Visitors to the offices of Jann Wenner on Sixth Avenue and 51st Street will be treated to the sight of the many National Magazine Awards the magazines of Wenner Media have collected over the years, many of them quite justifiably for the art direction of Rolling Stone. Well, they won’t be winning any art direction awards this year, and they’ll be lucky if ASME doesn’t try to claw some back. Rolling Stone has just produced a hideous magazine featuring four of the stars of Mad Men, four people who, one would think could not be made to look bad, but who look collectively wretched in this picture. We’re guessing that the four performers were photographed separately or nearly so, and then the four pics were photo-shopped together, with other techniques to enhance the image and give it the look of a single picture. Fair enough–we’ve seen Time and GQ and others do that recently. But here the processes were astonishingly, amateurishly botched. The facial expressions on Jon Hamm, Christina Hendricks and January Jones look Botoxed. Only Elisabeth Moss looks natural, or reasonably so, but she has her own problems, having been dramatically hourglassed in post-production, and, like Jones, become the recipient of snake legs. Moss’s left leg is–where, exactly? Jones’ right leg seems to be extending as though it was made of Silly Putty, and her left arm just melds, Siamese Twin-like, with Hamm’s oddly-shadowless right arm. With him holding a drink in that hand, it makes you wonder if Jones’ where Jones’ hand is–delicately slipped into the rock glass, perhaps?

Yesterday the New York Times reported that in November, the University of California will publish the first three volumes of the 500,000 (!) word Autobiography of Mark Twain. The opinion is that this will restore acid to a writer who has come to be seen as “’Colonel Sanders without the chicken, the avuncular man who told stories,” as his biographer Ron Powers put it. “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his passion has been kind of forgotten in all these long decades. But here he is talking to us, without any filtering at all, and what comes through that we have lost is precisely this fierce, unceasing passion.” Earlier versions, the paper says, were bowdlerized by editor Albert Bigelow Paine, a Victorian who was a stickler for propriety and who cut entire sections he thought offensive.

Reports the paper, “In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates “the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War” and Gen. Leonard Wood’s “mephitic record” as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars,” Twain observes. “He pays taxes on two million and a half.”

Other reappearing gems:

“Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most impulsive men in existence … He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch — throws a somersault and is straightaway back again where he was last week. He will then throw some more somersaults and nobody can foretell where he is finally going to land after the series. Each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion. That is what is happening to him all the time as president.”

“Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it.”

“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”

Wonder Woman has a new look. Tim Gunn approves. “I love Wonder Woman’s new look,” Gunn told Newsarama writer Alan Kistler. “This new look says, ‘I’m confident, I’m powerful, I’m sexy, and don’t mess with me.’ Furthermore, she looks like a citizen of the real world rather than a creature from another land. I would imagine that this new look will allow Wonder Woman to morph into situations in a less noticeable manner and, thereby be even more effective at combating evil doers. It’s no longer a costume, it’s real clothes.” It seems to me that the new clothes look terrific, but does she really look like Wonder Woman?

In The Guardian today: “The playwright Sir Tom Stoppard spoke today of his fears that the “printed page” is in danger of being edged out in a `world of technology’.  “I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there’s more competition for one’s attention nowadays,” he said. “The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.” The “moving image,” he added, was taking precedence in many children’s lives over “the printed page … [and] I think that’s to the detriment”.

Reported in a British paper, read on its website in New York, on a screen, of course.

Squired by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a ballyhooed visit to the main control room of the London Underground last week, and came away favorably impressed with the ability of the Tube’s management to use its CCTV system to monitor events on any and every station and platform in the system. Bloomberg flew home with visions of of monitors in his head.

I had the opportunity of visiting the same control center early in 2009 for an article I was reporting that eventually appeared in The Washington Monthly, and it’s damned impressive. The large wall mounted screens enable the people in charge to see for themselves what is happening, and this certainly leads to clearer information and better decision. The management team told me about how the CCTV system helped them in the aftermath of the July 7, 2007 bombings to close the system, safely evacuate a quarter million passengers. and most miraculously, reopen for business the following morning.

But before Mayor Bloomberg gets too enthusiastic, he should realize that there are important differences between the systems that would impact the experience. For one thing, many New York stations (perhaps even most) have a series of I-beam columns running the length of the platforms. Those will certainly block the view of any cameras set up to survey the platforms. More significantly, most Tube stations are heavily staffed with a large number of personnel. Many of them are almost like doormen, greeting passengers, giving directions and explaining the fare systems. These people are instructed to initiate contact with people who seem confused. It would be shocking if New York were to make that heavy investment in personnel, but it’s those people, and not so much the CCTV, that helps make the Tube virtually a crime-free environment. Indeed, the director of the Tube told me that have been most useful in telling managers when tracks have been cleared after a suicide, and normal traffic can be resumed.

But what about the striking CCTV images we saw of the men who perpetrated the bombing of 7/7, and the failed bombing attempts two weeks alter (see right)? Weren’t the cameras useful in identifying and capturing the terrorists? Yes, certainly they were. But the secret is while were captivated by the images that were captured, we missed the fact that they were only some of the images that should have been available. There were a lot of cameras that were broken or empty of film. Indeed, the day after, when police shot and killed an unarmed Brazilian tourist who resembled one of those caught on film but who did not respond to commands to halt, no cameras in the vicinity were functioning. Still, the cameras were useful because by having the images of the suspects, authorities were able to restore a sense of order and calm. “It sends the message that someone is in charge, that we know who committed this act and that we’re going to find them,” Tim O’Toole, the director of the Underground, told me.

When I was an editor at Spy a couple of decades ago, we used to run an item called The Spy List, which was almost invariably a simple set of names that were connected by–well, that was for the reader to figure out, or to speculate upon. Basically it was a way we could print rumors about people without risking the moral or legal consequences of spreading gossip initiated by unnamed and perhaps unreliable sources. And we were able to get away with it because we operated out on the edge, at a deliberate distance from the mainstream.

The Wall Street Journal, which fancies itself a mainstream, important, powerful newspaper, veered sharply into the heart of Spy List territory the other day when it published on its front page a 17 year-old photograph of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a nominee to the Supreme Court, playing softball. Published rumors in recent weeks have held that Ms. Kagan is a lesbian, which she denies and which the White House refuses to discuss. As well they should–it’s no one’s business. And no respectable newspaper would introduce the question in a straightforward way. But a partisan newspaper just might find a way to introduce the topic in a low, mean, back-handed way.

A newspaper might well have good reason for publishing a photo of a person in the news engaged in some leisure activity, and a current photo of the new Supreme Court nominee kicking back with friends would be a perfectly appropriate picture to publish, and on the front page. But a 17 year-old picture of the nominee? You might run that inside, in the context of a profile of this person in the news, in the midst of baby pictures, graduation photos, shots of early achievement, and so on.

But a 17 year old photo on the front page, unaccompanied by an article, apropos of nothing in the news? Not only is that not the sort of thing that serious newspapers do; it’s the sort of thing that is ordinarily called a mistake and that costs people their jobs. It’s simply not newsworthy, and in a week where oil continues to flow, the Icelandic volcano continues to spew, Great Britain settles on a new prime minister, amid other events, using precious front page acreage on this type of photo would ordinarily constitute journalistic malpractice. It would be stupid.

But the editors at the Journal aren’t stupid. They’re cynical. They’ve coyly introduced the topic of Ms. Kagan’s sexual orientation into public discussion, and caused people to discuss the paper, which should impress their boss. They should be proud–all it’s cost them is honor.

Does anyone else see the irony in the head of the world’s largest surveillance state meeting his destruction in front of an open mic?

Let’s face it, for all the commentary about how Gordon Brown’s harsh comments about a 65 year-old housewife revealed the inner man, what he was mostly guilty of was venting. Struggling through a difficult campaign, going through the motions of public appearances that he didn’t think were going well, Gordon Brown vented. He did what people do after dinners with prickly in-laws and long, droning meetings with the boss—he let off steam.

Now venting, like farting, belching, scratching your butt, and wishing someone were dead, are unpleasant and unattractive human activities that most people perform at least periodically, even though they seldom reflect advantageously on the performer. But usually they are performed before a privileged audience in a place that is private, a status that Brown, sitting inside his car in the company of a handful of loyal aides, thought he enjoyed. But Brown had forgotten that he was wearing an open microphone put there by the TV news people filming his campaign stop, and his comments were shared with the world. What distinguished this incident from a garden variety event like Christian Bale going ballistic on a soundstage is that Brown is not merely a world leader, he’s the leader of the country that is the foremost surveillance state in the world. More than anyone, he should have expected someone to be watching.

There are 4.2 million closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the UK, one for every fourteen people, perhaps a million in London alone. The cameras are operated by the police and by governmental authorities like the London Underground, by private security firms and local governments, by schools and hospitals and parking lots and chip shops and pubs. In some parts of London, like Westminister, where Parliament and the government buildings are collected, they are literally everywhere, gray boxy sentinels as expressionless as the guards in front of Buckingham Palace. But there are plenty in residential neighborhoods as well. Within 200 yards of a particular vantage point on quiet Canonbury Square in gentrified Islington, one can find 32 cameras running 24 hours a day, and the only thing that makes that particular vantage point unusual was that in 1944, it was the place where George Orwell was living when he began writing 1984.

And thanks to Brown’s Labor government, more cameras are on their way, only they will be more capable. Testing has begun on cameras that will incorporate software that will evaluate your face and eavesdrop on your conversations and tell you to pick up the empty coffee cup you’ve just tossed. If we think public officials are too cocooned now, imagine what they’ll be like when they risk becoming global laughingstocks every time they fail to dispose of a candy wrapper in a proper bin. Yet what’s astonishing is how ineffective CCTV is in fighting crime. A report by London’s Metropolitan Police that was released last August stated that “for every 1,000 cameras in London, less than one crime is solved per year,’’ putting the cost of that particular act of justice at a not very efficient 20,000 pounds. Perhaps one reason is that is that the cameras have been set up on an ad hoc basis dating back to the Thatcher regime, and are not linked. This means that although a Londoner might be caught by a video camera as often as 300 times a day, the fact that those cameras are not connected to one another means that the spectacular feats of surveillance people see television cops perform with ease are simply impossible. Retroactively the police might be able to follow a criminal every step of the way from his home to the scene of the crime, but it’s not as though cops can follow a suspect through central London. Last year an amused security official of the London Underground told me about the time the TV series “Spooks’’ filmed in the Whitehall station. “The character went into our security booth and connected our camera system to MI-5. We’re not connected to MI-5.’’

Instead, the cameras catch people in the act of performing the kind of infraction that Gordon Brown committed—things that are embarrassing, things that should be ignored that instead cause tons of explanation, things that everybody does. Everyone in London seems to have heard a story like the one about the university security sweep that was aimed against car thieves but instead caught two faculty members snogging in the back seat of a sedan. That was an accidental discovery, but as it turns out, local governments, armed with souped-up surveillance capabilities invested in them with new anti-terror laws, have been targeting people suspected of littering, fishing illegally, dumping, and applying to a school outside their area of eligibility. Seeking al-qaeda, we found cow-tippers. Last January, documents were revealed that suggested that the South Coast partnership, a cooperative venture between the Kent Police and the Home Office, was planning to use unmanned spy drones of the type employed in Afghanistan, in policing the population. Hey, it’s not a black helicopter, but it’s close.

And CCTV is just the beginning; British civil libertarians have been fighting other recent Labor Party initiatives include the institution of a biometric national ID card, the creation of a national DNA database, fitting all cars with tracking devices, and instituting systems for tracking all e-mails, phone calls and internet use. The glib line often cited to justify these measures is “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’’ But everybody’s got something to hide. If you don’t believe me, ask Gordon Brown.

Most of the obituaries of Fess Parker, the actor who famously portrayed Davy Crockett on television in the fifties and who died yesterday, placed him at the center of genuine coonskin fad, part of the crazy quilt of crazes of that period that included Elvis, hula hoops, drive-ins and that made up pop culture during that decade. I prefer to think Fess as being one of the key figures in the fifties and sixties who were entertaining children and adults with stories directly taken from or based on American history.

Consider all these influences which appeared between 1955 and 1965: Parker first played Crockett, one of the first national smashes in the young days of television, and then later played frontiersman Daniel Boone on an NBC series ran for six seasons after its 1964 debut. Parker’s show, The Adventures of Davy Crockett, was produced by the Walt Disney Company, which during this period also made a film version of Esther Forbes‘ Revolutionary War novel Johnny Tremain, and created a TV programs based on the adventures of the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielsen, of a drummer boy who served at the battle of Shiloh, and of the 7th Cavalry’s only survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Commanche, a horse.) Disney wasn’t the only television producer that tried to mine history: in 1961, there was a short-lived television series called The Americans about a pair of brothers from Virginia who ended up on the opposite sides of the Civil War, and in 1963, an anthology series on CBS called The Great Adventure, also short-lived, which depicted key moments in the lives of people like Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Hale, Sam Houston, John Brown, Jean Lafitte, Boss Tweed and others (one wonders if this approach was inspired by President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.) At the same time, Hollywood, whose longstanding interest in historical epics had ebbed, once again began pumping them out in earnest: The Alamo (Crockett again!), The Buccaneer (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson), The Horse Soldiers (John Wayne playing a cavalry officer loosely based as a Union cavalry officer Judson Kilpatrick), The Longest Day, PT 109, The Great Escape, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and many, many more westerns and World War II adventures (and this wouldn’t include non-American-based films like Cleopatra, Ben Hur, El Cid, Khartoum, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Becket, The Lion in Winter, and so on, which fed an interest in history.) On the radio, country singer Johnny Horton had a hit single with “The Battle of New Orleans,” and a hit album that includes songs about the sinking of the Bismarck, Snowshoe Thompson and Jim Bridger. Our bookshelves were filled with Landmark Books, non-fiction biographies and accounts of battles, events and discoveries, and “You Are There. . . ” books, which showed us large historical events through the eyes of child participants. For a lighter read, Topps put out a line of Civil War trading cards, with grisly battle scenes drawn by Woody Gelman, who also drew Topps’ famous Mars Attacks! series. Best of all, we had toys. Toy guns, sure–flintlocks, Winchester repeaters, Colt revolvers, Lugars, .45 caliber automatics, and carbines, but all kinds of playsets full of toy soldiers and accessories that allowed us to imagine for ourselves what the Alamo, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach and the Little Big Horn must have looked like, had they been waged on the colorful linoleum tiles of my mother’s basement.

It’s not that kinds today get no history-based entertainment–American Girl dolls are an obvious example–but kids are far more steeped in fantasy and science fiction. I just think of myself as very fortunate to have been brought up during a very brief period when so much of pop culture enthusiastically communicated and reinforced the idea that the past was place that was exciting, and inspiring, and well worth getting to know.

In an article on CNET.com called “Why No One Cares About Privacy Anymore,” Declan McCullagh celebrates (I don’t think that’s too strong a word) the changing mores and advancing technology that seem to be turning the idea of privacy into a quaintly passe concept. Noting that the anticipated storm of privacy objections to Google Buzz have simply not materialized, McCullagh suggests that people, particularly young people, just aren’t all that worked up over the idea that the world knows their business. “Internet users have grown accustomed to informational exhibitionism,” he writes. “Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.” McCullagh quotes the Judge Richard Posner, a conservative political theorist, who has written “As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.” The truth about privacy is counter-intuitive, McCullagh concludes: “Less of it can lead to a more virtuous society.”

In many ways, this is certainly true. It always seemed astonishing that homosexuals were denied security clearances during the Cold War because their secret left them susceptible to blackmail. During my parents’ generation, people kept secrets about all sorts of things because social stigmas were attached: a drinking problem, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, mental retardation in the following, a marriage outside of one’s race/religion/ethnic group. People have gotten over most of these things. We feel better because because we can lead lives that are more free and more honest.

And yet, there is still much we would resent having put on public display. Who among the exhibitionists would like to have the details of his finances spread across the globe? And while Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford and others have given infidelity a bad name, do we really feel that people are not entitled to keep their romantic liaisons to themselves, free from community judgment?  But what is really important to realize that we are not always in control of the things we need to be private about. Just last week, Mary Cheney, daughter of the Great Scaremonger Dick Cheney, and an odious person in her own right, spearheaded an effort to attack the Department of Justice lawyers who represented accused members of al Qaeda who were in detention. Now, these lawyers were not performing this entirely professional action in secret, so the parallel is not exact, but all of sudden, here they were doing their jobs in relative anonymity, and now a public rabble-rouser is accusing them helping America’s enemies, which certainly sounds like the definition of treason to me. A perfectly normal, yea, even admirable activity has now been spotlighted and stigmatized, and if you think it’s impossible that a right wng nut will one day take a shot at one of these lawyers, then I envy your peace of mind. It may be a better world that doesn’t require so much privacy, but in the meantime, it’s a pretty good protection against hysteria and malevolence.

Click here for a hilarious video from moveon.org. Well, I think it’s hilarious anyway.