Rico's rants: Too weird, even for Rico

The New York Times has an article by Thomas Vinciguerra about some people with serious Kirk compulsions:

There is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Washington, except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain’s chair from the bridge of the USS Enterprise, as seen in the original Star Trek television series.
Mr. Veazie, 27, was not yet born when that show first went on the air in the 1960s; even his parents were only teenagers. During his childhood, there were Star Trek spinoffs on television with more sophisticated special effects than the original, and a more contemporary sensibility, and there were also movies featuring the old show’s actors aboard updated versions of the Enterprise. But Mr. Veazie, who watched endless reruns of the original series with his mother in the 1980s, was never drawn to those later incarnations. “The original show was the first one I saw,” he said. “It was so idealistic. A lot of us kids wanted to be Captain Kirk— and part of that was the chair.” Mr. Veazie, a manager at Underwriters Laboratories, built the chair himself last year, and has been gratified to find, since installing it in the living room in May, that “when someone comes in, it’s the first thing they comment on.”
Serious Trekkies have long fashioned copies of their favorite costumes and props, and, back in the ’70s and ’80s, a few even put together homemade knockoffs of the captain’s chair, using reference materials like the Starfleet Technical Manual and USS Enterprise Bridge Blueprints.
But lately fans like Mr. Veazie have been building or buying more sophisticated versions of the command module from which James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner, ordered “Ahead, warp factor six.” Moreover, they are making them the centerpiece of their homes, thus conquering what is for them a final frontier of domestic décor.
At a moment when yet another movie is about to present yet another revamped Enterprise (this one claiming to be the original vessel of the young Kirk, Spock and McCoy), these traditionalists are holding their ground.
Drawing on a wide variety of new sources, including construction-oriented websites, web-based entrepreneurs who supply kits of parts, and a Maryland company that just started selling ready-made chairs for $2,700 apiece, they are making a definitive statement to the world, or at least to their friends and families.
“The closet command-chair Trekkies have come out of the closet,” said Keith Marshall, 45, an unemployed phlebotomist, emergency medical technician, corrections officer, and firefighter whose uncompleted chair, currently sitting in his brother’s garage, is slated for his own living room in Bonney Lake, Washington. “For a lot of people in the last few years,” Mr. Marshall added, “the pieces have come together.”
The current wave of interest seems to have started after the original chair was auctioned for $305,000 in 2002 and subsequently displayed at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, where Star Trek loyalists could view it up close. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, the chair’s devotees tend to be clustered in the Northwest.)
The spread of digital video also helped the cause, allowing hobbyists to freeze-frame shots of the chair and scrutinize it from every angle. On message boards like Dewback Wing A.S.A.P.: A Site About Props, they swap and compare screen grabs, measurements, schematics, and spare parts.
Aficionados offer different reasons for the chair’s allure, some straightforward, some verging on the mystical. “Everyone wants to sit in it,” said Bruce Boyd, an unemployed auto parts manager in Roseburg, Oregon, who completed his chair— which he also keeps in the living room— in November. “There’s some sort of charisma there. It’s hard to explain. I know it’s not real,” added Mr. Boyd, 43, “but the minute I sit in it, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.”
Clark Bradshaw, a computer animator and graphic designer in Nicholasville, Kentucky, cited the chair’s unmistakable design. “It definitely is the only one of its kind,” he said. “All of the other chairs in all of the shows resembled each other— they weren’t distinctive.”
Mr. Bradshaw, 36, began building his chair in college, fifteen years ago. But when he saw the exacting specifications on the A.S.A.P. forum, he said, “I just ripped it apart and started over.” In his home office, it awaits painting and final assembly.
For Mike Paugh, 42, a financial planner in Cranbrook, British Columbia, the appeal goes back to childhood. “I loved the show,” he said. “I had all the model kits and all that stuff, but when I moved I had to get rid of them. Now I’ve started to build again.” He spent about $1,000 on his chair, which he finished in October of 2007 and put in his family’s rec room. Mr. Paugh is one of many Trekkies who are not particularly impressed with what they have seen, in trailers and on the Internet, of the Enterprise from the new Star Trek movie, directed by J. J. Abrams and coming out in May. “A lot of guys are saying, ‘They’re wrecking this show, they’re not doing it the way they used to do it,’ ” he said. “The chair, in particular, looks like some weird office chair,” he added. “But then, that’s what the original was.”
Indeed, it is a commonly held view that Captain Kirk’s throne was built around the black Naugahyde cushioning and slim walnut arms of a model No. 2405 or No. 4449 armchair produced by Madison Furniture Industries of Canton, Mississippi, between 1962 and 1968. The late industrial designer Arthur Umanoff conceived the chair as part of an attempt to replicate the Danish modern look, popular then. Today, vintage examples of the Madison chairs can fetch up to $2,000 on eBay.
“They weren’t high-end furniture,” said B. J. West, a San Francisco-based computer game production designer and Madison collector who maintains a website devoted to the chairs. He has had many requests for information and advice from would-be builders of Kirk chairs, he said.
Louis Shornick, 90, the owner of the Madison company from 1950 to 1966, used to watch Star Trek without thinking that his product was being immortalized on the small screen. Only later, when Mr. West sent him detailed pictures from the original series, did he see a connection. “I said, That’s our chair,” Mr. Shornick recalled. “There is no doubt in my mind that that’s it.”
Not everyone is so sure. Herbert F. Solow, a former vice president of Desilu Studios who developed and sold Star Trek to NBC, insists Kirk’s chair was made from scratch, as does John Jefferies, an uncredited “Star Trek” set designer whose late brother, Walter, was the set designer for the show— and the designer of the captain’s chair itself. Mr. Jefferies remembers helping his brother construct the chair’s extended frame, swivel base, and pedestal from plywood, and coating it with dove-gray paint from the Desilu stores. “It was a function of what we had to work with, and the ability of the people we had,” said Mr. Jefferies, 73. “And cost was a factor. Today, it would probably be made of fiberglass or carbon fiber material.” He added, “If we knew we would be a part of history, we would have paid more attention to what we were doing.”
Walter Jefferies’s imitators are considerably more painstaking. They fixate on the contours of the seat, its angle of recline, the exact color and size of the controls, and a myriad of other details. When Tod Sturgeon of Auburn, Washington, the manager of a private security firm, built his chair in 2006, he was consumed with the paint job. “I got six or eight different grays, put them on a sheet of wood, compared them to what I saw on the small screen, and did sort of an average,” said Mr. Sturgeon, 40. “We Trekkies really do get down in the wheat sometimes.”
Mr. Veazie, of Washington, spent several hours a day for two weeks last spring sanding, spackling, and otherwise smoothing out the grain of his plywood frame. “The finishing took forever,” he said. “I could have spent another month on it. I was obsessed with fidelity.”
In the fictional “Star Trek” universe, the chair’s buttons and switches were used for deep-space communication, signaling alerts, and other command functions. Some latter-day Captain Kirks have their own ideas.
“I want to put an intercom system in it that would control the intercom system in my house and operate some lights,” said Mr. Marshall, the phlebotomist. “For that couch potato thing.”
Mr. Paugh, the financial planner, is wiring his chair’s innards with 25-watt bulbs to light up its epoxy resin knobs. The bulbs’ ceramic sockets will be surrounded by foil to protect the encircling wood from the heat, exactly like its 1960s progenitor, according to a description in the catalog for the 2002 auction from the California auction house Profiles in History. “I want to have it look just as gross inside as the real one, even though the people I’m going to show it to can’t see it,” Mr. Paugh said. “I know that doesn’t make me sound particularly sane.”
For those willing to be a little less hands-on, Diamond Select Toys & Collectibles, a company in Timonium, Maryland, that specializes in science fiction and comic-book novelties, has just begun selling a ready-to-use model for about $2,700. This version— which the company says it plans to limit to 1,701 pieces, in honor of the Enterprise’s Starfleet registration number— includes light and sound effects emanating from the control knobs, push buttons, rocker switches and a mock intercom on the chair’s boxy armrests.
So what, beyond pushing buttons, do these men— as all Kirk chair owners appear to be— do with the most conspicuous piece of furniture in the room? Some watch television in theirs, or simply loll, and some seem to find the chair an empowering place from which to deal with others. “When we have a little family powwow— I have four children— I sit in it to lay down the law,” said Mr. Boyd, the auto parts manager.
And most, of course, indulge their fantasies, imagining doing battle with Klingons and otherwise cruising the cosmos. “Sitting in it,” said Mr. Bradshaw, the graphic designer, “I find myself striking an action pose quite unconsciously.” To his regret, he must strike those poses in his home office. “My wife is not big on it,” he said. “I’ve actually been threatened with divorce if it comes into the living room.”
Mr. Sturgeon’s wife is more understanding. Though her husband’s chair measures, like most of its counterparts, an obtrusive 40 inches wide, 44 inches tall, and 38 inches deep — with extra room needed to swivel — she permits it in the living room.
“Every once in a while I’ll play a Star Trek video game in front of the chair and pretend I’m in command of the fleet,” Mr. Sturgeon said. “But by this time I’m so used to it that it’s just like any other chair. Maybe I feel like I’m in command of the house.”
“You sit in the chair,” Mike Paugh said, “and you’re watching an episode and pushing buttons and you find yourself saying, Fire photon torpedoes or whatever, and you’re making the sounds yourself because I don’t have the sound effects yet.” “Personally,” said his wife, Barbara, “I think my husband is a nerd.”
For all the labor and money the chair builders expend, they generally don’t park themselves in the captain’s seat for too long. “It’s not the most comfortable of chairs,” Mr. Veazie said. “The arms are too low and they’re too far apart. Now I know why William Shatner was always leaning forward in it.”
There is another possible explanation, suggested Eddie Paskey, who as Mr. Shatner’s stand-in on Star Trek spent much time in the chair during camera and lighting set-ups. “Early on, Bill sat down, leaned back, and it went over backwards,” he said. No word, though, from Captain Kirk himself. “Mr. Shatner is not doing any ‘Star Trek’-related interviews right now,” his assistant wrote in an e-mail, “because of the new movie.”