Fall 2024 classes begin on Wednesday, August 28. Originally, I was hoping to teach City Tech’s ENG2420, Science Fiction course in person this semester, but the in-person section had too few students to run. Thankfully, after the administration switched the class to being online, asynchronous and sending a message blast to prospective students, the new online class quickly filled up. Since City Tech recently switched to a new learning management system (LMS) called Brightspace, I’m going to experiment teaching the class on it instead of using our open learning system, OpenLab. However, I will still create my video lectures as YouTube videos, so they will be public facing for anyone interested in following along or using them in their own classes. Also, this will be my first time teaching the class using my open educational resource (OER) Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook. Here’s to a positive and productive semester!
Yesterday, Y and I took the subway to Manhattan to watch the film Alien: Romulus on the IMAX screen at the AMC 14 on 34th Street.
I thought that Alien: Romulus was an interesting story that threaded the needle of connecting the origin film Alien (1979) via the first Xenomorph we saw and the android Ash (Ian Holm) to Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) via the black liquid (hints of the black oil from The X-Files) and the Engineers. The retrocomputers, ASCII text, and a computer with a 3.5″ floppy disk drive made it feel like the same world as Alien. I felt that some of the lines were corny, over-the-top, and unnecessary fan service, but overall, it was an interesting and sometimes exciting addition to the series.
Unrelated to the film per se, I have some thoughts instead about the technologies of presentation and communal engagement with the film.
First, movies shown in theaters, especially IMAX films, are shown with the volume far too loud. Y and I last went to an IMAX film over 10 years ago, but the memory of how that experience hurt both of our ears, we planned ahead and brought foam ear plugs. Even with our ear plugs, which work wonders at eliminating noise in other settings, were just barely up to the task of keeping the volume of the film presentation at tolerable levels. Let me put that another way: While wearing ear plugs, I was able to hear the film’s dialog and sound effects and music just fine and sometimes a little not fine when it got so loud as to overpower the ear plugs. That’s too damn loud. It was only after we were leaving that Y thought we should have checked the decibel levels. Hindsight is 20-20.
Second, I know to some I might sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn, but for those who have known me a long time, they know that I’ve been deadly serious about this since going to see films when I was a kid. That is we owe other theater goers our respect so that everyone can enjoy the film. Carrying on, talking, or using a phone during a movie can disturb others, so we shouldn’t do those things. Unfortunately, some of the other customers, who would have paid the same $30 per ticket we paid, don’t care for social norms and simple decency. It would be one thing if these were kids who didn’t know any better, but these were adults who acted like kids. Hell is other people, I suppose.
Considering these things, I prefer to stay at home to enjoy a film without ear plugs or annoying guests. Of course, I am assuming the neighbors don’t act the fool, which I’ve tried my best to address following these tips.
Czech painter František Kupka‘s Mme. Kupka Among Verticals (1910-1911) on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan evokes what we see much later as being dematerialized for matter transport in Star Trek. In particular, Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s season six, episode 2 titled “Realm of Fear” features Lt. Barclay (Dwight Schultz, aka Murdock from The A-Team) facing his fears of the transporter and unwittingly saving the missing crew members of the USS Yosemite who were trapped in the transporter’s matter stream.
In “The Offspring,” the 16th episode of the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we get to see Piet Mondrian’s “Tableau I” hanging on the wall of his quarters when he shows it to his daughter Lal. I think this might be the first time that I had really seen or had my attention drawn to a work by Mondrian. I thought it was quite striking as a work of art, and it seemed fitting that Data might be drawn to this work for its ordered lines despite Mondrian’s neoplasticism theory and its connection to nature and emotion as being the motivators for the artist’s composition.
Mondrian’s “Tableau I” appears in Lt. Cmd. Data’s quarters–notably in the eleventh episode of season five titled “Hero Worship,” in which Timothy, a young boy traumatized by the loss of his parents, apes Data’s mannerisms in order to erase his emotional response to his loss. In one scene, Data and Timothy paint in Data’s quarters where “Tableau I” is on an easel to the side.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, Mondrian’s “Tableau I” is on an easel in about the same place as pictured in “Hero Worship.”
Yesterday, I was able to see some of Mondrian’s works in person at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Manhattan. Y and I went there to see our friends from Japan, Masaya and Saki. While I didn’t get to see “Tableau I,” because it hangs in the Kunstmuseum in The Hague, I did get to see some representative works of his neoplasticism.
