The three or four of you familiar with my more obscure works may have picked up a copy of Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. Written with great expectations, the book fizzled when my gleeful publicist at Viking – a huge Trek fan with posters of Kirk and Spock on his walls – quit in an unexplained huff a couple of months before the 1999 release date.
One of my favorite characters in that book was Ronald D. Moore, a Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine producer (he also co-wrote, with Brannon Braga, the Trek films Generations and First Contact). Moore added immeasurably to the Star Trek universe; he was, by popular estimation, the “Margaret Meade of the Klingon Empire.” But he left that world with a bad taste in his mouth, after running afoul of Braga on Voyager. I’d wondered what had become of Moore – until I read John Hodgman’s recent New York Times Magazine story about the new Battlestar Galactica series on the Sci-Fi channel. Somehow, the ship – and show – had slipped right under my radar.
Last night, my friend Mark Wagner (who painted the fabulous Wheel used in Strange Travel Suggestions) and I bought a LoCoco pizza, and watched the whole three-hour Battlestar Galactica mini-series in a marathon of edgy ethereal madness.
Even with my high expectations—I’m a huge fan of Moore’s work—the show is amazing. It’s dark, edgy, old-fashioned sci-fi, a cheeky blend of high- and low-tech with frequent nods to 2001 and Blade Runner, a subtle touch of Trek around the edges. If you’ve been sitting around bemoaning the lack of great sci-fi films or shows, take heart: redemption is at hand. And watch carefully, as the beauty is in the details. My favorite moment: a glimpse of a “Pan Galactea” space-clipper, complete with the old Pan Am logo, alongside Galactica during one of the “jump” scenes. And Edward James Olmos is marvelous as the Commander; a stroke of casting genius right up there with Patrick Stewart as Picard.
So this is what it’s like when I don’t travel: I watch hours of sci-fi on TV. It’s very much in character; the two major inspirations that really put the travel bug in me were both films, and one of them was indeed 2001 (the other was Lawrence of Arabia). Growing up, I dreamed of spending quality time in both the desert and outer space. That was in the 1960s and 1970s, when everyone was sure there’d be youth hostels on Mars by the 1990s.
Oh, well. I did manage to get out to Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert, where T.E. Lawrence pitched his tent among the Arab brigands; but the Moon seems even farther away now than it did when I was a kid.
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On a very different note, let me say that I am engrossed in a book that is changing my life. In preparation for future performances of Strange Travel Suggestions—and, more immediately, for teaching my story-telling class at the annual Travel Writers’ Conference at Book Passage in Corte Madera—I’m reading Impro, by Keith Johnstone. This slim volume, ostensibly about "improvisation and the theater," is an immensely useful guide for anyone wishing to become a better artist, a better writer, or simply a more creative human being. It’s so full of wisdom, and so engaging, you’ll wish you’d discovered it years ago.
Among Johnstone’s revelations is the fact that great artists create not by being original, but by being obvious. He ends that chapter with a quote from Mozart: “Why my productions take from my hand that particular form and
style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or in short, makes it Mozart’s, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality.”
“Suppose Mozart had tried to be original?” Johnstone asks. "It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”
Something to remember as I consider remounting my own show, tossing and turning through the compulsion to be more clever and original than ever…..