Who Ya Got?: Which Modern Characters Will Live Forever?

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.” -- Hector (just before getting his ass kicked, real bad)

What do these names have in common?

Gilgamesh.  Hercules.  Perseus.  Odysseus.  Achilles.

Answer: they are fictional* characters who were created at least 2,500 years ago that I just

77 years old

thought of off the top of my head.  And that you instantly recognized.

Think about that for sec.  Forget for a moment that their true origins in songs shared around hearth fires may be too murky to trace, and allow that their stories were each, at some point, recorded into a more lasting medium, a scroll of papyrus or perhaps a stone tablet.  

74 years old

Now move forward in time to between 0 and 1000 A.D.  How easy is it to name five more such characters (off the top of your head, no googling)?  I’ll do it as I type.  Go.

Beowulf.   Well… that's one.  And you can tell I'm not cheating.  These were the Dark Ages after all…  Let’s see, Aeneas just misses the cut because Virgil was a smudge B.C.… So...um… 

at least 2,700

Alright, let’s skip to the next 900 years.  1000-1900 AD.  Now we're in a post printing press world, when the production of fiction went through the roof.  So it should be a lot easier.  Go.  

Arthur, Merlin, Don Quixote, Hamlet,  Romeo and Juliet, Quasimodo, D'Artagnon, Ivanhoe, Oliver twist…. okay, stop.  There's a lot.  Shakespeare characters alone could keep us going  for quite a while.   

Pushing 400

But here's where it gets interesting.  How many of these characters will anybody remember in 2,000 years (baring the apocalypse, of course)?  I mean, does anybody think that Mr. D'arcy or Sydney Carton will have the shelf life of Helen of Troy?  Cuz I don’t.  Scrooge?  Yeah, maybe.  

In the modern era, 1900-to the present, with the arrival motion pictures, television, comic books, video games, the internet…  production of fictional characters has exploded into the realm of who the f- knows how many. 

I've been thinking about it and I don't think there are many in that soup that will last forever.  But what do you think?

16

What character (not story) created since 1900, will exist in the hearts and minds of people and even be known off the top of their heads, in the year 2513?**

Who, if anyone at all will be our time’s contribution to the pantheon of fiction?  Peter Parker?  Tom Joad?  Scarlett Ohara?  Captain Kirk?

I think the number is between zero and one.  But I'm not saying which one just yet.  Who ya got?  

 88

*Yes, I know… some were possibly actual people.  But surely the versions of them born of gods and nymphs were fictional.  Geez.

**Yes, I know…  the earth will be ruled by Apes by then.  Just play along and don't be such  a smartass.  Geez.

"All Men Dream, But Not Equally"

There is an excellent website called ZenPencils.com.  It is a near bottomless source of awesome set to pictures.  I like to read through their archives.  There are many images and strips longer and more complex than this one, but you should go there to see for yourself.  Definitely worth a bookmark.   

Enjoy.

Good Answers to My Best Questions

Hey!  It’s the 25th Anniversary of...

By the time I was in my 20’s, I had spent roughly 20 years of my life trying to get decent answers to my best questions.  

In high school I went to a Catholic school with daily religion classes.  They didn’t answer my questions satisfactorily.  

“Is my Methodist father really going to hell because he had a vasectomy after this 39 year-old wife (my mother) gave birth to his seventh child (me), even though the doctor said further pregnancies would be dangerous?”

“I’m afraid so.  Yes.”

“Seriously?” 

“Well…”

“Don’t bother to answer that.  The second question was rhetorical."

And besides, that wasn’t one of my real questions anyway.  I was just using the process of elimination to see if anybody or any institution had any good answers.

God is Back!
And this time…it’s personal!

So far, the only things that had really spoken to me about the things I really wanted to know were movies and books.  These might have been the impetus for asking my best questions in the first place.  My first memory of “awe” was as a very young child, maybe 2 or 4, and being allowed by my hell-bound, birth-controlling  parents to stay up to watch the annual showing of “The Ten Commandments" on ABC.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a truly awesome experiment in bombast and scenery chewing, featuring a dream pairing for fans of the William Shatner school of acting - Charlton Heston vs. Yul Brynner (as Moses and Ramses).  I still watch it every year.  A long time ago I switched over from thinking it was a truly great film, to thinking of it more as beloved nostalgia.  Kind of like the way Macaroni and Cheese switches somewhere along the line from a child’s delicacy to comfort food.

But the first time I saw “The Ten Commandments?”  With the pillar of fire, the parting sea, the staff that turns into a cobra, the God who lives on the mountain top?   Let’s just say it left a mark.

"Wait... you couldn’t have told me that before?!
WTF?!"

Around the same time, also in perpetual reruns on TV but new to this child, “The Wizard of Oz.”  Terrifying, truly awe inspiring, and there was something about those instructions… “Follow the yellow brick road.”  It wasn’t until many years later that I really understood.  I was trying to get somewhere, to come to an understanding about my best questions, metaphorically crawling on my hands and knees in the dark, spiny shrubs and hedges scratching my face and my arms, going nowhere… when all along there was an easier path, paved in gold bricks, right next to me.  I was astonished to find this out.  As with another scene in that film, when the good witch tells Dorothy, "you could have gone home anytime you liked, but you wouldn’t have believed it.  You had to find out for yourself."

He’s going ot see Star Wars?  Again?  WTF?!

After that it was Star Wars.  I was ten in 1977.  Right in the wheel house for Star Wars.  I saw it twelve times that summer.  No easy feat for a kid who needed a ride from his Mom to get to a movie theater.  At some point she started saying “again?!  I’m not taking you all the way over there to see the same movie again.”  So I lied, started saying I was going to see something else, and then went to Star Wars again. Over and over.  Absorbing every sound and nuance like a starving man invited to a BBQ, who can stop gorging by the twelfth hamburger, and truly taste and appreciate the joy and wonder of food.   It’s funny when I think about that now, that a parent trying to be conscientious about what her child is doing, somehow thought it would have been better to see a different movie, any other movie, like say “Smokey and the Bandit” or Airport ’77, rather than absorb any more of the life-changing event that was Star Wars to every ten-year-old that summer.

In the ensuing formative years, the big moments all came through story.  Reading the “Lord of the Rings” in junior high school.  “The Grapes of Wrath” in high school.  “Hamlet.”  The first 2 Terminator movies.  Various treatments of King Arthur.  Robin Hood.  Batman.  Comic books in general.  

What did all these things have in common?  Hmm.  Little did I know that this was just another way of asking one of my best questions. 

I found a real good answer to that in my 20’s when somebody who knew I wanted to be a writer - and I wish I could remember who it was because I’d like to thank him or her - told me about Joseph Campbell.  

The answer to what they had in common is in this book:  “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

If you are a writer or an artist of some kind, certainly any kind of a storyteller, there’s very good chance you have already read this, but if you haven’t... go read this book.  

If you are not looking for something quite so academic, maybe just wondering and looking for some decent answers with meat on the bone, answers that don’t come with the baggage of institutions or dogma, answers that are simple, honest and will give you easy directions on where to find the yellow brick road so you can follow it yourself, absolutely check out the interviews with Bill Moyers, “The Power of Myth.”  The series in available for purchase in many forms including books and DVDs.  And the website of "Moyers & Company” has posted many videos with excerpts a plenty  HERE

Here’s about 40 seconds worth...

The Real You

“Be sure there’s nothing vanishes in the universe; it does but vary and renew its form.”

--Ovid

You are what the entire universe is doing, right now, right where you are.

Stop for a second and take a look around.

Let What You Love Kill You...

I found something helpful today that comes from England. Specifically the GuardianUK (linked below).

James Rhodes: 'Find what you love and let it kill you'

My life as a concert pianist can be frustrating, lonely, demoralising and exhausting. But is it worth it? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt.

***

I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

The rest of the article is excellent, recommended reading, features a moving video of james playing.  
And it’s right here…CLICK

And here’s different video W/ an interview (the Guardian’s video is great too, definitely worth a click).  He almost missed his calling.  Then got back on track, just in time from the sound of it.

Importance of Star Trek (link)

Speaking of important things on the internet, as most of you are no doubt already aware, the name of my fantasy football team is The Starfleet Commanders.

(A candid shot from our recent championship season)

As the team’s owner and head coach, it behooves me to keep up on all the latest Star Trek articles.  Below I've pasted a few excerpts of a recent and very entertaining one.

It's authored as only a high-quality (it really is - click the link) article for the internet should be authored, by an anonymous person who calls himself “Rimjob."  That alone makes it worthy of a link.  But it’s also quite… fascinating. 

The Philosophy Of "Star Trek"

by Rimjob

The first time I ever really watched an episode of "Star Trek" was on a weekend I was stuck at home sick. I was a little kid, William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy were hosting a "Star Trek" marathon, and I tuned in just as "The Devil In The Dark" came on. That episode contains almost every element that makes Trek... Trek.

In that episode, there's the dynamic between Kirk, Spock & McCoy, but also the episode goes a long way in differentiating Trek's values from those of most Sci-Fi. I once read an article that compared Trek to most other science fiction franchises. In almost anything else, the Horta would be the "monster of the week" that gets killed off at the end of the story by the triumphant hero. However in "Trek" the Horta is ultimately an entity to be understood & given compassion, with Starfleet finding a way for everyone to live together.

***

From a paper published in the journal Sociology of Religion:

The appeal of "Star Trek" is not for a kind of personal salvation, but for the future of the "Star Trek" collective …."I" will not live until the twenty-fourth century, but "we" certainly will, according to the "Star Trek" future. It is hope for ourselves as a society, a myth about where we have come and where we are going. Fans want to be part of forming that destiny.

Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon (the other executive producer of the original "Star Trek" who created many of the defining elements of the show, including the Klingons, the Prime Directive, and naming the Federation and Starfleet), and others that worked on "The Original Series" infused the show with a secular humanist philosophy that truly believes in "Man" as a species. That we, as human beings, are not only the product of biological evolution, but are also capable of social evolution to be better than what we are through compassion, tolerance, logic, science, and boldly going where no one else has gone before.

***

As depicted in the various TV series & films, by the 23rd century humanity exists in a virtual paradise. On Earth, there is no poverty, crime, sexism, racism, or war. Earth is the capital of the United Federation of Planets, with humanity seeming to have great influence as the backbone of Starfleet.

Troi: Poverty was eliminated on Earth a long time ago. And a lot of other things disappeared with it: hopelessness...despair...cruelty...

Samuel Clemens: Young lady, I come from a time when men achieved power and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor....where prejudice and intolerance are commonplace...and power is an end unto itself...And you’re telling me...that isn’t how it is anymore?

Troi: That's right.

Samuel Clemens: Hmph. Maybe it's worth giving up cigars for, after all.

  Find the rest of the article ( a lot more) at The Daily Kos  

Choose Wisely

These images are probably very important. 

No doubt.

But look closely. 

Which one is MORE important?

Please show your work.