Note: In 2021, I’m blogging once a week, typically on weekends, but I’m more or less skipping this week (Sunday Jun 27 through Saturday July 3) due to travel. This entry, something of a placeholder, is number 26 of 52. We’re halfway through the year! So far, counting today’s non-entry entry as a missed post, I’ve missed only 3 posts in 2021. That means halfway through 2021, I’ve posted to my blog 23 times so far this year!
I’m travelling this weekend, so I’ll get back to blog-posting in earnest next weekend. In the meantime, I’ll leave any readers out there with two videos.
First is the 34-second TV promo from the 1990s for a Season 3 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Hollow Pursuits.” So far, of Star Trek — I grew up in a Star Wars household, so I didn’t watch the better franchise until recently — I’ve completed The Original Series, The Animated Series, the first five movies, and the first three seasons of The Next Generation, and besides the wonderful fourth movie The Voyage Home (better known as the one with the whales), “Hollow Pursuits” is my favorite Star Trek story. I think the episode, which introduces the Lt. Barclay character, is amazing, but you wouldn’t know it from the hilariously ridiculous promo clip, which focuses on things other than the thought-provoking and empathy-generating story. Which I’ll admit, plot-wise, is over the top, in that so-bad-it’s-good campy way. Don’t be fooled by the goofy promo clip! Watch the actual episode someday, especially if you’re interested in mental health topics. It says a lot about psychosis and recovery: just replace the external, computer-created Holodeck room with a holodeck of extreme fantasy/delusion/escape inside a person’s head, but in either case keep the important help of social support and meaningful work.
Second is the music video, about five and a half minutes long, for the song “Johnny & the Sea” by one of my favorite musicians working today, Jordan Reyne. Here’s her Wikipedia entry. I could have picked any number of her songs, but while I was travelling through eastern Washington state and Northeast Oregon recently, “Johnny & the Sea” repeatedly came to my mind. I like her lyric lines “It’s through nausea and fear that we come to know how we are made” and “You forget how to swim once your life doesn’t throw you too far.” If you like the song, I recommend checking out the rest of her music, for instance the whole album that has “Johnny & the Sea” as its opening track, 2012’s Children of a Factory Nation. I love so many of the songs on that disc (to use an outdated term), but if you’re in a hurry, maybe check out “Wait (I Run Too Slow).” Or, for a more recent song of hers, listen to 2017’s “Birth Ritual.” What sticks out to me in her music are her vocals, her lyrics, her compositional style, and how well she plays her acoustic guitar (idk how she manages to get that bright percussive attack sound!). So yeah, everything about her music :-) She is her own person with her own unique style.
Maybe I should someday post to my blog reviews of Star Trek, and more reviews of music…
This blog post, Just two videos for fun this week: Star Trek and Jordan Reyne, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/02/two-forfun-videos-startrek-jordanreyne/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.
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1 comment so far ↓
Hollow Pursuits? Is that the one where Wesley’s like, “huh, huh, huh, Lieutenant Broccoli, huh, huh, huh!” and Picard’s like, “Shut up Wesley!” And then Diana sees Barclay’s holo-version of herself in the holodeck and she’s like, “Muzzle it!” And then Riker gets all sarcastic and goes, “But we’ve got to help this poor sick man!”
Yeah, that’s good stuff! I hope you get around to watching DS9 too after you finish TNG, because I’m one of those people who actually prefer DS9.
Movies-wise, I really liked “The Wrath of Khan.” I even got to see it in a theater, which was pretty cool. I tried to watch the whale one at one point, but I admit, I couldn’t get through it… I had to turn it off after about 30 minutes.
Nowadays I’m watching this show “Dark Matter” which I’d recommend to anyone who likes TNG/DS9. It’s a bit like a modern Star Trek show, and there’s a bunch of subtle references to the previous-gen shows that you’ll catch if you’ve watched those. But unlike “Discovery” and “Picard,” “Dark Matter” still follows the episodic format, which I think fans miss from the modern Trek shows from CBS.
Oh, and “Voyager” kind of sucks, by the way, but there are standout episodes here and there which are worth watching, IMHO. And I’d recommend “Enterprise” as well–I actually liked that one a lot more than I thought I would!
Happy travels and 4th of July weekend!
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