I was about to ask my readers a question: "who is responsible for that now-classic image of a diner at a street corner with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and I believe Elvis Presley sitting nonchalantly inside? "The viewer is supposed to imagine himself driving by that street corner, getting a glimpse of these legends, but of necessity hurrying on...." But then I realized -- hey, you're on the internet thing, dummy! You can find it. So here it is. Boulevard of Broken Dreams. I had misremembered the created/captured moment. Elvis isn't sitting about nonchalantly -- he's working there, behind the counter, serving Monroe, Dean, and Humphrey Bogart. And the artist? Gottfried Helnwein, working a variation on Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I find Helnwein's image much more arresting than Hopper's. But you can judge for yourself, dear reader, because this is after all the internet.
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A year or so ago I discovered that one of my relatives was reading some heavy-duty intellectual named Slavoj Zizek. Since she is merely an impressionable half century or so of age and her reading must be monitored, I asked her who Zizek was. She told me I could read about him on Wikipedia, and even sent me a link to the relevant article. I should mention that we've had philosophical differences before -- she was once an admirer of Ayn Rand, and I tried to persuade her that Randianism was crap. She now sees that it was crap, but I don't get any credit for my efforts at explaining this to her before she was ready. Instead, she thinks of me as an officious intellectual meddler, and does things like referring me to Wikipedia for accounts of her recent reading material. I read, but wasn't satisfied by, the Wikipedia article. There's more about Zizek in a Routledge publication, "Fifty Key Postmodern Thinkers." It is arranged in reference-work fashion, alp...