wolvensnothere: @LeVarBurton, in the latimes: ...

wolvensnothere:

@LeVarBurton, in the latimes:

Great interview with LeVar Burton over on Hero Complex. He talks about “Star Trek,” “Reading Rainbow” and “Roots.”

On castmates:

PKD: Who do you see the most?

LB: Brent [Spiner] and Marina [Sirtis]. Jonathan travels a lot directing. Patrick infrequently. I go over there or he comes over here. Gates [McFadden] is busy with her theater. Michael Dorn is out spending his money.

On fans:

PKD: Any notable fans?

LB: Jimmy Fallon is a big fan of the show. He does all of these singer impersonations and a couple of months ago he did Jim Morrison singing the “Reading Rainbow” theme song. It’s really good.

On race:

PKD: It seems like Geordi always got shot down by women. Constantly. Did you ever bring that up to the showrunners?

LB: Mm-hmm. It was frustrating to me. I mean from a writer’s perspective, I get that it was the idea that the nerd or the geek is inept around the feminine form. But I was never comfortable with it. And I also thought there were some other things going on. Sociological things. Everybody had a sexual identity, even Data the robot. But Geordi didn’t. The Klingon did. But the black man didn’t. You’d have to be a black man to have the perspective, because you see that pattern repeated throughout popular culture, so it becomes a familiar pattern that you notice readily.

Bonus nerd thing: Just realized Times’ staffer Patrick Day’s initials are PKD.

Photo: Astronaut Mae Jemison appears in an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with LeVar Burton. Credit: Robbie Robinson / Paramount Pictures

Yeah the PKD thing threw me, for a second.

Having been rewatching all of TNG, recently, these ideas are fresh in my mind. I was, in fact, just last night, thinking about the fact that Geordi never has a successful relationship, and it’s a little upsetting to me, for obvious reasons.

And now this has me wondering how many of my early relationships were coloured (so to speak) by this invisible architecture of bias… Hm

Reblogging this, here, from myself because of the following:

LB: William Shatner has gotten really good at playing himself. He’s gotten so good at playing himself that he was able to reinvent his own image while playing himself. That’s a real cool trick. He was able to change people’s perception of who he was by first trading on their idea of who he was and then taking them someplace else and getting them to associate with a whole other side of his personality. He went from pompous to cool.

Let’s think a little bit about how LeVar Burton just talked about Shatner’s use of identity magic.

I think I shall meet this “Lee-Var Burr-Tone.”

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

Post by wolvensnothere February 29, 2012 at 10:20am