Oakland, 8/18/05: For a while it looked like my one-man show, Strange Travel Suggestions, would make its long-awaited East Bay debut at the
Berkeley Marsh in late September. I just spoke with Stephanie Weisman, Artistic Director of The Marsh, and the dates have been changed. My show will now appear at the brand-spanking-new venue in February, 2006. I’m grateful for the delay, as it will allow me to come up with some brand new stories (and maybe balance, at long last, that pesky Wheel).August 2005
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Oakland, 8/18/05: For a while it looked like my one-man show, Strange Travel Suggestions, would make its long-awaited East Bay debut at the
Berkeley Marsh in late September. I just spoke with Stephanie Weisman, Artistic Director of The Marsh, and the dates have been changed. My show will now appear at the brand-spanking-new venue in February, 2006. I’m grateful for the delay, as it will allow me to come up with some brand new stories (and maybe balance, at long last, that pesky Wheel).Allow Me to Recommend….
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.
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