Thought That Came Unbidden

Happy National Coming Out Day!

I think if I ever get really sick I’m going to do it in Australia. A week between diagnosis and operation. Not bad. Lolly had her sister post an update to her blog.

She went in at about 11:15am and got out at about 3:30ish, and they say that everything went really well.

She has her eye sight, good reactions in her limbs, and is fully conscience of where she is and so forth.

Much to all our relief there have been no side effects so far. She is spending the night in ICU for observation to make sure that nothing bad starts happening. Apart from being hot, a bit nauseous and having manky hair, it looks like so far everything is going really well.

We haven’t been updated on whether they got all the tumor out, or if she has pins in her head or any of that yet, but that should happen tomorrow.

Part of me is relieved, and the part of me that spent a week badgering doctors in an ICU in Florida is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, I know: different people, different tumors, different prognoses.

But I always hear dice.

Back when VH1 actually ran something besides “celebreality” programming I would drop in periodically on a show called Rock & Roll Jeopardy. Based on the classic Jeopardy we give you the answer/you supply the question format, all the categories related in some way to rock & roll.

The most memorable show I ever saw was an entry into one of those celebrities playing for charity tournaments. I can’t for the life of me remember who the other two contestants were but the third was Moon Zappa who was clearly out of step with the shallow trivia aspect of the show. At one point she became so frustrated with her timing and inability to get to even answer a question that when she finally rang in her “answer” to the clue was “What is ‘turn off your TV and read a book’?” It was at that point that she earned a permanent place on my “celebrity dinner guests” list (you know, the dozen or so celebrities you’d like to have a good meal and a conversation with as distinguished, of course, from the dozen or so celebrities you’d leap over your loved one’s prone body for a chance to have sex with (very often the two lists are not the same)).

Celebrate Banned Books Week

The American Library Association has been celebrating Banned Books Week since 1982…that’s 25 years people. According to the ALA blog the 10 Most Challenged Books of 2006 reflect a range of themes, and consist of the following titles:

1. “And Tango Makes Three” by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, for homosexuality, anti-family, and unsuited to age group;
2. “Gossip Girls” series by Cecily Von Ziegesar for homosexuality, sexual content, drugs, unsuited to age group, and offensive language;
3. “Alice” series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor for sexual content and offensive language;
4. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things” by Carolyn Mackler for sexual content, anti-family, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
5. “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison for sexual content, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
6. “Scary Stories” series by Alvin Schwartz for occult/Satanism, unsuited to age group, violence, and insensitivity;
7. “Athletic Shorts” by Chris Crutcher for homosexuality and offensive language;
8. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky for homosexuality, sexually explicit, offensive language, and unsuited to age group;
9. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison for offensive language, sexual content, and unsuited to age group;
10. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content, offensive language, and violence.

Off the list this year, according to the ALA, are perennial favorites Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

And ponder this for a second…the Intellectual Freedom Manual (ALA, 7th edition) states:

Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of the work, and the viewpoints of both the author and receiver of information. Freedom to express oneself through a chosen mode of communication, including the Internet, becomes virtually meaningless if access to that information is not protected. Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled.

Does this sound like the America we live in today? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Go read a book. I plan to.

If you are of a certain age (over 30) and of a certain persuasion (geeky), you probably remember The Bionic Woman the softer-core peddling of American values designed to capture the female 15 and under audience that was being lost by The Six Million Dollar Man in 1976. A quick recap to freshen the memory for those of you with out the auto-geek switch.

The show’s central conceit wasn’t the bionic replacement of limbs and organs – the melding of human tissue with computer technology in an age when the average computer filled a 9’x12′ room – nor was it the idea that a government agency could be fielding operatives who were using experimental technology to achieve slightly shady mission objectives. After all, we’d just come off the Watergate Hearings so the idea that our government was doing something we didn’t know about seemed not only plausible but damn likely.

No, the central conceit of The Bionic Woman was that an operative, an employee of the U.S. government who was the equivalent of a GS 15 (Steve Austin, the titular Six Million Dollar Man), could lay a guilt trip on a Federal agency to the extent that they would spend millions of dollars to turn a tennis pro/school teacher into the first female cyborg and send her out in the field on black-bag missions that would probably have given the CIA pause if the show hadn’t been aimed at kids. The government doesn’t feel guilt. People do, though, and guilt plays a huge role in the new iteration of the show, Bionic Woman (pay attention to that missing article, it will be important later).

After a car accident that should be fatal – you have to give series producers this, they go for verisimilitude when they need to – Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan), a 20-something bartender with no military training at all, gets the cyborg treatment from Will Anthros (Chris Bowers) her college professor/surgeon/research director for a secret quasi-government project boyfriend. And Jaime’s bionic replacements come not just with the usual strength and speed that we of a certain age have come to expect from technology. They come with skills. Mad skills that life-long practitioners of aikido would drool to have. It seems, though, that the massive car accident just might not have been an accident after all.

Oh no, boys and girls, said government project, dark and spooky as it is, has that problem that is so handy for writers: it leaks like a sieve in a hurricane. So now project head Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer in a sledgehammer subtle performance) has two problems on his hands. He has to figure out how to convince Jaime to “repay her debt” to the project and come work for him, and he has to figure out what to do about the project’s first bionic experiment Sarah Corvis (Katee Sackhoff, marvelously psychotic and chewing the scenery for all she’s worth).

The screener for this show felt like a thrown together pilot: just enough flash to sell the people who sign the checks but not quite finished around the edges. Executive producers David Eick (late of Battlestar Galactica, Glen Morgan, Jason Smilovic, (Laeta Kalogridis and Michael Dinner, pilot) hit most of the marks weaving in the government conspiracy angle (is this a private project or is it a black bag job?), the unpredictability of the lone assassin with skills (is all of Sarah’s crazy really just sexual jealousy?), our simultaneous dependence on and fear of technology (or is something in her bionics making her a whack job?), and, of course, a good looking cast. But if they’re going to make it work they need to go dark, not that sort of 80% black, construction paper dark that TV is so famous for. No, they’re going to have to go untrustworthy government, no hope, backed into a corner, ready to chew your leg off to get out of the trap dark if they’re going to make it work.

The question then becomes not can Michelle Ryan keep her American accent in place and develop more expressions in a range broader than stunned and totally pissed off. No, the question becomes, does NBC have the courage to put some grit into prime time or should they have put this on the Sci-Fi channel where it belongs?

Cross posted from Amphetameme.org where Victor has written his own take on the new show.