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Michael Dorn remembers the joys of Worf

I greatly enjoyed this interview with Michael Dorn, and I'd like to share it with you:

LA Times: One of the things that you brought to Worf was an endless but endearing exasperation. Was that there on the page, or did you add that as an actor’s choice?

Michael Dorn: That was totally by my invention. I realized by looking at the people on the bridge that they’re all great friends and they’re out in space and they’re traveling, and it was all so pleasant. I decided that I wanted to be the opposite. I made my guy the guy that was pissed at everything. If someone looked at him sideways, he was mad. So that’s where they got all that. You know, I really gravitated a lot towards Worf. He was a good guy; he was honorable and brave; he evolved; he didn’t stay stagnant over the years. I liked that. The loyalty and honor were very appealing to me. The other thing too is that it’s not a blind loyalty to anyone or anything. And he’s right all of the time — all of the time — because he’s always true to himself."

I always assumed that Worf was intentionally written as the curmudgeonly African-American voice on The Next Generation. From this interview (not just the quote above) I get the feeling that much of what I liked about the writing of the character was actually improvised by Dorn.

"It didn’t bother you to see the world tiny and unprotected, surrounded by darkness?”

"It didn’t bother you to see the world tiny and unprotected, surrounded by darkness?”:

In a recent episode of Mad Men titled 'Lady Lazarus,' Pete Campbell has an existential crisis when he sees a picture of the Earth from space, but were there color pictures of the whole Earth in October 1966? First some background...

On MetaFilter, quartzcity takes us through the history of space travel and photography and the birth of the Spaceship Earth meme. I'm not sure how deeply Matt Weiner thinks about references like this when he is writing Mad Men - but this MetaFilter post is a wonderful example of the community around a show being more interesting than the show itself.

Lena Dunham Talks About Girls Being Super White

And I think the liberal-arts student in me really wants to engage in a dialogue about it, but as I learn about engaging with the media, I realize it's not the same as sitting in a seminar talking things through at Oberlin. Every quote is sort of used and misused and placed and misplaced, and I really wanted to make sure I spoke sensitively to this issue. ...

via www.grantland.com

This makes sense to me. She didn't write a black character because she doesn't have black friends. Whether or not it's OK, it's not not uncommon.

Nobody knows what anyone’s building until it’s built.

via artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com: David Simon on Wearying 'Wire' Love and the Surprising Usefulness of Twitter

I do try many times a season to put Alison [Brie] in a situation, wardrobe-wise, that I know is going to end up as an animated GIF file! I observe that stuff and the way people are consuming it, because I'm a nerd too and I love to obsess about my favorite TV shows.

via www.iwatchstuff.com

Amazing! I think 30 Rock does this too. Of course we should have anticipated the trend would work its way into television. These GIFs would make a good coda to Anil's treatise on animated gifs.

?uestlove Talks Michele Bachmann Fiasco, D'Angelo

And as for that forever-awaited follow-up to Voodoo, ?uestlove says it's "97% done" and that it's "the black version of [The Beach Boys'] Smile."

via www.pitchfork.com

So it's going to be the most overrated black album of all time? Bummer.

Ricky Gervais on The Office's Tenth Anniversary

Ricky Gervais:

The Office was not about media in any way. It reflected some of the symptoms of a society fascinated by celebrity, but it was truly about real, everyday people. I resisted saying normal people because I feel it wouldn’t be interesting watching a program about “normal” people. Particularly in Britain. We love the peculiar. The Office, like many other sitcoms before it, finds humour in a dysfunctional family. The reason why we find this both funny and comforting is that we all belong to a dysfunctional family. If you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.

The dysfunctional family in The Office had a lot of children. Namely the men. Men as boys and women as adults was a recurring theme. This is funny because it’s true. Men don’t really grow up. And a man who is meant to be in charge and a role model acting like a big kid is even more ridiculous. This is why it was important to always keep Brent in the work environment. He should know better. If he’s on holiday or at home he can do what he wants. But when he’s meant to be leading by example and he acts like a twat, it’s pathetic. This is the ‘sit’ in sitcom. It’s all about the situation.

Fix it!

I Love Sweaters

Sofie Gråbølr, on Sarah Lund's sweaters in The Killing:

A lot of thought went into Lund's wardrobe, says Gråbølr. She and the film-makers knew that they wanted to avoid the cliche of the woman in a suit in a man's world, but they didn't know what to avoid it with. 'Then I saw the sweater and I knew,' says Gråbøl. 'Because to me it is so on the spot. It tells so many things to me about the character, which meant I didn't have to act them. It tells of a woman who has so much confidence in herself that she doesn't have to use her sex to get what she wants. She's herself.

'Also I was brought up in the 70s in a very left-wing politically active scene and I wore those sweaters. To me, a sweater like that tells of a person who deep down believes in soft values, togetherness. She works in a cynical world and she is cynical herself, but the sweater says that maybe deep down there's a longing to, I don't know, sit around a fire with a guitar!'"

I appreciate that these handsome sweaters found their way into the US remake as well. At around $400 a pop, they're pricey, but as Detective Lund has shown us, they can be worn for twenty days without interruption.

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