Last night we popped in the first disc of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, a show I dropped halfway through the third season when I realized I was so emotionally invested that I could no longer enjoy watching it. We skipped an episode, watched another and then watched all the most important bits of both parts of “Exodus”, the episode in which the colonists abandon and/or are rescued from New Caprica. I was left dumbfounded, over and over again, at just how good the show was. Time and again it takes concepts we know all too well from the news – in this case, insurgencies, occupations, suicide bombings and indefinite detentions – and turns them inside out for us. As 24 whiles away the seasons on torture porn, one after another, Battlestar Galactica made us root for the terrorists without even realizing it. Years later and on my second lap with these episodes I still found myself shaken.

That’s the good stuff. The Boyf points out that this is why he loves science fiction: it can say anything and it most of all can say all the things other genres can’t.

Questions I had the first time I tried to watch the show have only strengthened over time: what, exactly, is the technical difference between Cylons and humans? If a Cylon can pass a colonial fleet physical and incidental injuries and all the broken skin of everyday life, what exactly makes them different? I suppose that’s the philosophical point of the whole show, or at least I hope it is. In the meantime, I’m an engineer. The physical answer is just as interesting to me as the metaphysical one.

Of note: I’ve read that they charge much higher advertising rates when they’ve just sent out a breaking news alert.

Here is the thing: its negatives are some real negatives and its positives are, surprisingly, some real positives. This is a half-hour show with a season length of six episodes. We are talking about some extremely efficient storytelling here and they honestly get points for that. The storyline moves because it doesn’t have time to dawdle over much of anything.

On the other hand, the DVD should feature a voiceover on each menu that says, “We’ve replaced the lifestyles section of your local newspaper with Skinemax; let’s see who notices,” because that is exactly what one gets when one watches this show.

The basic premise is that a small-time reporter at a small-time paper lives in something right out of the Tour of Homes with his boyfriend, Fauxhawk McJunkyard, and investigates a string of grisly murders perpetrated by the gay vampires. It is an almost woefully ambitious storyline that tries to incorporate a lot of different topics that could make for a really interesting story: trust issues in relationships, the ways in which an unrestrained and irresponsible sexual environment can be seen as preying on people, the political angle of a boyfriend who can’t get any information from the doctor after his boyfriend is attacked because he isn’t technically a family member, etc. There’s a lot to work with there, the lead is cute, the boyfriend is cute, they’ve got a resident fruit fly, plus the whole fangs thing. In the end, though, it’s such a low-budget affair and the villains are so ham-fisted that it falls fairly flat.

The impression one cannot escape is that the incredibly stupid vampires in this town – whatever it’s name is – are incredibly lucky to be surrounded by even dumber mortals. They occasionally require the characters to make stupid choices just so they can set up false, fleeting suspense. The only straight people in the show are in a horribly abusive relationship to make Fauxhawk’s creepy stalking seem less crazy. The dialogue could be worse but the delivery is pretty cringe-worthy. To top it all off, no pun intended, every episode has to include at least one session of incredibly lackluster and unenthusiastic dry-humping. There’s actually a scene in which, to demonstrate his ennui, the head of the local vampires watches with obvious boredom as a bunch of dudes in those way, way played out leather strap bandolier things hump each other and all I could say in response to his complacency was, Brother, you and me both. If the softcore is how they sold the show, well, so be it, but damn, it is not in fact a selling point.

As I said to Deadblob after, this show is the intersection point for cute guys, bad acting, unrealized ambition and pantomime blowjobs. For all that, its ambition wins out. I have to respect it for trying so hard. I left the second disc at the top of my Netflix queue, anyway.

Wow.

KJ and I, in what has become something of a Monday tradition, left one another largely incoherent voicemails afterward.

• Mohindir is the hottest guy ever.
• Peter is a very close second.
• DL is a very close third.

Now back to not posting about Heroes because it is making my brain explode with the goodness.

Went to see Snakes on a Plane on Saturday night.  If you go, and you live in the Triangle, you simply must go see it at the Starlite Drive-In.  Cheap admission, cheap concessions (with corndogs on the menu!), sit in your car, laugh your butt off.  It’s the world’s stupidest movie, but it’s a lot of fun in the right circumstance.  One of those circumstances is definitely having the windows down, enjoying a breeze and listening to the people in the car a couple of spaces away yell at their kids to avert their eyes during the T&A bathroom-booty scene.  A mom would shout, “Eyes closed!  Eyes closed!  Eyes closed!”  Then, a pause.  Then, “EYES CLOSED!  CLOSE THOSE EYES!“  It simply made everything even better.  For those who know me, and thus know how I get antsy and slightly violent when someone talks in a movie, this should tell you everything:  the drive-in is so much fun that I didn’t even care that I could hear someone yelling at their kids.

Second, The Boyf taped a mini-marathon of Life on Mars, which is currently playing on BBC America.  If you get BBCA and you like the cop dramas, you simply have to check this out.  A time-traveling (or comatose) modern-day detective winds up in (or hallucinates) 1973, trying to apply current police procedures – highly developed techniques such as “avoid police brutality” and “don’t plant evidence on someone just because you have a hunch” and “build an evidence trail to secure conviction” – in a setting which doesn’t have much time for them.

Get it?  Time!  Ha ha!

Anyway, good watching.  And seriously, Starlite is now my preferred place to watch popcorn movies.  Yowza!  It’s awesome.

So, I take that back.

That said, isn’t it enlightening (somehow, of something) to note how people who didn’t actually know the guys are quick to fall back on the rumors that the photos were of underage victims of sexual or drug abuse?

As I said yesterday, at least one of the major revelations of these stories – news that perhaps isn’t so new – is how quickly people will fall back into the attitudes and beliefs of that time, their personal prejudices, their personal beliefs.

This week, the hometown paper is doing a series of articles about the crime, its victims, and the subsequent investigation. If you want the whole story, you can start with the first article and go from there if you want to read the rest in its presented order. The short version is this: two gay men and a woman who was probably a friend of theirs were murdered, their bodies were abandoned, and when they were discovered five days later the law enforcement officials investigating the crime managed to completely and utterly botch the job. I’m sure they would take issue with that summary of things, but there aren’t very many ways to view an investigation that includes an unprotected crime scene, an officer driving the victim’s car halfway across the county upon its discovery (thus destroying any fingerprints, for instance, that might have been left in it) and a murder investigation that doesn’t even bother with an autopsy until a year after the murder – and then only on one victim.

The story is a remarkable demonstration of the state of law enforcement at the time, perhaps especially in jurisdictions unaccustomed to investigating murder scenes.

The thing that excites me about this series of articles is that I read basically everything there was to find about it when I was in high school. Twenty-five years after the murders, all I could find at the local library were the microfiche copies of the original articles in the local paper. Needless to say, there were aspects left unsaid in those stories. Now, the paper is willing to discuss the fact that two of the victims were gay men, possibly lovers. Now, the paper is willing to discuss that one of the victims had long been friends with African-American recording artists of the time and had been the victim of intimidation tactics when a black musician stayed as a houseguest for a few days in the 1960′s. Now, the paper will discuss the rumors from that time that two of the victims had been involved in drugs – possibly for sex – and the rumors that they had been with prominent, closeted gay men in the community.

What bugs me most about the current coverage, however, is what always bugs me about news coverage: that mix of prudish “good taste” and sensationalism that leads to articles that will discuss in detail the obvious sexual assault of the woman who was among the victims but will only mention in passing that the two men may have been in possession of “compromising photos” from various parties they threw in Hendersonville and Asheville. This may sound dumb, but c’mon. In the debate between “good taste” and telling the full story, pick a path and stick to it. There is rarely a middle way. If you’re going to frickin’ diagram the murder scene, including details about injuries to a woman’s anatomy, don’t suddenly get shy about the rumors these two guys were the hottest potential blackmailers in town. It’s not even a gender-equality thing here, it’s just… either tell the story or don’t. Y’know? This is the post-Monicagate era, ferchristsake. We can talk about these things, and we don’t have to use them as a teaser for the next day’s articles then bury them in a couple of single-sentence quotes before the jump.

And of course it bothers me that if the deal was that they were murdered for knowing a bit too much, perhaps even first-hand, about the proclivities of the various closet queens of the southern WNC mountains then an article that skirts that whole issue is itself an expression of the very silence that might have made these men dangerous. Likewise, a story that will so freely discuss the romantic history, and rumors thereof, of the woman who was the third victim – down to quoting her father as having said, “She still likes the men” – is also an expression of the same contemporary attitudes that made her a forgettable victim, easily dismissed either as someone clearly knee-deep in “trouble” or someone who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, as others insist.

Perhaps that’s the best purpose the story can serve, to document that the attitudes of the time are so quickly and easily reflected in the quotes that can still be obtained today, to remind us that we walk with those same burdens of acquired shame on our backs. Everyone starts off talking about what great guys Glass and Shipman were, always on time to work, always sharply dressed, always having people over for Sunday dinner or big parties, and then the next step of conversation – at least in the retelling – is to immediately leap from there to intimations that they were dealing, they were the secret boytoys of community pillars, that there were pictures, etc. There is no middle ground. They seem to universally be remembered either as perfect mamas’ boys or twin icons of vice. Likewise with Shumate; everyone who speaks of her either talks of her as an aloof intellectual with a taste for parties or as an innocent victim who somehow happened to go from picking blackberries on Old Mills River Road to being beaten to death on the other side of town with absolutely no intermediary steps.

I don’t blame the journalists of the Times-News, to be honest. It seems to me like they have tried to integrate and synthesize the two very different world views of that place and the two very different standards for acceptable discourse of that time and this, and in so doing they have reflected the cultural chasm that is at the heart of almost every small-town-life drama. Gay men living in a place and time when there were precious few outlets for what gay culture there was were forced into the shadows, forced into relationships made inherently sketchy by their clandestine nature, and people either ignored it or whispered about it, but no one sought to change it. Meanwhile, a woman who was divorced, independent and possibly addicted to prescription drugs is neatly pigeonholed along the lines of the ol’ sinner-saint framework. And still, forty years later, almost everyone is quick to rush back to those old positions.

To be fair to those quoted in the stories, there are plenty of people who clearly did not hate Glass and Shipman for being gay, and there are relatives of Shumate who are quick to talk about her in friendly, even wistful terms. The second the story steps outside of that, though, and particularly when it gets to those charged with investigating the crime itself, attitudes very quickly return to the old strategies of ignoring who and where and when they were or immediately pointing to those facts as self-supporting explanations for what happened. If the Times-News wants to shed new light on the case, other than describing the crime scene in detail or being willing to mention, if only briefly, the seedier aspects of their lives, it could at least do them the service of discussing attitudes towards them in the same era – and now.

If they’re going to run a quote like “Word was they gave drugs for sexual favors,” from a retired deputy, there are at least two other questions they could ask:

So is that what got them killed?

Or did it keep anyone from digging very deep after they were killed?

It’s sick and tragic if this is the case.  It also reminds me of a few weeks ago when I heard TDW as the guest on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR.  There was an office potluck that day, and one of the things I was bringing required me to be out of the house earlier than usual.  As I sat waiting for my contribution to be prepared, I caught part of his interview.  In it, he expressed his philosophy for training a dog:  exercise, discipline, affection and reward.  I have never seen the guy’s show, so I have no idea if he’s in fact the most talented dog trainer ever or just another snake-oil salesman.  What I want to note, however, is what I heard him say on the topic of that approach:

“It’s just like how I treat a woman…”

*pause*

“…How I treat my wife.  First I exercise her, then show affection, then ask for what I want.”

Now, I cannot find a transcript of that interview, and so I have no way to demonstrate that I heard him correctly.  What I can tell you is that I sat there and stared in shock at the faceplate of the radio.

Exercise her, show affection, then ask for what you want.

Smooth.

Now, did anyone else hear that?  Or am I insane?

• One of the criticisms leveled against Twin Peaks in what little scholarship I’ve read regarding the series’ encoded meanings is that it is an anti-feminist work that glorifies violence against women. Taking the series and film as a whole, however, and especially in light of the last scene of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it seems to me that it has no agenda other than to reflect Laura as a whole person with good and bad qualities and decisions all her own. She is neither held up as a saint nor damned as a sinner. In fact, the end of FWWM suggests that the only way she is able to move forward is by having someone, presumably the audience, witness – neither condemn nor endorse but witness – the whole truth of her complicated life and recognize her as a fully three-dimensional human being rather than a positive or negative stereotype or otherwise pigeonhole her specific and unique and human experience. As such, it has no specifically feminist agenda but it is also impossible to classify as anti-feminist; given that its message, if one chooses to find it in this way, is that each person must be allowed to be all of themselves and recognized as such, and that each person has a right to face their own fears and demons and, by integrating those and other experiences into the whole of their being, gain enlightenment, it seems that it is equally empowering of all people and, in that regard, may be more subtly feminist than anyone suspects. It also means I’ve probably watched Twin Peaks too many times, but in fact sitting around thinking about it like this makes me want to watch it again. I also think that the show’s message, if there is one, is no more complicated than that the social pressures of the middle class make it easy for kids to turn out fucked up.
• There are few things in the world more tasty than salmon.
• I would rather spend a sweaty morning mowing my back yard every 2 years than sew it with grass seed and have an easy time of mowing it every 2 weeks.
• I really need to get my emergency brake fixed so that I can get my car inspected.
• Dan Brown (author of Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code) should be publicly mocked for publishing such a thinly veiled pitch for a screen adaptation and daring to call it a novel.