Retromania: Reviewed and Reassessed - Part 5: Tomorrow (Chapters 11 and 12)

Simon Reynolds: Retromania
Cover of the German edition (Ventil Verlag, 2012)

I.

In chapter 11, Reynolds - a former sci-fi fanatic - indulges in nostalgia for the Space Age; a time of giant steps and final frontiers, as he describes it. 

 

He also mourns the "absence of futuristic-ness" [a] in the fabric of daily life and says neostalgia became an increasingly widespread feeling during the opening decade of the 21st century, though, I have to admit, I didn't feel this "pang for the future that never arrived" [362]; perhaps because I preferred The Flintstones to The Jetsons [b] - or maybe because I hate motorists at ground level and the last thing I would want to see is flying automobiles blotting out the sky. 

 

Whatever the reason, I'm not particularly disappointed the future didn't arrive - for I never really expected or wanted it to. And when it has interfered with the present in the form of advanced (and alien) technologies, it's not been entirely advantageous - are we really any happier or better off now that we experience the world via a series of screens or have outsourced our thinking to AI? 

 

I don't think so: and Reynolds isn't particularly impressed by the digital age, which he describes as more decadent in character than heroic. He wants the world of Star Trek and to be able to beam on board the USS Enterprise - not the future glimpsed in Blade Runner in which it rains all the time, or the grotty on-board conditions of the commercial starship Nostromo, as seen in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).  

 

 

II.  

 

Sooner or later, Reynolds was always going to relate this idea of nostalgia for the future to the world of popular music - which I guess is fair enough, considering he's a music journalist, critic and author. 

 

But, if I'm honest, it gets a little boring reading about bands and DJs and genres of music I've never heard of and I can't help wondering at the kind of books Reynolds might have given us had he spent a little more of his time reading literature and philosophy and a little less listening to records ... [c] 

 

III.

Is nostalgia chiefly a "not feeling at home in the here-and-now, a sensation of alienation" [370]? That seems to view it as tied to a model of deficiency and/or lack; a model which, as a Deleuzian, is obviously problematic for me. 

 

Might we not think nostalgia as a form of desire; something positive and productive? By tying nostalgia to the (socially constructed) idea of lack, Reynolds views it as the pursuit of a missing (ideal) object, which is all very Freudian and Lacanian, but is that really where he wants to go? 

 

(I think perhaps he does, but I don't.)

As for alienation ... Why bring in a dated 19th century concept like this; one that relies on the very deficiency model rejected above? Further, if there's no human essence - and there is no human essence - then how can a subject ever really feel or be alienated? 

 

Perhaps Baudrillard is right to say (rather amusingly) that we are today alienated from alienation and that we have moved beyond the dramas of alienation played out in modernity. Either that, or that alienation is now total within an age of simulation in which the individual is fully codified. 

IV.
 

"In recent decades, nostalgia for the future has gradually lost its vagueness and become tied to a specific idée fixe: an archaic and sometimes comically ossified idea of what the future is going to be like." [370] 

 

In other words, it's become a retro-futurist emotion, stimulated by popular culture and in particular a vision of the future that was in large part invented by the Disney Corporation: 'Tomorrowland' (1955) providing the material blueprint for the plastic utopia to come. 

 

Amusingly, Tomorrowland is now a museum - and, after visiting, Reynolds came to much the same conclusion as Bruce Handy writing in Time in 1998: The future isn't what it used to be - i.e., it's "desperately uninspiring and lugubrious" [372] - which is shit in anybody's language. 

 

But is the fault less Disney's and more ours? Have we lost the ability to dream as a culture and "to come up with visionary goals to aim for" [372]?

 

Possibly. 

 

But again, let's enter a note of caution before throwing ourselves on the floor and bewailing our own inability to imagine the future. For mightn't it be a sign that we have wised up a little as a culture; that the postmodern abandonment of grand utopian visions - particularly when these are tied to dangerous political ideologies - is something we should be proud of. 

 

I certainly don't wish to resurrect the myth of rational progress and recommit to a single telelogical future; I rather like the ambiguity of the present and have no desire for a better world. I believe in the ruins of The City of Tomorrow and if that makes me a cynic, or a pessimist - or even a defender of capitalist realism - well, so be it. 

  

 

V.   

 

Moving on ... and essentially skipping a couple of sections, we come to the end of chapter 11, in which - to my surprise - Oswald Spengler again puts in an appearance; just what is Reynolds's fascination with this historically significant but intellectually marginal (and marginalised) figure? 

 

He refers us to the Faustian spirit identified by Spengler in his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik - a spirit which, says Reynolds, "is the dynamic behind modernism and modernisation, the impulse that propelled both the space race and twentieth-century music's exploration of sonic space through electronics" [394]. 

 

That may or may not be true, but this Faustian spirit is also tragic in nature and Spengler is adamant that there can be no prudent retreat into the past - not even one made in order to recover a lost future. He also dismisses optimism as a form of cowardice [d], so, ultimately, I can't see the appeal of his work for Reynolds, though he has clearly been influenced by the latter as this paragraph illustrates:

 

"When you look at the culture of the West in the last decade or so - the dominance of fashion and gossip, celebrity and image; a citizenry obsessed with decor and cuisine; the metastasis of irony throughout society - the total picture does look a lot like decadence. Retro culture would then be just another facet of the recline and fall of the West." [394-395]          

 

Reynolds suggests that this leaves opens "the possibility of the new coming from outside the West, from regions of the globe where culture is less exhausted" [395]. He specifically mentions China and India - "set to be the economic and demographic powerhouses of the century" [395] - and two cultures which, interestingly enough, Spengler also regarded as high-level, equal in spiritual greatness to the West. Obviously, both are ancient cultures and yet, paradoxically, they "feel 'younger' than us at the moment" [395].    

 

I have to admit, I have my doubts (and concerns) about the idea that the economic and geo-political future belongs to Asia; for there are multiple factors (including some we cannot foresee) that might prevent the global dominance of China and India. 

 

Nevertheless, Reynolds also seems to pin his musical hopes on the non-Western world, now that the "Anglo-American pop tradition is all innovated out" [396]. But again, I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party will allow an explosion of "popular energies and desires" [396] amongst the young. 

 

And the last time they encouraged such it resulted not in the Summer of Love, but the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, so those who advise the West to simply rest and outsource the future to Beijing should be careful what they wish for.    

 

 

VI. 

 

I smiled to hear that even William Gibson has given up on the future; that he prefers these days to speak of atemporality and the digital Now. 

 

When I was in the philosophy department at Warwick in the 1990s and the CCRU was a thing (if it ever was a thing), Gibson's 1984 novel Necromancer was required reading. Unfortunately, I found it to be one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read - right up there with Naked Lunch (1959) and Silas Marner (1861).   

 

However, I agree with Gibson that the 21st century is richer, stranger and more complex than any imaginary future and that science fiction, therefore - at least in the traditional speculative sense - is now redundant: the future is here already and our task today is to explore the alien present [e]. 

 

Reynolds, however, isn't of this view: "Gibson's perspective is so completely other to my own that I'm flabbergasted." [397] I'm sorry about that, although it's always nice to see a piece of 18th century British slang being used.

 

 

VII. 

 

And now, the end is near - chapter 12 - the final chapter: 'The Shock of the Old' ... Time for Reynolds to address those questions he posed, but perhaps failed to fully address along the way. 

 

Questions such as: Given that I enjoy many aspects of retro, why do I still feel deep down that it is lame and shameful? [403 - italics in the original].

 

I'm tempted to suggest it's because, Simon, you still labour under the illusion of psychic depth. If you were a little less soulful - became a little more floral - you'd miraculously find much of the shame you experience (which seems more moral than instinctive in nature and which often serves to hinder your enjoyment) simply fades away. 

 

Of course, becoming-flower isn't easy. But, if a wasp can manage it, I'm sure you'll be able to find a way (and can always turn for advice to Deleuze and Guattari writing in A Thousand Plateaus).  

 

 

VIII. 

 

Reynolds admits that his understanding of rock and pop is very much infused by the "belief that art has some kind of evolutionary destiny, a teleology that manifests itself through genius artists and masterpieces that are monuments to the future" [403]. The funny thing is, he says this in part due to the fact he was born in 1963 - 'The Year That Rock Began'. 

 

But I was born in the same year, and my understanding of popular culture isn't weighed down by this belief. Perhaps that's because I was born under a different star sign [f]; or perhaps it's because I took the work of postmodernists such as Lyotard more seriously than Reynolds and have made terms such as irony, incredulity, and insouciance watchwords rather than belief, teleology, destiny, etc.        

 

Again, by his own admission, his obsession with and loyalty to music served only to consolidate his outmoded ideas and beliefs:

 

"Although by the early eighties modernism was thoroughly eclipsed within art and architecture, and postmodernism was seeping into popular music, the spirit of modernist pop carried on with rave and the experimental fringe of rock. These surges of renewal served as a booster shot for me, reconfirming the modernist credo [...]" [404] 

 

That's a really rather terrible admission of bias; superhonest, but shocking. And for me it confirms Jamie Reid's idea that music prevents you thinking for yourself [g]. 

 

Reynolds continues: "There is an argument that the linear model of progress is an ideological figment [...] [404] - well, yes, I made exactly this argument earlier in this post. 

 

But despite having his belief in progress badly shaken by recent events, Reynolds sadly chooses to avoid the argument and instead just doubles-down on his position: "As a died-in-the-wool [sic] modernist [...] I would find it hard to break the habit of a lifetime [...] Giving it up would feel like giving in, learning to settle for less." [404]  

 

Again, that's honest, but disappointing: he sounds like one of those Japanese soldiers stranded on a Pacific desert island for many long years and refusing to accept the war finished long ago. I know some people admire holdouts - and perhaps there is something admirable about an act of defiant resistance - but ... well, there are surely better hills to die on than that of popular music. 

 

 

IX.  

 

Reynolds doesn't like flatness and so he won't think much of Pancake Tuesday, Jane Birkin's physique, or the Deleuze and Guattari text recommended earlier. 

 

For as the title suggests, Mille plateaux is all about flat terrain and molecular politics, rather than mountain peaks and what Reynolds describes as the momentous and by which he refers to molar events and the idea that these alone bring about significant historical change or progress. 

 

As an object-oriented philosopher, I subscribe of course to a flat ontology, which is to say, to the idea that all objects exist on the same plane of reality and I can't help suspecting that Reynolds would not care for this model of being; that he rather likes hierarchical structures that allow for judgement. 

 

Or perhaps he just has a fear of feeling emotionally flat and this explains his need of newness and constant stimulation, including, during his rave days, the entactogenic drug ecstasy [h].

 

 

X. 

 

Another thing Reynolds does not like is stillness; he wants things to keep moving - and moving forward at pace. But hasn't he heard that sometimes one can be quick even when standing still (that speed and intensity do not necessarily require movement)? Stillness isn't synonymous with stasis and stagnancy.

 

I refer him once more to Deleuze and Guattari, and their notions of lines of flight and deterritorialisation; neither of which are progressive ideas - there's no linear movement from A to B - but both of which allow for radical change and the breaking away from established habits, structures, and identities so as to invent new ways of thinking and acting. 

 

Stillness is a keyword for me now; as it became for Roland Barthes in his late work on the Neutral  and I'm pretty sure the latter also writes in praise of flatness too.  

 

 

XI. 

  

This couple of sentences made me smile: 

 

"This attachment on the part of young people to genres that have been around for decades mystifies me. Don't they want to push them aside?" [408]

 

Apparently not! 

 

But is it any more mystifying than why the author of Retromania should wish to cling on to ideas from the late-19th and early-20th centuries to do with progress and making everything new.   

 

Maybe young people don't give a shit anymore about when a genre was first invented and don't feel that "vague nostalgia [...] for a lost golden age when music had power and integrity" [410] that Simon and Sandi Thom think they should. 

 

Maybe they prefer music that is less potent and less meaningful, but also doesn't demand that they adhere to it with fanatic loyalty and at the exclusion of all other interests; maybe they don't need mythical rock gods (or even the NME) to tell them what to think and feel any longer [j].     

 

 

XII.

 

Reynolds's closing remarks on the economics and politics of pop culture in an era of postproduction were provocative. I particularly like the bit about meta-money and meta-music being connected at some fundamental level (although I don't know if it's true outside of Marxist analysis):  

 

"Culture, as the superstructure to the economy's base, reflects the gaseous quality of our existence. The insubstantiality of the economy revealed itself, horribly, a few years ago. We are still waiting for the music-about-music bubble to burst." [420-421]

 

For Reynolds, it is fashion which provides the "nexus between late capitalism and culture" [421] - the point where they intermesh. If video killed the radio star, fashion killed popular music; infecting the latter with its "artificially accelerated metabolic rate, its rapid cycles of engineered obsolescence" [421].

 

The logic of fashion has polluted the sweet river of time that once flowed gently but inexorably from past to future. Or as Reynolds writes: "Fashion - a machinery for creating cultural capital and then, with incredible speed, stripping it of value and dumping the stock - permeates everything." [422]

 

As a philosopher on the catwalk, I smiled at this. But I also feel I have to push back a little - even if Reynolds himself slightly qualifies the above by conceding that the fashion-isation of the world "can't totally explain the rise of retro rock" [422].

 

Firstly, it's a little surprising that a self-professed modernist like Reynolds should so dislike fashion - the most modern of all modern phenomena. But then lacking any telos - any final purpose - I suppose fashion was always going to seem trivial and superficial to Reynolds. 

 

One might have imagined, however, based on the experimental and radical nature of the music he privileges, that he'd rather approve of the manner in which fashion ruptures the order of referential reason, dissolving old values and conventions. It may only provide the illusion of change, but there is a genuine passion at its heart: the passion for empty signs and cycles and for making the insignificant signify and it's this which makes it of interest (to me at least). 

 

 

XIII.    

 

If fashion is for Reynolds is a non-starter and if "it is now pretty clear that pop is living on borrowed time and stolen energy" [422], then where do those who care about cultural vitality and rescuing lost futures go from here?   

 

Reynolds says he'd "love to nominate hauntology" [423] as the answer to this question and as "the alternative to the curatorial model of art" [423]. But he can't bring himself to do it. For he knows that in many ways even those figures he admires working in this area, such as Ariel Pink [i], "are postproduction artists too, rummaging through the flea market of history and piecing together the audio equivalent of a junk-art installation" [423].    

 

By his own admission, this leads to a tricky question for Reynolds as an Ariel Pink fan and champion of the hauntological in general: what exactly is this music's contribution? 

 

"In fact, what in today's musical landscape is rich enough, nourishing enough - which is to say, sufficiently nonderivative - to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? Surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further use-value can be extracted." [424]. 

 

That seems a fair observation. But surely then, when this point is reached is precisely when people will - from necessity - create new sounds. So he should find comfort in this idea - and that thing he cherishes called hope. 

 

And indeed, he does: concluding his study with a line that might have come from Fox Mulder's bedroom wall: "I still believe the future is out there." [428] 

 

So, there was really nothing to worry about all along ... 

 

  

Notes

[a] Simon Reynolds, Retromania (Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 362. Future page numbers will be given directly in the text and refer to this edition. 

 

[b] Strangely, however, I prefer Lt. Ellis in her silver mini-skirt [click here] to Loana in her fur bikini, although I'm not blind to the appeal of prehistoric women: click here.  

 

[c] His brief reading of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet on page 369 is excellent and I only wish Mr Reynolds wrote more on Portuguese poets and French thinkers such as Baudrillard - whom he mentions several times, but never really engages with - and spent a bit less time discussing rap music, rave culture, and obscure electronic groups from the 1990s.     

 

[d] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: a Contribution to the Philosophy of Life, trans. C. F. Atkinson, (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1932), p.103.  

 

[e] That's really not such an outlandish view; J. G. Ballard said much the same thing way back in the seventies; i.e., that sci-fi should stick to exploring the all-voracious present and mapping inner space and the impact of modern technology on the human psyche. For Ballard, in sum, the job of the writer is to invent reality as we already live inside a fictional world order. See the Preface to the French edition of his novel Crash (1974): click here.  

 

[f] I was born on 13 Feb and that makes me an Aquarian; Reynolds was born on 19 June and that makes him a Gemini (and so more prone to belief and less sceptical in character) - or so I'm told by someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.  

 

[g] I'm referring to Jamie Reid's 'Stratoswasticastor' design: click here for details on punkrocker.org.uk 

 

[h] See Simon Renolds, Generation Ecstasy (Routledge, 1999), in which he takes the reader on a tour of the world of rave culture and techno music as a dosed up and blissed out insider. For Reynolds, MDMA was the essential ingredient or catalyst; the magic pill that allowed for a communal and transformative experience bordering on the spiritual (although he does also acknowledge its more troubling aspects).   

 

[i] Reynolds names the American musician and singer-songwriter Ariel Pink as (probably) his favourite artist of the 2000s, even if his hypnogogic sound is "woven out of blurry echoes of halcyon radio pop from the sixties, seventies and eighties" [xxiii] - i.e., the "grand period of primary pop productivity" [423].  

 

[j] As a father of children, Reynolds recognises that younger people do not think the same way that people of his generation think; do not care about the same things: "they're not the least bit interested in the capital 'f' Future, barely ever think about it" [425-426] and their urge to escape the present is satisfied "through fantasy [...] or digital technology" [426].  

 

 

Other posts in the Retromania series can be accessed by clicking here. 

 

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidegger

Lost in Space mit Martin Heidgger 

(SA/2026)

 

'It is no longer the Earth on which human beings dwell today ...'  

 

 

I. 

 

One of the things I have to remind myself of when reading Heidegger is that even if he was born in the year Nietzsche went mad and published Sein und Zeit a few months before The Jazz Singer premiered in New York, he lived for a significant number of years after 1945 and so witnessed (whether he wished to or not) a period of rapid global transformation marked by huge geopolitical events and socio-cultural shifts.

 

We know what he thought about the Cold War - that it was a battle for technological mastery of the Earth fought between two superpowers that, whilst ideologically opposed, were metaphysically identical - and yet we have no idea what Heidegger thought about the sexual revolution, the extension of civil rights, England winning the World Cup, or a thousand other things that he could have commented on had he wished to do so. 

 

However, thanks to a posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, we do know how he regarded the space race ... [1]

 

 

II.      

 

Whilst Heidegger did not comment directly on the 1969 Apollo moon landing, in the above interview he did express his horror at the idea of humanity venturing into space; one small step for a man, one giant leap further into the void for Dasein. 

 

Looking at photographs of the Earth taken from space by the robotic lunar orbiters launched by NASA in 1966-67, Heidegger said he was frightened, regarding the images as evidence that we no longer dwell (i.e., have our being) on Earth in any meaningful sense. Instead, our relationship with the world had become, he said, purely abstract, reducing the Earth to a planetary object to be surveyed and enframed (i.e. reduced to a mere resource for exploitation).  

 

For Heidegger, das Raketenzeitalter, as he called it, was perhaps even more disasterous than the Atomic Age; for whilst the latter threatened to blow us all to kingdom come, the Rocket Age essentially evicted humanity from its terrestrial home. He provocatively claimed that nuclear weapons were thus no longer needed as the technological revealing exemplified within the space race had already resulted in mankind's existential uprooting.   

 

For Heidegger, the idea of colonising the Moon (or other planets, such as Mars) was anathema; for the Moon was a physical environment that could never be a world in the true sense of the term, only a site for technical manipulation. Far from expanding the human horizon, space exploration would only reduce and narrow such by making everything distanceless. 

 

Heidegger also criticised the modern scientific jargon used to describe the heavens; what he called rocket language made words purely functional and thereby rendered authentic communication or poetic engagement with the world impossible. 

 

In sum: Heidegger wholeheartedly rejects the idea advanced by Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise that our destiny as a species is to "explore strange new worlds" and to "boldly go where no man has gone before" [2]. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] This interview with Der Spiegel was conducted on 23 September, 1966, by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff. It had been granted by Heidegger only on the condition that it remain unpublished during his lifetime and so was not published until 31 May, 1976. 

      The interview is commonly known by the title 'Only a God Can Save Us' in the English translation by William J. Richardson, which can be found in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. Click here to read on the Internet Archive. 

 

[2] I'm quoting here, as I'm sure most readers will know, from the opening monologue spoken by William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk during the opening title sequence of the original Star Trek series (1966-69).

 

 

For a sister post to this one - 'Back of the Net mit Martin Heidegger' (13 Jan 2026) - click here.    

 

 

No Matter What the Future Brings ...

"You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss ..." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The kiss between Kirk (played by William Shatner) and Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) in an episode of Star Trek entitled 'Plato's Stepchildren' [2] - which was first broadcast 55 years ago this month - is often cited - incorrectly - as the first example of an interracial kiss on television [3].

 

Even if not actually true - and even if their lips do not actually touch [4] - it was a nice moment and (in a time of heightened racial tension) a significant one. Indeed, it is often ranked as one of the greatest romantic moments in Star Trek and one of the most culturally impactful. 

 

For me, however, as the author of a series of papers on zoophilia [5], there is another on-screen kiss in 1968 which interests more; and that is the kiss shared between Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) and Zira (played by Kim Hunter) in the movie Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Shaffner) ...

 

 

II.

 

The original - and the best - Planet of the Apes movie (written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, loosely based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle), is fondly remembered by many people for many scenes and many lines of dialogue. 

 

That includes, obviously, the still-shocking end scene when Taylor realises where he is and what has happened: 'Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time ... We finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!' [Click here.]

But my favourite scene comes shortly before this, when Taylor is about to ride off, accompanied by Nova, in search of what Dr Zaius terms his destiny. 

 

Wishing to express his gratitude to Cornelius and Zira for the help they have given him, he informs the latter he'd like to give her a kiss. She gives her consent and seems to enjoy the touch of his lips on hers, even if she finds Taylor so damned ugly. [Click here.]

Again, it's  a very touching scene and, arguably, far more transgressive than the kiss in Star Trek, hinting as it does at the possibility of interspecies romantic relations - particularly human-chimp sexuality, something that I have previously discussed on Torpedo the Ark: click here.   

 

 

III.

 

Amusingly, in her 1994 autobiography Beyond Uhura Nichelle Nichols recalls that one person describing himself as a proud white Southerner wrote the following in a letter to the studio after her kiss with Shatner was broadcast: 

 

"'I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it.'" [6]

 

One can't help wondering if a similar letter was received by the producers of Planet of the Apes, that might possibly have read:

 

I am totally opposed to the mixing of species. However, any time an all-American hero like George Taylor gets rescued by a beautiful chimp scientist like Zira, he may as well take advantage of the fact. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] These lines (and the line used in the title of this post) are from the jazz song "As Time Goes By" written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. It became famous when it featured in the 1942 film Casablanca, performed by Dooley Wilson as the piano player Sam. Click here.

 

[2] Star Trek, 'Plato's Stepchildren' [S3/E10], directed by David Alexander, written by Gene Roddenberry, Meyer Dolinsky, and Arthur H. Singer, was first broadcast on 22 November 1968. The scene in which Kirk kisses Uhura can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here. 

 

[3] Although widely believed to be the first interracial kiss on TV, there are, in fact, several earlier incidents of such. For example, Shatner himself exchanged a kiss with France Nuyen - a French-American actress of Asian heritage - on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1958 (they were performing a scene from the Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong in which they starred).

      Shatner, in his role as Captain Kirk, also kissed Lt. Marlena Moreau, played by BarBara Luna, an actress of Filipino-European ancestry, on the lips in the second season episode of Star Trek entitled 'Mirrror, Mirror' (1967).

 

[4] Shatner would later reveal that concerned NBC executives had insisted their lips never touch, using the technique of turning their heads away from the camera to conceal what was (or was not) going on. However, writing in her 1994 autobiography, Beyond Uhura, Nichols insists that in the take of the scene that was eventually broadcast the kiss was genuine. Despite the concerns expressed, the episode received no complaints - in fact the response from fans of the show was hugely positive. 

 

[5] See The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. III, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). The six papers in the Zoophilia series (also known as the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures) were first presented at Treadwell's Bookshop in Feb-March 2007. 

 

[6] Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, (G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1994), pp. 196-197. 

Is it Time to Torpedo Torpedo the Ark?

Henry Winkler as Fonzie about to jump the shark in Happy Days (1977)

Alice Krige as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

 

I. 

 

Having spent many years among the ruins writing nothing but fragments in praise of fragmented writing, there was, in the late autumn of 2012, nowhere else to go - and nothing else to do - but enter the blogosphere and embrace the postmodern re-creation of that most charmingly sentimental of forms, le journal.

 

However, as Torpedo the Ark marks its tenth anniversary and rapidly approaches its 2000th post, I find myself wondering whether the blog has, in fact, jumped the shark ...?

 

This perjorative phrase was coined in 1985 with reference to a now notorious episode of the American sitcom Happy Days, in which Fonzie (literally) jumps over a shark whilst on water-skis [1]. 

In a nutshell, it means that a once great TV show (or blog) has passed its best before date - or, if you prefer, gone beyond a joke - and entered the phase when it requires increasingly ridiculous stunts and gimmicks in order to retain its audience (or readership). 

 

This is certainly a concern, although, to be honest, not much of a concern, as I think that one of the most interesting aspects of Torpedo the Ark is that the quality of the posts (like the length and content) can vary wildly and that this variation is not chronologically determined. 

 

Thus, like the Fonz, I'm cool when it comes to jumping the shark. And besides, it doesn't prevent me from growing a beard afterwards [2].  

 

 

II.

 

More of a worry is that the following critic may have a point: 

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander,

 

You claim that Torpedo the Ark is an attempt to destroy the coordination of life in all its rich diversity and difference. Ironically, however, that's precisely what you are doing on your blog.

      Indeed, I am tempted to think of Torpedo the Ark as a kind of Borg vessel and visualise you as a Borg Queen, overseeing the co-option of otherness and assimilating a wide variety of ideas within a single narrative.

      Unlike Noah, who built his Ark to God's design in order to preserve and protect all forms of life, you have constructed a diabolically clever blog which forcibly transforms very singular writers and thinkers into drones ready to do your bidding, or dummies who give voice to your own nihilistic philosophy based not so much on the futility of resistance as the abandonment of all hope and curbing of any enthusiasm.

    

 

This is a provocative email in which the writer nicely summarises the blog's (nihilistic) philosophy. And if I thought it were true, I'd certainly be concerned.     

 

However, whilst I may have a profound loathing for species 5618, I don't quite see myself as a Borg Queen in the manner my correspondent conceives. For just as she is more an avatar of the Collective than a ruler over it, I am merely an effect and function of the blog, rather than a sovereign intelligence controlling everything behind the scenes. 

 

In other words, I am neither the origin nor the limitation of Torpedo the Ark and so it's really not up to me to determine when or how it comes to an end. Happily, I can leave that to fate ...      

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Happy Days episode in question was the third episode of season five, entitled 'Hollywood: Part 3' (dir. Jerry Paris), which aired on 20 September, 1977. Click here to watch a five minute clip on YouTube. 

      It's important to note that Happy Days remained a hugely successful show long after this episode and the series ran for another six seasons. 

 

[2] Growing the beard is the opposite of jumping the shark; the definitive moment when a show or an artist finally finds their feet (or their voice) and their popularity or critical standing suddenly takes off.

      The phrase derives from the fact that the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is considered superior to the first season and that, coincidentally, the character William Riker (played by Jonathan Frakes) had chosen to abandon his clean-shaven look.   

 

 

If We Could Talk to the Animals

Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus)

  

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains 

the hottest blood of all ... [1]

 

 

As far as I recall, even Doctor Doolittle - who, famously, abandoned his human patients in favour of treating animals, with whom he could communicate in their various languages - never spoke to a sperm whale. But, apparently, an interdisciplinary group of scientists may now be close to so doing, with help from AI technology ...

 

The Cetacean Translation Initiative aims to decode the astonishing variety of clicks and whistles made by sperm whales. If successful, the project would be the first time (outside of fiction) that humans will be able to understand - and presumably employ - the language of another species (if, that is, animal utterances can legitimately be described as a language) [2].   

 

Of course, learning to decipher and communicate in whale-speech isn't going to be easy, even with the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence. But it's an intriguing project and one wonders what Moby Dick might have to tell us ... 

 

Alas, I fear it won't be anything very pleasing to human ears; for I suspect that these huge, intelligent mammals will, like elephants, have long memories and will thus recall the industrial scale slaughter of their kind by man during the last 300 years [3]. 

 

Maybe, to paraphrase Nietzsche, they'll accuse us not only of being the most absurd and unfortunate of all animals, but also the cruellest [4]. 

 

But maybe, if we're lucky, they'll also teach us something about love ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whales weep not!', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 607-08. 

      This poem can be found online at poets.org: click here. Some readers might recall that the opening two lines were quoted by Capt. Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (dir. Leonard Nimoy, 1986), which features a pair of humpback whales. 

 

[2] Scientists and linguists are still uncertain whether or not animals can be said to truly possess language. For vocalisations can only be called a language if it can be shown that they possess fixed meanings and structures (i.e., without semantics and grammar, you just have a lot of clicks, grunts, squeaks, and squawks).   

 

[3] Although sperm whales are now a protected species and remaining populations are large enough that their conservation status is rated as vulnerable rather than endangered, the recovery from centuries of commercial whaling will be a slow process and it's doubtful the number of whales inhabiting the world's oceans will ever be what it once was. 

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'Talk to the Animals', written by Leslie Bricusse for the film Doctor Dolittle (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1967). Performed by Rex Harrison (as Doolittle), it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and has been recorded by numerous artists, including Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis Jr. 

      Click here to listen to Bobby Darin's take on the song, from the album Bobby Darin Sings Doctor Doolittle, (Atlantic Records, 1967). 

Ailurophilia: The Case of Gary Seven and Isis

Robert Lansing as Gary Seven holding his familiar Isis the Cat

April Tatro as Isis in her human form

One of the strangest and most amusing episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, is 'Assignment Earth' - the 26th and final episode of season two.*

There are several reasons for its queer likeability; the fact that it's set on Earth in 1968; the performance of its two guest stars, Robert Lansing as the interstellar agent Gary Seven and the lovely Terri Garr as Roberta Lincoln; and that it features a black cat called Isis who works her feline charms even on Mr. Spock.**

Whilst appearing at first to be an ordinary cat, Isis is revealed not only to possess great intelligence, but the ability also to take on human form (and what a form it is, as played in the episode by the (uncredited) actress, dancer and contortionist April Tatro). She is Mr. Seven's constant companion and can communicate with him via a form of interspecies telepathy.

Whether he engages in sexual activity with Isis whilst she's in her human form isn't made clear, but it certainly seems likely and Miss Lincoln displays clear signs of sexual jealousy towards Isis (in her human form) at the end of the episode, even though at this point she has no real relationship of any description with Mr. Seven. 

Quite a lovely animal ...

I find myself strangely drawn to it. 

Notes

* 'Assignment Earth', written by Art Wallace (based on a story by Wallace and Gene Roddenberry) and directed by Marc Daniels, was first broadcast on 29 March, 1968. 

Further adding to its uniqueness as a Star Trek episode is the fact that it essentially functioned as a backdoor pilot for a projected new series starring Lansing and Garr as Mr. Seven and Miss Lincoln (a series that, alas, was never to be made).     

** As the following short scene from the above episode demonstrates: click here.

Readers who like this episode, might also find the seventh episode of season two of interest; entitled 'Catspaw', it was written by Robert Bloch (i.e, the writer of the novel Psycho (1959), upon which Hitchcock's 1960 film was based) and featured another shape-shifting alien woman (Sylvia, played by Antoinette Bower) with a fondness for taking the form of a black cat. Directed by Joseph Pevney, this episode was first broadcast on 27 October, 1967, in order to coincide with Halloween. 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

Three Cases of Brain Theft

I. The Case of Mr. Spock

As fans of Star Trek will know, 'Spock's Brain' was the opening episode of the third and final season of the original TV series.

Written by Gene L. Coon and directed by Marc Daniels, the episode was first broadcast on 20 September, 1968, and tells the amusing story of how an alien beauty beams aboard the Enterprise in order to surgically remove and steal Spock's brain. Capt. Kirk and his crew have just 24 hours to locate said organ and pop it back into Spock's empty skull before his brainless body dies.

Personally, I quite like the episode for its B-movie charm, although it's widely regarded as the worst of the entire series; even Leonard Nimoy admitted to feeling embarrassed during the shooting of the episode. Claims, however, that it strains credibility seem ridiculous to me. For even at its most plausible, Star Trek is hardly gritty social realism and I'm pretty sure that the Enterprise doesn't even have a kitchen sink.

Long story short, Dr. McCoy - with the assistance of Spock himself - successfully returns the brain to its rightful location and all's well that ends well. 

II. The Case of Adolf Hitler

Unlike Mr. Spock, Adolf Hitler is not a fictional character. However, it's important to stress that the 1968 film They Saved Hitler's Brain, directed by David Bradley, is not a documentary detailing real events.*

Adapted (and extended) for TV from a 1963 feature film entitled Madmen of Mandoras, it tells the tale of how Nazi officials removed Hitler's still-living head at the end of the Second World War and transported it to a (fictional) South American hideaway, in the hope that they might one day be able to bring the Führer back to full consciousness and thence resurrect the Third Reich.      

From 1945, the movie leaps forward into the 1960s and the surviving Nazis, having decided the time is right, kidnap a leading scientist in the field of neurosurgery in order to help fulfil their evil scheme. Unfortunately, however, Western intelligence agencies are aware of what's going on and determined to foil the plan. I'll not reveal the ending, just in case any readers are interested in watching the film for themselves: click here. 

Amusingly, They Saved Hitler's Brain is referenced in several episodes of The Simpsons (and at least one episode of Futurama), suggesting Matt Groening either has something of a fan's penchant for the film, or an obsession with Hitler's brain.

And note also - according to the Dead Kennedys - if you want to make a Tricky Dickie Screwdriver, you'll need to mix "one part Jack Daniels, two parts purple Kool-Aid, and a jigger of formaldehyde from the jar with Hitler's brain in it".** 

III. The Case of Albert Einstein

Finally, we come to the case of Albert Einstein; a case involving a real man, a real brain, and a real theft committed just hours after his death in April 1955.

Even whilst he was still alive, people were fascinated with Einstein's brain. Such an organ, belonging to one of the greatest of all scientific geniuses, just had to have special properties, or be significantly larger in size than the standard model. No surprise, therefore, that before his body had even chance to cool, his cranium was being removed and brain dissected - though what is surprising is that this was done without his prior consent or the permission of his family.***

Einstein's autopsy was conducted by the pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey. Having removed and weighed the brain, Harvey then popped it in a jar of formalin and smuggled it to a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he photographed it from numerous angles, before then cutting it into around 240 slices, encasing these segments in a plastic-like material called collodion.

Harvey kept some of these for himself; others, he distributed amongst fellow pathologists, all of whom were eager to have a piece of Einstein's brain. One lucky fellow, Einstein's ophthalmologist, received the great man's eyes that Harvey had also taken time to remove and carefully preserve.   

In 1978, what remained of Einstein's brain in Harvey's possession was rediscovered by a journalist interested in the story (preserved in alcohol in two large jars and hidden in a box). Eventually, in 2010, Harvey's heirs transferred all of his holdings - including the remains of Einstein's brain and fourteen never-seen-before photographs of the organ prior to dissection - to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Silver Spring, Maryland.    

Notes

* Hitler committed suicide along with his wife, Eva, on April 30, 1945, and their bodies were burned according to his instructions. The Red Army, who captured Berlin just a few days later, discovered the charred remains and shipped them back to Russia, where a piece of jaw bone and a fragment of skull were secretly kept in the Soviet State Archives.

** I'm referring to (and quoting from) the Dead Kennedys track 'We've Got a Bigger Problem Now', from the EP In God We Trust, Inc. (Alternative Tentacles, 1981): click here to play. 

*** Einstein's eldest son endorsed the removal of his father's brain, but only after the event and only on the condition that it should be used for serious research to be published in respected scientific journals.


For a related post to this one on brains in jars, click here.

Futuristic Fashion: The Sci-Fi Mini-Skirt

Gabrielle Drake as
Lt. Gay Ellis in UFO (1970-71)

I think I've mentioned that I'm not a great lover of science fiction. But the future of female fashion, however, as imagined within the genre, certainly does excite my interest ...

I'm particularly struck by the fact that the mini-skirt is predicted to become almost de rigueur and worn by space babes throughout the universe, whatever their planet of origin; often silver-metallic in design, as worn, for example, by everybody's favourite Moonbase commander, Lt. Ellis, with matching top and boots. 

The question is: how did the short - often dangerously short and knicker-flashing - skirt become such a staple of futuristic fashion as conceived within 20th century science fiction?

It's been suggested that the pulp artwork of Earle K. Bergey, produced in the 1940s, was seminal to this development. Certainly by the fifties, the sci-fi micro-mini was ingrained within the pornographic imagination and the girls on Space Patrol regularly took raised hemlines not only to the outer limits of the universe, but the upper levels of the thigh; as did the lovely Anne Francis as Altaira in the sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred M. Wilcox, 1956).    

A decade later, when well above the knee skirts and dresses were officially designated by British fashion designer Mary Quant as minis, we find the women of Star Trek, including Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura, also happily showing lots of leg and thus affording Captain Kirk and his mostly male crew the opportunity to perv whilst allowing her, apparently, to feel liberated and empowered.   

There is, of course, no reason why very short skirts shouldn't be popular in the 23rd century; women have been wearing them for almost as long as they've had legs ...

Archaeologists have found evidence, indeed, that neolithic lovelies liked to parade around in such, distracting their menfolk from hunting and other activities (cf. Wilma and Betty in The Flintstones) and Bronze Age beauties in Northern Europe, such as the Egtved Girl, also dressed to impress by wearing very short skirts and midriff-baring crop-top combinations.

So, it's perfectly feasible that women in the distant future and farthest reaches of space will continue to choose playfully provocative outfits that speak of youthful exuberance and optimism; to keep on dancing and reaching for the stars, whilst their hemlines go boldly upwards and their nipples burst through like hyacinth tips, as Germaine Greer once put it ...    

To see more examples of sci-fi minis, go to the Mini Skirt Monday page (#190) on Retrospace: click here.

Loving the Alien (Notes on Exophilia)

Dream-sketch by Zena
(untitled, undated)

As Roland Barthes once pointed out, the art of love has no history. And so there's no progress in pleasures - nothing but mutations and perverse deviations. So it can't be said that exophilia is simply an unearthly development of xenophilia; loving the alien is not merely a substitute for loving foreigners.

Rather, it's a unique form of desire that deserves to be considered in its own right, even if its devotees share traits with other paraphiles who have a penchant for inhuman and non-human lovers and long for a sexual experience that is truly out of this world (what the journalist Annalee Newitz charmingly describes as an alien fuckfest).   

What, then, is exophilia, in essence, if you will ...?

Obviously, such a question is difficult - perhaps impossible - to answer; who can truly say what love is (particularly forms of love that are by their very nature queer and which often involve extreme as well as abnormal activities)? 

However, for those who imagine the phenomenon of alien abduction to involve human test subjects being taken secretly and against their will by extraterrestrial biological entities in order to be experimented upon in ways that include a non-consensual sexual component, I suppose exophilia might be said to be primarily a sci-fi rape fantasy or close encounter of the kinky kind. 

Procedures such as vaginal and anal probing, the collection of semen and harvesting of ova, etc. all speak of medical fetish transplanted out of the lab or hospital and projected into the still more sterile and even more hi-tech environment of a spacecraft. It's intergalactic masochism in which submission is made to an alien overlord rather than a woman in furs.            

Of course, not all exophiles are so passive in their pleasures; some dream of violently penetrating alien bodies and inflicting a maximum amount of pain and suffering upon creatures from outer-space ...

Supervert, for example, is the author of a philosophically-informed, pornographic work entitled Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, in which the protagonist, Mercury de Sade, is a serial-killer looking to make contact with EBEs - not to befriend them, learn from them, or submit to them; but so that he might rape, torture and murder them. 

It's a deeply unpleasant read. But it's also a necessary counternarrative to the moral idealism of Star Trek in which humans and non-humans all rub along together in a kind of rainbow alliance; or, again to paraphrase Annalee Newitz, the playful cosmic permissiveness of Barbarella in which everyone fucks, but no one is ever fucked-up or fucked-over.                    


Notes

Those interested in knowing more about Supervert's Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish (2001) can click here. Or, to read a sample chapter, here. 

Those interested in reading Annalee Newitz's review of the above as it appears on AlterNet (18 Aug 2002), can click here. 

This post was inspired by (and is dedicated to) Zena, who provided the lovely illustration above.