 19-year-old.
I couldn't take the hippies then. I despise them now because so many people today who hear that you were a young person in 1967 assume you were a hippie and, therefore, in a position to give them drug advice. Nope, sorry ma'am. I worked for the New York Times during that era. When you work for the New York Times the heroin gets put away before you get in the door.
Also, I hate the hippies for tonsorial reasons. I'm losing hair down the middle of my head. Soon I will look as if my scalp were landscaped with parallel hedges. I have been telling people that I am planning to shave my head and get hair tatooed on. But what I would really like to do is have a ponytail. But I can't do it because people would think I'm an old hippie.
Here's a timeline to consider in light of Menand's obversations:
--1960. Introduction of the birth control pill. And John F. Kennedy, a young man with what at the time was considered long hair, is elected president. You will probably not see those two events as related, unless you are related to Marilyn Monroe.
--1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis and its consequent, very real possibility of nuclear war, scares the living shit out of everyone, especially young people, who worry that they will be sautéed before getting to enjoy the fruits of birth control pills. I organized an end-of-the-world party in the college parking lot. We drank beer and awaited the fireball. Our concern was mainly that we got to finish the case first.
--1963. John F. Kennedy is assassinated. So much for young person running the country. It was the death of whatever hope remained for the future after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
--1964, three months after the Kennedy Assassination to be precise, the Beatles arrive in America. They are fun. They are hip. They have long hair. They are from a country that has never dropped a nuclear bomb on anyone. They are smart. One of them, asked by a reporter how he finds America, replies "turn left at Greenland." Does anyone old enough to remember who Frankie Valli is think of him as either smart or funny? Three out of every four persons in America goes ape over the Beatles. The other 25%, as we now know, is crazy.
--1965. President Lyndon Johnson vastly escalates the Vietnam War. Those who didn't have the shit scared out of them by the the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination have the shit scared out of them by Vietnam.
Incidently, Johnson also is starting to look pretty good in retrospect. At least he had the decency and smarts to quit his job (by deciding not to run for a second term), when it became apparent that people didn't like having the shit scared out of them. This was long before "Nightmare on Elm Street." This was "Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue."
And at various points along this timeline, more so toward the end of it, young people discover that they don't have to take it anyone. Examples: the Free Speech Movement in Berkley, the Civil Rights Movement, and the antiwar movement. Especially, in my case, at Columbia, where I was double-parked at the time, where I only escaped a TPF (tactical police force) officer who was chasing me with a club, by diving over a hedge and landing on my ass looking up at the statue of Alexander Hamilton.
To the point we are considering here, in 1967 a number of young people discovered that a fun thing to do while waiting to get fried in nuclear holocaust, shot to death in Vietnam, or forced to remain celebate until marriage, was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.
Thus was born the Summer of Love. And just off the top of my head, I guess that somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 kids went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. This is nothing compared with the number of crazy people in America, but enough to show just HOW crazy a certain portion of the population was made.
They made the headlines. Still, 40 years later, they are making the headlines.
My point, at long last reached. Was the Summer of Love a mass movement, a wonderful and watershed moment in world history? Maybe. All in all, peace trumps war and we'd all be much better off with the hippies' goofy optimism than we are with the two Sith Lords currently running the country.
But viewed from another point of view, the Summer of Love was the equivalent of a bunch of guys today getting pissed off by this, that, and the other thing -- the war in Iraq, for example -- by taking a year off from their jobs to follow the NASCAR circuit. Or by taking a semester off to bicycle around Europe. In 1967 it was a bunch of people going crazy because the world was making them crazy and they took advantage of ready money and cheap rents -- or, in the case of the legendary crash pads, no rent -- to spend a summer doing drugs, having sex, and listening to "Sgt. Peppers" until they wore out their neighbors.
Better than spending it at Da Nang or Disneyland, wouldn't you say?
By the way, the hippie's much-celebrated "be-in" was not invented in California. It was invented by my old buddy Jean Shepherd, the New York based radio raconteur. In the late 1950s or early 1960s he created "the Mill," wherein a crowd of listeners would gather at a designated street corner to mill around with nothing in mind other than freaking out the straights.
Which often happened.
Did the Summer of Love illustrate a mass movement? No, it was small by all reasonable standards but got a lot of press because, like celebrity journalism and rock journalism today, it was fun, newspapers never had the excuse to publish photos of half-naked women before, and it gave reporters the excuse to try smoking pot. Did it accomplish anything in the long run?
Yes, actually, quite a bit. You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? It fostered opposition to unjust wars. And it promoted openness to sexual freedom and alternative lifestyles. Nobody lived together "out of wedlock" in 1966. After 1967, it seemed like everyone did. Also coming out of 1967 was the desire for healthy living and, before too long, organic food. And willingness to question the basic premises of our lives.
The Summer of Love also fostered some silly notions, such as levitating the Pentagon and as the rumor that reality doesn't exit. There was circulating the story that reality is an illusion and that everything is run by computers against which a small band of rebels is fighting. Think you invented the Matrix, Wachowski brothers? I first heard that yarn in 1967. In the East Village, come to think of it.
Is there take-home message on the Summer of Love and the ongoing celebration of its 40th anniversary? Yes, and you will love this, it's the familiar Republican refrain that market forces work. The second the gas consumption of an SUV became outrageous, the Prius became popular. That's the market operating -- If you threaten peoples' lives they will find new and perhaps revolutionary things to do. Sometimes it means sex, drugs, rock and roll, and really bad fashion ideas. Other times it means antiwar riots in the streets.
Are you listening, Washington? With or without flowers in your hair.
-------------
*The National Institute of Mental Health-sponsored National Comorbidity Survay found a few years ago that 28% of Americans had experienced psychotic symptoms at some point in their lives. European studies placed the percentage between 6% and 18%. Which does not explain the British obsession with hedgehogs and the French obsession with eating anything that walks, crawls, or flies.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
-- Bush Plans to Pardon 'Dog the Bounty Hunter'
By Michael Jahn
An informed source has revealed that President Bush plans to pardon Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman, who was arrested for snatching someone off the street in Mexico.
It's illegal to snatch someone off the street in Mexico. Snatching a bag of weed and making haste for the border apparently isn't, however.
President Bush also was behind the early release of Paris Hilton and is reported working on a commuted sentence for Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, who is in the cooler in Reno for tax evasion.
Regarding the early release of Hilton, "The President wanted to help someone widely regarded as being his intellectual equal," the source added.
-30-
www.myspace.com/michael_jahn
An informed source has revealed that President Bush plans to pardon Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman, who was arrested for snatching someone off the street in Mexico.
It's illegal to snatch someone off the street in Mexico. Snatching a bag of weed and making haste for the border apparently isn't, however.
President Bush also was behind the early release of Paris Hilton and is reported working on a commuted sentence for Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, who is in the cooler in Reno for tax evasion.
Regarding the early release of Hilton, "The President wanted to help someone widely regarded as being his intellectual equal," the source added.
-30-
www.myspace.com/michael_jahn
Monday, July 2, 2007
-- 'Armada' Screenplay In the Offing
Young Hollywood screenwriter Will Wallace is taking around his screenplay of "Armada," my 1982 cult science fiction thriller.
Says the SF website "Stainless Steel Droppings:"
"Though television and film planted the seeds, the birthplace of my love for science fiction was a small farmhouse in rural Nebraska. The vastness of space and time opened up to me on the floor in front of my uncles’ small, four-shelf book case. On the uppermost two shelves sat my passports to other worlds; my introduction to heroes beyond, but including, Captain James T. Kirk and Han Solo. As silly as it sounds, those two shelves were a whole universe to me, the influence of the books no doubt enhanced by the fact that this was my ‘cool’ uncle who did not loan his books out to just anyone. I used to go out to my grandmother’s house and sit in his room and look at those books over and over again, deciding which to choose to read next, mesmerized by the fantastic images that graced the covers of those books. It was at that shrine to the final frontier that I was introduced to Han Solo’s pre-Star Wars adventures; where I read my first sex and swearing in Michael Jahn’s "Armada" ..."
He neglected to mention that it was the first zero gravity sex. As I recall, there also was zero gravity soccer. The swearing was earthbound.
"Armada" was the Battle of Britain set between the Earth and the moon. A giantic alien ship that sprouted weapons and emitted boomerang-shaped fighter craft had come to eliminate life hereabouts. After a lot of marginally effective dogfights, it was destroyed in a spectacular explosion engineered by a white man who was forced by circumstance to become an amateur warrior and a NASA pilot who was person of color, using an improvised technological solution. One of the alien ships was shot down and its nasty alien pilot was beaten to death during interrogation and and if all that reminds you of a certain blockbuster movie that hit the theaters a decade or so on, I can't be held accountable for your conspiracy theories.
Sigh.
It was a good movie. But given the advanced state of computer graphics and a masterful adaptation of my book, Will's will be better.
Somebody, in Hollywood, buy it, please, and let me retire.
Says the SF website "Stainless Steel Droppings:"
"Though television and film planted the seeds, the birthplace of my love for science fiction was a small farmhouse in rural Nebraska. The vastness of space and time opened up to me on the floor in front of my uncles’ small, four-shelf book case. On the uppermost two shelves sat my passports to other worlds; my introduction to heroes beyond, but including, Captain James T. Kirk and Han Solo. As silly as it sounds, those two shelves were a whole universe to me, the influence of the books no doubt enhanced by the fact that this was my ‘cool’ uncle who did not loan his books out to just anyone. I used to go out to my grandmother’s house and sit in his room and look at those books over and over again, deciding which to choose to read next, mesmerized by the fantastic images that graced the covers of those books. It was at that shrine to the final frontier that I was introduced to Han Solo’s pre-Star Wars adventures; where I read my first sex and swearing in Michael Jahn’s "Armada" ..."
He neglected to mention that it was the first zero gravity sex. As I recall, there also was zero gravity soccer. The swearing was earthbound.
"Armada" was the Battle of Britain set between the Earth and the moon. A giantic alien ship that sprouted weapons and emitted boomerang-shaped fighter craft had come to eliminate life hereabouts. After a lot of marginally effective dogfights, it was destroyed in a spectacular explosion engineered by a white man who was forced by circumstance to become an amateur warrior and a NASA pilot who was person of color, using an improvised technological solution. One of the alien ships was shot down and its nasty alien pilot was beaten to death during interrogation and and if all that reminds you of a certain blockbuster movie that hit the theaters a decade or so on, I can't be held accountable for your conspiracy theories.
Sigh.
It was a good movie. But given the advanced state of computer graphics and a masterful adaptation of my book, Will's will be better.
Somebody, in Hollywood, buy it, please, and let me retire.
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