Star Wars

Kurt Vonnegut, the post-modern Mark Twain, died yesterday after suffering for two weeks of brain injuries related to an accident at his NYC residence.

I have to admit to being ignorant about his work --he's one of many American writers I overlooked during my college years to focus on his Latin American counterparts.

I got how funky he could be through his essays and interviews as well as his constant criticism of the Bush administration. Yet it's his becoming the subject of the Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen urban legend that made him take cool to a whole 'nother level.

The man was what myths are made off.

Here's the brilliant hoax and here is a parody featuring Yoda --yes, The Yoda from the Star Wars movies.

If you were close to my little piece of First Avenue around 9pm, you may well have heard me screaming and whooping it up. I'd just finished watching Return of the Jedi when I saw the man that makes the ending of that movie so right : Sebastian Shaw, the actor who played the older Anakin Skywalker in the 1983 original movie.

Nothing in pop culture has shocked me out of my wits so much like the ending of the 2004 digitally remastered version of this movie. Honestly, I was shaken by how confusing it was to see Christian Hayden's Anakin insted of Sebastian Shaw's. It was the arrogance of George Lucas that really upset me the most. How could he? How could George Lucas take this movie and mess with the ending? I mean, this is one of those seminal movies that changed the whole cultural narrative around son/father myths!

Our pop (culture!) quiz for the day:

Which control-obsessed subculture of our institutionalized lives is being critiqued in this morning's NYT op-ed passage about respecting personal choice?

[quote=Robert W. Cort]The problem for the rest of us is that a monopoly like this one, without any underlying economic rationale, distorts the marketplace and hurts consumers. It will not hold in the face of democratizing technology.[/quote]
Big Business, Big Church, Big State?
Big Media, Big Law, Big Labor?
Big Education?

It hardly matters -- Big Mouths for Big Money, all.

When choice control is the goal and the winner takes all, we always play the paying public, giving it up at the gate.

Just you wait. Keep trying to starve, shame, coerce and compel us out of our own homes and choices and inclinations according to your timetables, targets and price lists. Keep manipulating the many into settling for whatever further enriches YOU and your chosen few.

Long ago in a galaxy far away, Princess Leia had advice for sociopathic powerbrokers everywhere: "the more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."