Pencil Shavings

Bread and Circuses, and Charlie Sheen

Around 140 BC Roman politicians discovered that the best way to tame an unruly populous was to offer them cheap food and entertain them with bloody spectacles. The cheap food was bread or grains, the spectacle was violent chariot races called Circuses.

The people of Rome were easily distracted from the serious matters facing the Empire, by spectacular entertainment that often resulted in bloody painful deaths for the participants.

What does this have to do with Charlie Sheen?

It seems that we have not lost our taste for spectacular entertainment (and if there is a chance of the bloody death or at least metaphorical bloody death of the participant all the better) and we are still easily distracted from the serious nature of the times we are living in.

The world is in crisis. There are thousands of people dying right now as you read this. Some from natural disaster, some from illness, many from starvation, and some are being killed by their own governments because they dare to disagree.

And what are we doing?

We are busy being entertained.

The more serious the problems of our world become, the more we wish to eat our cheap food, and be entertained by the cheap spectacle. Why are we so determined to avoid facing the hard problems of our society? Why on earth would we care more about what Charlie Sheen is doing or saying, than about what we might do to help the people of Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Lybia, China, (and the list goes on)? I was shocked on the weekend to see that on Yahoo and Google Charlie Sheen was trending higher than the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster that is assaulting Japan.

We still, obviously, live in a time of Bread and Circuses. I wonder, how long this need to be entertained going outstrip our humanity? When will we pull our heads out of our TV's and see the world for what it is. Or are we going to entertain ourselves past the point of rescue, and into oblivion?

365 Days of Art - Day 251 - Watching

Day 251 and I was up late at night watching TV.

I'm not sure why some days I put off doing my art time until I'm dead tired and take my subjects from watching television.  I guess that's something all of us do from time to time.  We let small things disrupt our days and make us fret and worry, when if we settled down to focus on the big things the small things wouldn't be so important.

I watched a few shows that I don't normally watch, and did a lot of sketches of facial features - this is my eye page.  It seems appropriate somehow given that I was watching TV.

365 Days of Art - Day 234 - TV Drawings

Day 234 was a lazy day for me.  I just wanted to sit on the couch and watch TV, but my art time was pestering me too.  So I drew some of the people on the TV.

The News is easy to draw because they keep coming back to the same people in nearly the same position.  Network TV is tougher.  People are always on the move and making odd faces for comedic effect.

It was fun to draw some of the people on TV.  I used a really big sketch pad to try and fit a bunch of expressions all piled on top of each other.

a few pages (and a few shows later) and I had some really interesting work to look at.

Is It Worth The Hype?

So there has been a whole lotta hype about the new CBC comedy series Little Mosque on The Prairie. I understand a lot of American networks have even commented on it. The premise is that a young progressive Imam takes a job as the leader of a mosque in a small prairie town. Of course rampant paranoia and not so subtle racism ensues.

I know a lot of people think that this show will be controversial. But after watching it last night I have to say that it is..... cute. It's cute. It's amusing. It's not that controversial. In fact I think that they probably played it a little to safe - there were some great moments that could have had more humour wrung from them. But for a half hour, it was good and I think, that since this was just the pilot there is the opportunity for it to get better.

Yes, I will tune in next week.

The Google Zeitgeist

Another Friday night, and another chance to do something frivolous with my time instead of doing some serious writing.

Here are the top ten search terms from Google for the week ending July 4^th (and a happy belated Independence Day to my American friends (all two of you).

#10 The Devil Wears Prada: The new movie based on the novel. My take... any movie with Stanley Tucci in it is a movie worth seeing (although given my child rearing state it may be on DVD).

#9 Kate Bosworth: the new 2006 Lois Lane. I'm still struggling with the idea of Lois getting hooked up with someone who is not Clark Kent... and have you ever wondered why so many comic book characters have alliterative names?

#8 Michelle Wie: Now here is a super hero I can support. If only because it's nice to see a woman making golf headlines instead of a buncha fat white guys with addiction problems.

#7 Fireworks: Did I wish all those American's a happy Independence Day? For a change we weren't awakened in the middle of the night on Canada Day by fireworks... the night before is another story.

#6 The View: Ah yes, that bastion of calm, rational, detached news reporting. Or am I thinking of something else?

#5 Spiderman 3 : the top ten seems littered with comic book characters this week... oh, sorry – I forgot not to count anything associated with The View. Superheros are made to suffer and none seem to suffer more than Peter Parker (see alliteration).

#4 Brandon Routh: Superman! Why is it that even when you are young, tall, fit and handsome you still look a little silly in tights?

#3 Wimbledon: Yes – there are other sports besides the World Cup, and Baseball... (I'll duck now!)

#2 Tour de France: I rest my case.

#1 Star Jones: Barbara erased from the show and the credits within 24 hours... I wonder if she was looking for a bigger eraser when Star went on the talk show circuit?

The Most Relevant Topics

A lot of people write contemporary fiction and feel that they are reflecting the times that we live in.  I write contemporary fiction, but any reflection of the current world state has turned out to be accidental.

For the most clear and unflinching look at our times the best place to look is in the domain of Science Fiction.  Sci-Fi writers have a way of reflecting our times in the safe environment of the future or of alternate universes.  For instance, the new Battlestar Galactica TV series is such a frighteningly paranoid mirror of our time, that I can’t think of another fiction outlet (aside from Fox News) that portrays the current mind set of fear and worry about enemy’s in our midst. 

Perhaps this is the reason why Sci-Fi becomes so quickly dated.  It reflects our current times so faithfully that we have moved on to the next big issue of the day before the writing has time to develop a full shelf life.  Some themes are classic, Ray Bradbury is just a readable now as he ever was, the same can be said for Isaac Asimov.  Robert Heinlein doesn’t date as well.  His concepts although still fascinating, are too rife with the ideals of the 60’s and 70’s to appeal to the jaded teen and young adult of today.

I wonder if the contemporary fiction of today will strike as resonate a chord with readers as the latest batch of Sci-Fi.  I guess that is a survey that would be impossible to do, but I would be fascinated with the results.