Heaven or Someplace Like It

The show gives us glimpses of the afterlife, the interlife, the region between, or whatever the hell they call it.

"Heaven" doesn't resemble those Sunday School picture book illustrations. No golden streets, pearly gates, or angelic choirs hanging around on clouds and playing their harps. 

In her interludes between death and rebirth, Prairie pops into a three dimensional X-Y-Z grid of light . This cordinate system divides the blackness of space. Tiny galaxies drift by at infinitesimal scale. (and furiously accelerated time scale too. A second = a million years, or thereabouts.) The galaxies float through Prairie and her Sprit guide. Which implies this is place is no place. It's more of a user interface. An inter dimensional operating system,.

Did the angels build this place or do they just work here? Who are they working for?

If there's somebody upstairs, they aren't mentioned.

This isn't so much a spiritual realm as a physical realm in higher dimensions. More like the wormhole timey-wimey subway system in Doctor Who, and It only looks like religion, folks. But it's really science. Quantum physics and the something universe theory.

Destry Rides Again

The small town of Bottleneck is under the control of Kent (Brian Donlevy), a power-hungry boss who gets control over the local cattle ranchers by winning a rigged game of cards. When the local sheriff questions the legitimacy of the game, Kent has him killed and names the town drunk, Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), as sheriff. What Kent doesn't know is that Dimsdale knows legendary lawman Tom Destry, who in turns sends his daring son Tom Destry Jr. (James Stewart) to Bottleneck to save the day.

Although Destry wasn't black, Mel Brooks lifted a shitload of elements for "Blazing Saddles." 

Whale's Tale

On a surface level, Moby Dick is about obsession. Referring to Melville's bigass novel, just to be clear. "Jaws" is basically "Moby Dick" with a shark substituting for a whale. Quint was dumped in the Pacific with the sailors of the Indianapolis. Most of his mates became shark food; Quint survived, and waged a vendetta against sharks -- the "Jaws" terrorizing Amity, specifically. Jaws ate him. Moby Dick ate Ahab's leg. Ahab launched a vendetta against the great white whale. With the exception of Ishmael, the crew wound up dead; Ahab wound up harpooned to the whale.
On a deeper level, it's a mad little allegory about the Calvinistic clockwork universe. God is the mad watchmaker; if it's God will that a whale eats your leg, you should deal with it. It's entirely possible there's no watchmaker behind the mad machine. You should deal with that, too. Revenge against God and/or the universe is just plain stupid.
The whale is other. Inhuman. Like the sentient ocean in Solaris, it can't be analyzed. It's also bigger than you are. You lost a leg? Too bad. You will not beat up the universe. You will not beat up God. Don't try.
This is second hand knowledge, English major lore. I've read a seriously condensed edition with Kool illustration. I've seen boththe John Huston movie and the Mister Magoo adaptation. I've even read Ray Bradbury's script for the John Houston movie. Cool script. I've never actually read the original, unedited novel.

Ron Howard. Wow. What a wasted opportunity.

Marais: Street Art

Street art by Konny Steding

Street Art. Visual artists everywhere lack for galleries. When artists in Paris have that problem, they say "No problem," and put their stuff out on the street -- creating a changing exhibition space out of mailboxes, lampposts and any other surface they can find. Yes, I know, artists everywhere do that, but not to the sheer density as they do in Paris. The walls are thick with multilayered expression: cryptic stickers proclaiming "J'Existe," mocking distortions of street signage, sad-eyed women crying bloody tears. That dolorous image is ubiquitous in Le Marais -- high-speed brushwork on huge paper posters signed Konny. Who the heck is Konny? Well, in an unlikely chain of events, I wind up talking to Konny and Jacques Halbert (our mutual neo-Dadaist friend) at an iron-wrought table in a French pizza place. (I'd admired her art; suddenly I'm talking to the actual artist. What are the odds?) So I grill her. You've got a fluid style, but the proportions are perfect. How do you do it? A pencil under-sketch? Some kind of grid? Or is this all just brilliant freehand? Not willing to spill her secret, Konny pretends not to understand the question.

St. Michael or Michel

I wish I had taken his photo. We were sitting having an apertif at some nondescript cafe in a residential hood of Montmarte. Champagne for me; Heineken for him. Watching the world go by, which was mostly parents taking their kids home from school. Young lovers met and kissed over a glass and lit up cigarettes, a few ancients muttered in street as they bent to check that glittering object, hoping for a lost centime. We looked up to see a man standing in front of us. (He told us, eventually, he was 83 and had just come back from the doc who was checking on his new hip.) He started talking and everything from his mouth was gold, was silver, was pure. As happens during this magical time in Paris--before le repas and after the chaos of the day (around 7 p.m.), we spent some time with une verre and a conversation (in broken French on our side) that led far into fields we could wander for a long time still. He was born in the Caribbean but moved to Paris in his young 20s. He was a musician--and eventually a sought-after music teacher. Taught and played with some of jazz's greats. During the conversation, I noted that, well, he seemed happy. Happy from a deep inside place--despite old age and the hip, which made him obviously lame. I asked him where that happiness came from and this is what he said: "Happiness takes practice--like exercise. It's not just exercising the smile. It has to come from deep inside--from the bones, the sinew, the deep heart of who you are. It can be hard work!" And he laughed in that deep Caribbean way. As he left, we asked his name. "Michel," he said. And then he was off. Michel? Was he an ange? We had several visitations like this with, of all things, mostly older men--each who reached out to us offering words of wisdom and, almost, warning: Be happy!

The Republic Fucks Up

A more accurate subtitle. But far less commercial.

Mechano Man

Specifically, the mechano man crouched in the bowels of the search engine like the chess-playing dwarf inside the Mechanical Turk. The dwarf inside the machine! Or, in this case, the metaphoric, mechanical, chess-playing dwarf inside the massive, distributed, fuzzy-logic, pattern recognition system.