Fine t-shirt art worn by an archery friend
Category Archives: Media
A couple more viewings
A second from ‘The Man in the High Castle’
A third from ‘Man in the High Castle’
Predestination
A literary telephone box
In reading ‘Island’ by Aldous Huxley I came across the paragraph below. The speaker is talking about a ‘Mutual Adoption Club’ and comparing it to Western society. On Pala (the island the title refers to) whenever the parental home becomes too unbearable the child is allowed to migrate to one of its other homes within its MAC. A MAC consists of from 15 to 25 assorted couples and everyone in the club adopts everyone else. An inclusive, voluntary family. This is one of the good ideas of the book but there are a few hoopy ones – must have been all the drugs Huxley was taking…
Things are a great deal better in your part of the world – better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like – but freedom in a telephone box.*
*Huxley, Aldous. 2005. Island. London: Vintage, p.91.
Current TV favourite
I’ve become very fond of Father Brown. He’s a follow up to Miss Marple so what’s not to love. This scene cracked me up – another fab use for a phone box. Make a phone call to a cross-dressing club and when you give the right code phrase the door in the wall behind the phone box will open and let you into the club.
Fargo 2
The second Fargo TV series (wonderful) showed us a few phone shots and one box in particular got a lot of use:
Climate effects
There has recently been much flooding across areas of the UK. Here is a photo relevant to this blog:
Recent viewing
I don’t actually know this programme but couldn’t ignore the ad, for obvious reasons;
This shot is from the penultimate episode of ‘Humans‘:
From the recent adaptation of Jekyl and Hyde:
The iconic red box even turns up on a US highway in ‘Austin Powers: the spy who shagged me’.
Man in the High Castle again
Finally the second episode of this fabulous programme has appeared on my Amazon watchlist. In an earlier blog I posted a shot of a bubble covered phone but in this scene it’s something more traditional:
Mojave Phone Booth
I listen to a podcast called ‘99% Invisible’. It’s an American series I have been onto for a couple of years – although I only listen in spasmodically. Podcast no. 202 is title ‘Mojave Phone Booth’ . Cool.
It has led me to a movie I didn’t know about ‘Mojave Phone Booth’ (2006) and the Wikipedia page on the artefact itself – you guessed it, a phone box in the Mojave desert.
This goes a long way to proving that I am not alone in my fascination for phone boxes.
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Posted in Comment, Geography, Media
Tagged cinema, desert, USA