.: A Trek Anew!

Thursday, May 07, 2009

A Trek Anew!

What You don't have your enterprise model and 12 inch action figure yet?! Better get a move on it Mr!

Ok so it's April 30th, 5 in the afternoon... my best nerd buddy has called and issued a call to be at the AMC Dundas by 7pm... My heart begins to race as I know whats up! I'm about to be included in the very first showing of the new JJ Abrams Star Trek Movie in Canada!
I pack my bag at work and I am out of there at warp speed! Making to the theater with time to spare we meet up for what was one of the best movie going experiences in a long time. Thats right! This film while not with out it flaws is a great movie on so many levels and while I will not get into each and every moment I am about to write some minor spoilers... so look at the next two pictures and if you want to know more keep reading, if not come back to this post after you have seen the flick!

Epic! with a capitol E best describes what JJ Abrams has brought to the screen with this 11th Star Trek film. This is was the minimum requirement if this movie was to succeed! JJ gets an A+ here. Six months back if you had asked me what I thought about the initial images coming out of Paramount I would have given a very visceral response, in fact I might have told you that this was the end of the franchise as the die hard fans knew it. Take the next image... when I first saw the trailer and saw them constructing the Enterprise on the ground it was a big WTF moment! After working on the Enterprise my self over the years this was clearly a travesty of canon. I felt insulted! No really I felt insulted at having bought into a carefully crafted history and look to what in my mind was already established in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of Star Trek books and models, props and costumes now seemingly washed away with what seemed like crap on the screen. How could this have happened? Even the guy who drove Star Trek into a wall Rick Berman couldn't have fracked it up this bad!?

But then bits of the story outline began to surface... Leonard Nimoy was in the film... If hes in it certainly he has a say on some of this right? A plot with time travel and altered time lines began to appear??? Hmmm Finally the release of Countdown a four part comic book prequel hits the shelf and suddenly and magically the Vail of doubt and hate is lifted off of this film. At least for me.

This is a story of how Kirk and Spock and all of the original crew come together, just not the the Kirk and Spock story I grew up on... This is a new version of history driven by a Romulan madman from the future... The Next Gen future to be exact. Ambassador Spock is indeed assisted by Picard and crew to save the know universe only to be pulled into time and space and the past. When he sees that Nero (the baddy) has affected the time line of the past he seeks to set Kirk and Spock into a meeting that ensures that at least this part of history is not missed. As we all know the universe depends on this team to save the day countless times going forward!;-)

This recreation of the two iconic characters really drives home how great a casting job JJ and team actually did! In fact casing was key to this entire film! The contributions of Simon Peg (Scotty) and Karl Urban (McCoy) are freakishly on spot for their characters providing some of the most humorous moments in the movie.

This movie is about action and after running at a medium pace for the first 30 min the movie kicks it into warp drive(which is really kewl in this version) and never looks back and if I had one critic of the film itself is that the pace never lets up... there is now emotional up and down which causes the final act to feel a bit less than satisfying. But this is a small critic and should not dissuade you from enjoying the action. As I have said this is a fun filled experience and the story reset allows for many new adventures with this heroic crew!

EN Pros: Fab casting, great script, An epic canvas, the film stays within canon.

EN Cons: Lack of dramatic build up, Spock and Uhuru? WTF!, Tyler Perry! (I'm serious he is in this movie!) As Madea he is flawless! but its that association that makes him being head of Star Fleet hard to swallow.

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com