In The Atlantic, Jared Keller has assembled a rather brainy slide show–a collection of literary references in The Simpsons. Many of my favorites are here, including Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chambon, George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Robert Caro, The New Yorker, Tom Wolfe, The Economist, and William L. Shirer.Somehow Keller missed the episde in which Lisa mentioned the end of Spy.

JMal CBC from Kenneth B Smith on Vimeo.

The streets and parts and sidewalks of London are home to some 800,000 closed circuit TV cameras, a huge number of which are mounted on walls of public buildings. The cameras capture the comings and goings of vast numbers of people, scarcely any of whom feel that the cameras constitute an intrusion on their privacy. The general feeling is, “We’re out in public, we’re behaving normally, we’re assuming that we’re being observed by many other individuals–what difference does it make if we are also being seen on camera?” A very common-sensical conclusion, even if my inner civil libertarian remains uneasy.

But what’s fascinating, and weird, is that the when the tables are turned, and the buildings are being photographed, there is great anxiety, at least among the security officers representing the companies that own or take space in the buildings. This video was created earlier this summer, when the London Street Photography Festival assigned six photographers to shoot various locations in the city–all on public ground. But as you can see from this video, which was shot by videographers accompanying the photographers, all six shooters drew the attention of private security guards. In three cases, police were summoned, although in each case, the police sided with the photographers. None of them bought the idea that security was being compromised. Another small victory for common sense.

But it’s odd, isn’t it? Apparently people can be observed and filmed, but in the minds of corporate security, not even the edifices that house the corporations, which are in plain view 24 hours a day, cannot be photographed. It does show that at least in the minds of the corporations, they are a state unto themselves.

. . .the party is over for Friday Night Lights, a terrific television series based on an excellent Peter Berg movie based ona very good Buzz Bissinger book. The story of a high school football coach and his wife, his players, their families, and the culture of small town football, Friday Night Lights did an excellent job of creating characters and situating them not just in a cultural milieu, but an emotional one as well. Never has a series worked as hard to show all the social strata in a town that is thrown together in a high school. The actors were terrific: anchored by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, the cast seemed exceptionally real. Other standouts over the years included Adrianne Palicki, Taylor Kitsch, Brad Leland, Aimee Teegarden, Michael B. Jordan, and many many more.

Was this the best conservative television series ever? Quite possibly. The fundamental values of the series were family, work, self-sacrifice, teamwork,and submission to authority. Individualism was accepted, but it had its place (indeed, one of the faults is that if you were successful in upholding one of these values, like teamwork, dysfunctional individualism was overlooked.) How I wish conservatives would promote these values, rather than the causes of big business and religious fundamentalism they instead espouse. Coach Taylor was a benign dictator; often intolerant, unreasonable, and close-minded when presented with a problem, he would often enlarge his views after receiving the good counsel of his wife, which he valued. He was not unchanging, but he was always firm, which is a pretty good combo for a leader.

Three cheers for Craig Ferguson, who explained on his program why he wasn’t going to make jokes about Charlie Sheen anymore, which is because the dud is mentally ill. (This isn’t my armchair diagnosis, but that of my fried Dr. Howard Samuels, the noted therapist. “Charlie Sheen is a hardcore drug addict,” he said last week. “What’s been going on is typical of someone who smokes a lot of crack. For the first three to six months that the drug is leaving the system people are extremely grandiose, arrogant, entitled and angry.”

Anyway, Ferguson offered an historical parallel. “There was a mental hospital in London,” the brilliant Scots TV host said. “It’s been there for a very long time. It started as a priory in I think the 12th or 13th century. Anyway, it’s called Bedlam. And what happened was, in the 18th century, people used to go along and pay money — they would pay a penny — and they would look through the peepholes of the cells. And they would look at the lunatics and they would laugh at them. …So I’m looking at the Charlie Sheen thing unfold, and I’m thinking “Aw, man!” Naturally, his remarks drew a laugh, though rather less at Sheen’s expense than out of a shock of recognition.

One interesting thing about Sheen in this past week is how he has become a model of the new 21st century content provider–famous, followed, entertaining, news-breaking, brand-building–and free. Sheen is unemployed. He continues to make money from residuals, but the terms of that deal have been set. All the radio and TV programs whose ratings he has been boosting pay him nothing. He reached a million followers on Twitter faster than anyone, but this pays him nothing (reportedly he might tout products, which would earn him some money.) But on the whole, he has joined the bloggers at The Huffington Post and rabid YouTubers and everyone who posts comments and clips about Charlie Sheen on Facebook. We’re paying our pennies to Bedlam, and the lunatic ain’t getting paid.

Let’s see how long the goddesses roll with that arrangement.

And now–right after I praise Darrow‘s fab illustration in New York magazine–I join Craig Ferguson in establishing my blog as a Sheen-free sanctuary.

One of the hardest things to do is to explain to a young person what it was like when something that has become established and famous was brand new. This clip of Mel Brooks appearing on The Dick Cavett Show offers a small bit of what it was like when he was first rolling out The Producers. Brooks is his usual frantic, funny self, but his best line comes near the very end of the clip: “Tito had the car.”

The very sexy Anne Francis, a native of Ossining, died yesterday at the age of 80. Many know her best for her portrayal of Altaira in the sci fi classic Forbidden Planet (“Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet” goes the line in “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” a song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She also had roles in Bad Day at Black Rock and Blackboard Jungle. I know her better for her television work: appearances on The Twilight Zone, The Virginian, The Fugitive (with Charles Bronson and of course David Janssen), The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and Burke’s Law, where she introduced her signature character, Honey West. The curvy private eye with the pet ocelot was the creation of Gloria and Forest Fickling, who, writing under the pseudonym G.G. Fickling, featured her in a series of eleven mystery novels. Honey West then became a TV series that ran on ABC for 30 episodes during the 1965-66. I was 12 years old when the show ran on the air, even though it was a pretty awful show with a terrible opening sequence and theme music, it made an enormous impression on me. I can’t imagine why. Rest in peace, Ms. Francis.

In his recent review in The New Yorker of a number of books about the entity known as late-night television, Louis Menand recounts the famous evening when Dick Cavett hosted Gore Vidal, Janet Flanner and a drunken, obsteperous Norman Mailer. I don’t recall if I saw the original program in 1971 (my senior year of high school), but I know that over the years I have seen clips of Cavett’s famous slap at Mailer. But until I read Menand’s article, I don’t think I had ever heard of the delicious final exchange between the great battleship Mailer and fast, funny PT boat Cavett. writes Menand:

“[T]though he was criticized for being obsequious in the presence of theatrical royalty and other V.I.P.s, [Cavett] was nobody’s fool. His management of the on-air fracas, in 1971, between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer is properly renowned. . . .The short version of a long and ravelled story is that Mailer came drunk to the taping of a show featuring Vidal and The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner, who was then almost eighty. Mailer glowered and blustered and abused the other guests and the audience, which began abusing him back.

“At the time, Mailer was deeply embroiled with the women’s movement. He was aggrieved by a piece that Vidal had written for The New York Review of Books in which Vidal associated him with Henry Miller and Charles Manson. “The Miller-Mailer-Manson man (or M3 for short) has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed,” Vidal wrote. Mailer was entitled to think that he had wrestled with the questions raised by the women’s movement honorably, and that Vidal was high-handedly slandering him; but he was unable, in the condition in which he had entered the ring, to lay a glove on his opponent. Vidal feigned perplexity at Mailer’s distress, joined forces with Flanner (who clearly found him très gentil), and made Mailer look ridiculous the way a cat makes a dog look ridiculous.

“Mailer’s fatal insult, though, was to Cavett. “Why don’t you look at your question sheet and ask a question?” Mailer said to him at one point, after the swords had been drawn all around. “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?” Cavett said. “It was received as the remark of the evening,” Mailer later conceded, though Cavett’s follow-up was equally inspired:

MAILER: Mr. Cavett, on your word of honor, did you just make that up or have you had it canned for years and were you waiting for the best moment to use it?
CAVETT: I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy?”

A brilliant rejoinder; if only it was included in the clip. (And a writerly salute to Menand for that nifty cat-dog line.)

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?