This is very immature of me, but does anyone else laugh a little when they hear the Supreme Court of the United States referred to as “SCOTUS”?

 

BTW, watching law school moot courts on C-SPAN (especially when a Supreme Court justice is participating) is incredibly entertaining.

Patrick McGoohan, star and man responsible for The Prisoner, as No. 6:

The Prisoner has always been high up on my list.  Not only was it a well written and provocative show, the set and costume design were unreal.  I don’t believe the show would have resonated as much as it has had the design been less conscientious.  Choosing Portmeirion as the location, using the penny-farthing bicycle as the logo for the Village and having no. 6 sport a black jacket with white piping trim, were all very interesting and ultimately defining design choices.  

I hear that AMC is redoing the series.  I’m more than a little worried about it.  They have done a terrific job with Mad Men, with the writing, set design and costumes.  But it seems to me that they are sort of doomed if they do one thing and doomed if they do another.  If they go the updated route and set The Prisoner in the modern day, I fear it may lose a lot of the “charm” that the original had.  These days we tend to make our fictitious authoritarian regimes so sterile.  If they try and keep the 60’s touch, it may feel forced and inauthentic.

There are some things that a prime for reinterpretation.  Others, like The Prisoner, are unique one-offs that belong to a place and time.

Ever since “Antonio” from Wings became “Monk”, I’ve had a hard time accepting character actors in other roles.  I’m perfectly at ease watching major movie stars transition from one character to another because there is a certain contract we enter into with them.  We agree to suspend our disbelief.  We think we know them, so it’s easy for us to pretend we don’t.

This doesn’t work with character actors because we identify them with the character.  Our memory knows them as so-and-so.  The ugly girl from Clueless will always be the ugly girl from Clueless.  Costanza will always be Costanza and Al Bundy will never be a rich man.  Which is why all the actors from The Wire will have a hell of a time finding new roles.  I’ve already spotted Bunny and Rawls on other shows.  I saw Cool Lester Smooth on some BBC drama.  I hear Michael is on the new 90210 (now that’s scary).

So what to do with them?  Well, most people won’t care or won’t remember (obviously the cast of the Wire is a bit different).  But what about people like me who are cursed with a mind like a steel trap – a trap that catches nothing but worthless trivia?  How do you fool them?  

The answer is a commune for retired character actors.  We could just ship them there at the end of their role(s).  Don’t think gulag.  Think more along the lines of a Florida or a Palm Springs, complete with shuffleboard and early bird specials.  They could put on productions of “Bye, Bye Birdie” and “Grease”.  They could live out a quiet life and become just another search on deadoralive.com.

 

Frank Zappa and his parents, 1970.

 

For the last month or so this picture has been on my mind.  It’s great on so many levels.  First, let’s stick to the purely aesthetic.  The composition is great, with the back of the couch cutting off the lower left corner of the picture.   Visually, it separates and frames the subjects. The couch itself is awesome.   The two generations separated, one sitting and the other standing.   The color of the walls and the color of Frank Zappa’s shirt really tie him to his home.

This picture is from the 1970 Life Magazine series depicting rock stars and their parents.  It’s an interesting study in generational differences.  The 1960’s were a time marking a clear societal shift, with the younger generation so radically different (and somewhat alienated) from the one preceding it.  So what really strikes me about this photograph (and to a lesser extent the series as a whole) is how happy the two generations look together.  It brings a sense of hope, of reconciliation.  The sixties were over and the new decade was a chance to put the turbulence behind and to come together anew.  

It’s interesting looking at this snapshot of time to see how things have changed.  I wonder if this is where we had hoped to be.

This made me laugh:

 

Fantastic

From a NY Times article.  British atheists are apparently buying up billboard space for messages like that.  If I saw that drive by, my step would get a little bit lighter.  It’s so Monty Python.  But how is this any different from the hyper-intense Jesus billboards you see in different parts of the country?  Is this evangelistic atheism a form of religion in its own right?

Ah, the absurdity!

I’ve been ruminating on this idea for about a week now, and it seems that others have been on a similar wave length.  So, here goes the idea.

There has been much speculation about genetics and what the future will bring.  Will there be a day when we can tweak a gene to make our children smarter or better looking?  A strong drive for ethics may prevent this from ever happening, but what if the change is for a perceived “good” to mankind?  What if through scientific intervention we could eliminate dishonesty?

I don’t think this is very probable, but I could see people making certain arguments for it.  Without dishonesty, there would be no fraud, no theft, no obfuscation of important truths.  This could lead to an open and forthright “utopia”.

But really, with little insight, one can see it wouldn’t end up like that.  A lot of what keeps society a functioning, civil unit is the art of the white lie.  Think about all those instances where the absolute truth would have been devastating.

All of this is pretty predictable.  The interest for me lies (no play on words intended… well maybe a little) in the story that could be told about the consequences of two generations separated by the ability to lie.  What would the struggles look like?  Would mankind give up part-way through the process?  If so, how would those who have been “modified” react and survive?  Would the older, lying generation become more duplicitous or would they strive to self-correct?  If the converstion from liars to “George Washingtons” is complete, what does that mean for the inter-relations of society to come?

This could prove to be a very interesting premise to a sci-fi short story.  I most likely won’t write it, but maybe some one will or maybe someone already has and I don’t know about it.

The other day I was watching a C-Span presentation of Laura Bush giving a tour of the White House.  Everything was pretty standard until she got to the private den reserved for the family of the President.  To illustrate the function of the room, she began to describe some of the hobbies she and the President pursued in that room.  She said they loved to put together jigsaw puzzles and watch baseball.  Wait a minute – that sounds awesome.  And then it hit me.  Am I basically a condensed version of the Bushes?  I freaked out momentarily as she continued to describe their interests.  When she got to the part about scrapbooking and starting wars, I let out a sigh of relief.

I love advent calendars. I may be an adult, but I still buy one every December. They are like puzzles full of chocolate. Normally they come with pictures of Santa or some sort of winter scene, which makes sense for Christmas, but I’ve always thought that the advent calendar concept could be applied to other art . I found this picture of a bookcase advent calendar and I think it’s an interesting and fun twist, especially for a bibliophile like myself.

Which book is number 25?

It would be great if you could customize this to have your books on the shelves. In my case, that might mean some Moliere and a lot of Calvin and Hobbes.

Caricature of King Louis-Philippe of France (1831) by Honoré Daumier (after Charles Philipon)

I first came across this drawing in high school during a French history class, and it has always stuck with me. This is such a clever work of caricature that is so playful in its criticism of the increasingly unpopular monarch. The pear is a humorous fruit; its shape is so absurd and disproportionate. It’s the perfect fruit for ridicule and its contours map perfectly to his drooping jowls and exaggerated curls.

The French, I have always thought, make excellent critics. Like the British, they have a tremendous wit and they use it like an épée to poke holes in anything that does not meet their scrutiny. Daumier was a master at distilling society and the ever changing political scene into entertaining and pointed satire.

These early nights be zapping my creativity, yo.