One Little Kiss and Felina Goodbye

Reflections on the time-traveling power of music, plus the crew of the Enterprise get naked for a while.

To retrieve the memories and sensations of the past, Proust relied mainly on the taste of crumbly cakes moistened with lime-blossom tea. The rest of humanity relies on songs. Songs are emotionally charged and brief, so we remember them whole: the melody, the hook, the lyrics, where we were, what we felt. And they are emotionally adhesive, especially when they’re encountered in our youth. — David Remnick

The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. — Billy Shakespeare

The summer of 1978 in El Paso, Texas was a scorcher, with the temperature touching 110 degrees in June. We were preparing to depart the bland house in which the Army had stored us while I navigated my third-grade year and my dad learnt the latest techniques for blowing airplanes out of the sky with Hawk missiles. We were bound for Huntsville, Alabama—red clay and at least a chance of winter snows, as well as a farewell to the stupendous ant mounds that speckled the dusty yards between the squat gray houses like fat raisins in a dried out muffin. It was Victory Day for the ants, as I spent a good deal of my spare time murdering them with whatever bathroom chemicals I could smuggle out of the house while my sister, not quite three years old, simply ate them.

My life in Texas—this was our second time living there—was impossibly brief and resides in my mind as a series of flashbulb memories. The faces of classmates: Kimball in his cowboy print shirt which I may have coveted; tiny Arthur, my best friend with the raccoon eyes; Manny, a towering and silent testament to the insufficiency of special education in those years and that place. Sand; sand everywhere. Nowhere was there a speck of green, not the school yard, not the home yard. Mountains with giant white letters on them—painted by local high school students as part of some hoary tradition I learned later, though at the time they were just one more mysterious part of what was never to become a familiar environment.

We listened to the radio a lot at home. There was a station which specialized in cowboy songs—Bob Wills’ “San Antonio Rose,” Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s take on “Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” Most of it was a little corny but we liked it because it never countenanced the commercial sludge that was being cranked out by the likes of Barbara Mandrell and Olivia Newton John. Country music is often dual-stranded that way—just like you could recently avoid the Florida Georgia Line with the help of Sturgill Simpson, back then the brown liquor voice of Merle Haggard was available to offset the saccharine taste of Dave & Sugar.

My mom must have recognized the rarity and impermanence of this living relic; a few weeks before we left she began recording songs. In geological terms 1978 wasn’t that long ago, but the means available for making recordings were sparse. I’m sure you could find an old magazine ad for an all-in-one Marantz receiver and record player and cassette recorder, but we only had one of those standalone tape decks about the size of a shoe box with chunky buttons and a built-in mono speaker. She placed this miracle of space age technology next to the radio, and every time something good would come down from the sky she’d lunge for the play and record buttons, which those of you with a bit of gray at the temples might remember had to be pressed in unison. 

On a recent Saturday night, while wallowing in Linda Ronstadt’s rendition of “Blue Bayou”—itself a great reservoir of memory—I ran across David Remnick’s observation about the stickiness of songs and instantly thought of that tape, still etched in my memory a thousand and one years later, every song lacking the first two or three seconds in testament to the interval between recognition and action and always with a sliver of an ad or some other song at the other end. They are vehicles to an otherwise dim past. When I hear them I am transported instantly to that sweltering Texas summer and the limitless vistas of brown sand and panicky ants and Arthur’s hollow eyes and a big white A on the flanks of the Franklin Mountains shimmering in the desert heat like a communiqué from the gods—a Delphic message; a permanent blur at the corner of one’s vision; a mystery as yet unraveled.

The Naked Time

Last night I watched “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode of Star Trek, originally aired September 29, 1966, one day after Lester Maddox unexpectedly won a runoff election to become the governor of Georgia. Two Americas right there, folks: on the one hand an unreconstructed segregationist—who had threatened to crack the heads of three Black seminary students with a pickaxe handle should they persist in their ambition to patronize his restaurant—had proven that a majority of Georgians didn’t see anything wrong with overt racial animus; on the other a gay man of Asian extraction would be given several minutes of prime airtime to dash around shirtless and wielding a fencing epee. 

It wasn’t yet common knowledge that George Takei was gay, but twenty-one years after his family was released from a Japanese-American internment camp with nothing but the clothes on their backs it would be reasonable to assume that his breakthrough scene was not received with universal acclaim in the living rooms of the South. Nor likely by Okies from Muskogee for that matter. 

It’s easy to forget what radical force emanated from Gene Roddenberry and his weird, cheap-ass show. It’s possible I’ve just seen its 79 episodes far too many times—slogging through them once more I find them to be wanting in virtually every regard. Knocking the production design is like slapping kindergarteners, but the writing and acting and direction all emit the distinct, powerful odor of cheese.

The thing about “The Naked Time” though, in which the Enterprise runs afoul of a sort of illness that makes the sufferer effectively drunk, is that it is widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the show. I reckon Takei’s mad bare chested romp through the ship has something to do with that, alongside Spock’s uncharacteristic struggle with the buried emotions of his human half. Much has been made of the opportunity this episode gave to Leonard Nimoy to show range not ordinarily available in this character, but frankly it’s embarrassing to watch him reeling around scrunching up his face like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone. The scene goes on way too long and would probably have been more convincing had Nimoy read the stage directions out loud.

Takei dancing around with a sword is at least an undeniable cultural moment—not quite the Kirk-Uhuru kiss, but certainly a marker indicating that the old rules about who television was about were going to change, at least for an hour on Thursday nights. It also leads to Spock remarking, after he nerve-pinches Sulu into unconsciousness (the first appearance of this iconic bit of Vulcan prestidigitation), “Take D'Artagnon here to sickbay,” which, let’s face it, is an honest to God joke and Spock wasn’t even drunk yet.

I have a few favorite episodes; I can’t really remember whether I ever liked this one or not, but with perfect hindsight it strikes me as far too colossally stupid to qualify as a good work of science fiction, regardless of its cultural bonafides. The protective suits worn by Spock and the designated red shirt in the first scene look like shower curtains, and guess what? They’re shower curtains. In a later scene the red shirt—his name is Tormolen if you must know—stabs himself with a butter knife. A butter knife! Could they not afford a knitting needle?

Spock takes a very serious shower.

Now, lest I come off as just a hard-hearted hater riffing on an easy target dear to millions of hearts, an enterprise which lunged toward greatness it could never attain but which would inspire people who since have, let me tell you what I like about “The Naked Time,” aside from the title, which I believe is a secret nod to William Burroughs.

First, and I suspect many people who know the show well will assume I’m completely off my nut: Riley, an almost-but-not-quite-red shirt navigator for whom the infection manifests as a fifth of Bushmills and a face plant into full-on leprechaundom. Riley locks himself in the engineering room, presumably kicking his heels together as the doors slide shut, and routes all of the ship’s controls through his emerald bower. From this Celtic sanctuary he proceeds to put on something like an Irish cabaret, swaying and goosing his neck as he sings Gaelic ballads nobody remembers now much less three hundred years hence. He melts all over the furniture and bops the controls with world-worn insouciance, broadcasting his cartoony cornball mess to the whole ship for virtually the entire episode. Whatever is going on, Riley can be heard in the background, wailing about his first bonnie bride. It’s polyphony, Charles Ives-style—two completely different things happening at once and as a viewer you sit in between them and luxuriate in the mad chaos of it. I love it, and I love Bruce Hyde’s complete dedication to the absurd premise. Hyde went on to become a professor of ontology, which is a career path about which I’m sure much could be said by someone who doesn’t have to look up “ontology.” Sadly, that’s not me.

Second, I love the sound design, particularly the rattle of a rain stick whenever we are to understand that the infection is spreading from one person to the next. Real infections don’t make noises, but the dry rattle, evoking the deathly soundtrack of rattlesnakes, conveys danger with a sophisticated and multilayered tongue and yet doesn’t cost a fortune. I can’t say whether Roddenberry knew what David Remnick knew or simply stumbled upon the direct conduit to memory and emotion that sound provides, but like my erstwhile El Paso tape, the buzz of infection in “The Naked Time” evokes something beyond mere criticism, almost but not quite saving the episode. It represents Star Trek at the peak of its creative efficiency, and bodes well for future episodes, even if this one is a bit of a flop.