Live long and prosper

“Captain’s log, stardate 2003.8: We have entered standard orbit around Teegeeack, an inhabited and overpopulated planet in the Sol system. Lieutenant Uhura, Ensign Chekov and I beamed down to make a routine check of the planet’s facilities and found to our dismay that we had doppelgangers, extremely drunken doppelgangers, and that our extremely drunken doppelgangers were busy wreaking havoc in a restaurant across the street from government headquarters, which threatened to bring down the stability of the entire system.”

Well, not exactly. The government system seems to be collapsing on its own, with the insurgent campaign of former child actor Gary Coleman (see Tom Tomorrow, page 8) threatening to propel California into a strange parallel universe.

It is a strange parallel universe already inhabited by the state’s capital city, Sacramento, which plays home to not one but three bands—all of whose métier happens to be the 1960s space-western TV series Star Trek and its many sequels.

One band, No Kill I, springs from an incestuous Midtown scene of beer-fueled one-joke party bands; it’s the one joke that happened to keep getting the big laughs. And if No Kill I is pop-culture shtick gone awry, Warp 11 is its Ferengi analogue, a canny bunch who saw dollars and opportunity where their predecessors saw only a cheap excuse to get a good heat on.

And all of this was captured by documentary filmmaker Roger Nygard, who was in town to shoot No Kill I and Warp 11 for his next feature, Trekkies II. Also on hand was SN&R writer Cosmo Garvin, whose account of Sacramento’s latest claim to strange fame is this week’s cover story.

More local music coverage—a quick spin through a few locally produced CDs—is in our Arts & culture feature. In our Music feature, writer Dennis Yudt examines why the related bands Holiday Flyer, the California Oranges and the Sinking Ships merged their collective fortunes into a new supergroup, to be called Safari. And Clubber columnist Christian Kiefer reports on a legendary local guitarist stealing the show from a San Francisco band at a free outdoor show in Rocklin.