athena28

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  3. Posted

    Jeri Ryan Joins Law & Order: SVU

    March 20, 2009 05:31 PM EST

     

    Jeri Ryan has made a career out of playing legal eagles as a lawyer-turned-teacher on Boston Public and a district attorney on Shark. “I have legal stuff all over my résumé,” she says. Now Law & Order: SVU exec producer Neal Baer has cast her as defense attorney Patrice La Rue beginning April 7.

     

    “La Rue sounds French—I like that,” says Jeri, who will commute to SVU’s NYC set from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, French chef Christophe Émé. This is her first job since giving birth to daughter Gisele a year ago. “I’ve milked the maternity leave as long as possible,” jokes Jeri. “Next season we’ll find out more about who Patrice is, but I can tell you she’s a real ballbuster.”

     

    Source: TV Guide

  8. Posted

    The NY Times Magazine Section paid tribute, today, to certain persons who passed away this year. Here's one of the tributes:

     

    December 28, 2008

    Joan Winston | b. 1932

    Enterprising

    By ROB WALKER

    STAR TREK FANDOM

     

    In the annals of fandom, “Star Trek” has a special place. The original series gradually became a pop-culture staple and the cornerstone of an immense commercial franchise largely because of the devotion and — crucially — the collective creativity of its fan base. The original series went off the air in 1969, after three seasons. But fans continued to dream up their own “Star Trek” stories, distribute zines, make videos, write songs, publish newsletters and create visual art. And they gathered at conventions, some dressed in homemade Trek outfits, which is why, in the annals of “Star Trek” fandom, Joan Winston holds a special place: she was an organizer of the first Star Trek fan convention, in 1972.

     

    At times all this effort must have seemed thankless. Media accounts regularly portrayed the extreme fans as a bunch of kooks. A famous 1980s “Saturday Night Live” skit included William Shatner himself telling Trekkies to “get a life.” A Trek-specific gathering came about in part because even at science fiction fan conventions (which had gone on for decades), fans of the show were “merely tolerated,” as an entry on TrekCore.com puts it.

     

    But there’s another way of looking at such fans: as extremely active media consumers. And there’s another way of looking at the Trek convention culture Winston helped create: as like-minded individuals gathering to connect over a shared taste. In other words, Winston’s world was a template for what is now widely seen as the mainstream-media-consumer paradigm of the 21st century. Henry Jenkins, co-director of the M.I.T. Comparative Media Studies Program, has been studying and writing about media fans for more than 20 years and has summarized the Facebook/YouTube era as fandom without the stigma. “It takes all the things that fans have been doing throughout the 20th century and makes them public, mainstream, commercial,” he told me in an interview. “The mechanisms that fans were early pioneers of have become absolutely widespread in our society, whether we’re talking about early communities or social networks or participatory culture.”

     

    Unlike some pundits, Jenkins argues that consumers have not been passive vessels; rather, many were social, critical and even creative about the things they watched. Jenkins cited plenty of active-fan examples in his 1992 book “Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture,” including “Twin Peaks” and “Beauty and the Beast” (supported by more than 50 “major” fan organizations, with “a combined membership of 350,000”) and, of course, “Star Trek.” He noted that a key element of fan activity was “to speak from a position of collective identity.”

     

    Kinship with a taste community is just a Google search away these days, but in 1972 that wasn’t the case. Which is exactly why the first Star Trek convention was so important in sustaining fandom. Winston, who grew up in Brooklyn and held jobs on the business side of ABC and CBS, also wrote fan fiction, sent story ideas to “Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and visited the set of the show — all impressive manifestations of nonpassive media fandom. But her role in making the first Star Trek convention happen — in New York, with an estimated 3,000 attendees — was a lasting achievement. She even wrote a book about it, “The Making of the Trek Conventions.” Aside from making shared fandom apparent to outsiders (journalists, for instance, who chronicled the first Trek convention), the convention made fans apparent to one another. It’s a common theme among some media fans that the fan community ends up meaning more than the object of their enthusiasm.

     

    Clearly the active approach to media consumption that Winston and her fellow superfans pioneered is more vital and widespread than ever. In his most recent book, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” Jenkins writes that fans have moved from the margins to “the center of current thinking about media production and consumption.” And this is undeniably true: content creators are now desperate to find Joan Winstons. As Jenkins told me, events like Comic-Con, a convention for comics fans, draw not only hordes of costumed attendees but also Hollywood stars sent by entertainment conglomerates to court them. These days, he summarizes, the fans are the ones telling the content creators to get a life.

     

     

    SOURCE

  17. Posted

    In the Star Trek universe, dead isn't dead.

     

    Star Trek: The Experience Vegas Return Rumored

    By John Scott Lewinski September 10, 2008 | 7:39:56 PMCategories: Events, Exhibit, Star Trek, Television, Travel

    In the Star Trek universe, dead isn't dead. Just ask Spock.

     

    Now, less than two weeks after Star Trek: The Experience closed its docking doors in Las Vegas, rumors of a new home for the sci-fi attraction are beaming into Sin City.

     

    A spokesman for Vegas entertainment website AmericanLowLife.com is reporting a potential "meeting of the Experiences," with the Star Trek version moving downtown to a new home along the Fremont Street Experience.

     

    Rumors have the Trek museum, shops and rides moving into the Neonopolis, a retail and entertainment center on Fremont Street's eastern end. Requests for confirmation from Neonopolis representatives have gone unheeded so far, but hailing frequencies remain open.

     

    Image courtesy Simon & Schuster