One Hundred Forty Years Ago Today...

...Edward Hopper was born.

He gave us Nighthawks...and so much more.

Automat was painted in 1927. Imagine if it were painted today or yesterday or an exponential bunch of yesterdays. Imagine some musical accompaniment...May I suggest this but I would prefer it having been sung by Billie Holiday or Patsy Cline.

If You're Going To...

...San Francisco
Be Sure to wear some flowers in your hair*

...Montgomery, Alabama
Be Sure to wear some flowers in your hair...


This Tuesday, the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum will be celebrating ZELDA'S BIRTHDAY .

I wish I had a clone who could be flown...there.
But there is always next year. At the very least–to celebrate a woman who was born on July 24, 1900–I will feed Zelda the Cat an extra bowl of tuna fish.
She will, however, have to provide her own birthday candles.

As for the actual Zelda Fitzgerald, this is how she described one of her birthday parties:

The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.**

*My apologies to Scott McKenzie.

**For more quotes from Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, go here.

Calvin and Hobbes

Bill Watterson retired from drawing Calvin and Hobbes years ago but the stunning thing about his strip is that if you read something that was in its original form twenty years ago, it re-reads with eternal freshness.

Boondocks...TEXT ONLY

Riley's hair makes Don King look like he has a crew cut. The girl's hair is bigger than some Third World countries. Her only words get the italic highlight treatment:

You see, Jasmine, information–and the control of it–is power...Those who control information have tremendous power to manipulate the masses. Thus, we must stay vigilant in our pursuit of truth...Which is why I can never, ever tell you the awful truth about Spongebob Squarepants***WHAT ABOUT SPONGEBOB?

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Mr. McGruder. The world needs you to make this a better place. We need you to resume fresh daily strips of Boondocks.
We also need Gary Trudeau. But he is alive and well and fresh daily...with new and current comic strips...He also wants you back doing fresh and daily strips.
No he doesn't!
Why?
Because you might be the only cartoonist that Trudeau considers "competition."

The Tube Gallery

American cars in need of tune up
Go to Jiffy Lube
Carless British commuters
Go into the Tube

Underground they go
And now you know
With eyes set free
This is what they’ll see

FIFTEEN LEADING ARTISTS
COMMISSIONED TO CREATE
LONDON UNDERGROUND POSTERS

...According to Art Daily, the artists are (in alphabetical order):
Pablo Bronstein, Melissa Gordon, Runa Islam, Idris Khan, Sarah Lucas,
Goshka Macuga, Robert Orchardson, Martha Rosler, Nedko Solakov,
Frances Stark, Corin Sworn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing,
Lawrence Weiner and Haegue Yang.

The highlighted artist created the featured poster.

©

I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT...

...GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!





Howard Beale ranted and the TV audience had a new mantra!

Once upon a time, there were only three television networks. Along came a fourth network and its ratings were drowning in the deep blue sea until...news commentator Howard Beale gave his speech whose keywords are excerpted here and...program director Diane Christiansen fiendishly injected steroids into the Nielsen Ratings of the United Braodcasting Network (UBS)...

PETER FINCH won a Best Actor Academy Award for his foaming-at-the-mouth Howard Beale character. Best Actress Academy Award winner FAYE DUNAWAY was never so diabolically delicious as when she portrayed Diana Christiansen in Network.

The 1976 film is probably the most ominously quotable movie ever made. To give deserving praise to the actors in NETWORK would take me a month of Mondays. All I will say here is that PADDY CHAYEVSKY is the only scriptwriter to win three solo Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards. Twenty-six years after Sunset Boulevard, WILLIAM HOLDEN proves why he is one of the greatest to ever grace the silver screen.

...Mr. Dylan told us that we all got to serve somebody. That includes Howard Beale. Where there are corporations, there are holding companies. Where there are television networks, there are holding companies.

I want to believe that Paddy Chayevsky was once photographed by Otto Jensen. Whether true or not, I will believe this. Anyone photographed by Otto was enthralled by Otto's aura. Therefore, Mr. Chayevsky, whose other two scriptwriting Academy Awards were for MARTY and THE HOSPITAL, named a Network character after Otto.
The actor is Ned Beatty.

Arthur Jensen is the Chief Executive Officer of the conglomerate owning the United Broadcasting System. That is, Arthur Jensen is the CEO of CCA, which owns UBS. Howard Beale is sitting at the other end of the thirty-foot table pictured here. Jensen exhorts a volcanic tirade without blowing his lid. I would love to quote the whole damn thing but will only quote the final words:

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of busi-ness. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality--one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

Why me?

Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.