The Emoticon Formerly Known as Prince

Prince, who died April 21, at the age of 57, was an icon. But after he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1993, Prince also became an emoticon, at least in iTunes, where the symbol, when laid out horizontally, looks like this:

O(+>

A sign o' the times, many of which had a terrific soundtrack thanks to Prince.

Rest in peace, Mayor Nelson. You were one of a kind.

a bird's-eye view of a small world after all

Earlier today I received an e-mail from Twitter with this subject heading: "Robert Cass, what's happening in the world?"

It's been said that Hollywood is like high school with money, but according to Twitter, the entire world is like high school. From now on, whenever I start to feel guilty that I don't know enough about the current situation in Syria, I'll just remind myself that Syria sits at one of the uncool tables in the cafetorium.

Ferris Bueller: Forever Not Yet 21

No, Gotham Writers Workshop, I can't believe that Ferris Bueller's Day Off turns 20 next year. I can't believe it because next year isn't 2006. But the older I get, the less of a problem I have with lying about my age, so I understand where you're coming from.





"Not alright alright alright that you don't seem interested in my story, sweetheart."

In an alternate universe a bald, beer-bellied, non-Oscar-winning Matthew McConaughey delivered the monologue from last night's Saturday Night Live to a bored coed in the same bar where he was "discovered" in 1992.

The Bradley Cooper Effect: The First Ten Years

A recent temping assignment ended two weeks early, so I decided to do some fall cleaning at home and discovered pages I clipped a decade ago from Rolling Stone's 2005 "Hot List" issue. Bradley Cooper was spotlighted because Wedding Crashers, in which he played the villain, was the biggest comedy of that summer, and his new sitcom, Kitchen Confidential, was about to debut on Fox. 

Here's how writer Noelle Hancock described his character on the series: "Bradley Cooper, 30, plays Jack Bourdain, a reformed bad-boy chef hired to helm a swank Manhattan restaurant." And here's the caption that was placed next to his photo: "Cooper is poised for stardom with Kitchen Confidential." Well, he was poised for stardom—eventually—but Fox canceled the show after only four episodes (nine more were produced but never aired; they can be found on a DVD set that collects all 13 episodes). However, with three Oscar nominations under his belt in the past three years, including one for Best Actor for American Sniper, the highest-grossing movie of 2014, Kitchen Confidential is probably a distant memory for Cooper.

The thing is, though, he's apparently playing Jack Bourdain all over again in the new movie Burnt, which opened Friday. "A bad boy chef resurrecting himself as a Michelin-star chef in London" is how Deadline.com's Anthony D'Alessandro synopsizes the protagonist, Adam Jones, in an article about the film's underwhelming opening-weekend performance at the box office. Maybe if Cooper can convince his Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle director, David O. Russell, or American Sniper's Clint Eastwood to direct him as a bad-boy chef, the third time will be the charm.

In another parallel, I found a 2009 blog post of Noelle Hancock's in which she discusses her time spent with Cooper for the Rolling Stone piece (it covers roughly half a page in the magazine, yet she got flown out to L.A. for it—I doubt Jan Wenner would cover that kind of expense these days, as ad sales continue to shrink for print publications, but what do I know?). After a flirty lunch interview, Hancock let her imagination run wild. "I spent the next two weeks fantasizing about what our life together was going to be like," she wrote. "I couldn't believe I was about to be dating a celebrity. The paparazzi, I knew, would be annoying. They'd follow us down the street, photographing us shopping together and brunching. I figured I'd let them get a few shots in before taking charge. 'Okay guys, that's enough for today,' I'd say. 'Let's shut it down. Thanks!' Our wedding would be featured in InStyle magazine. They'd follow Bradley and me to the playground to photograph us pushing our herd of Aryan-looking babies on the swings. But we'd get through it – together."

Hancock then recounts the next time she saw Cooper, two weeks later at the Kitchen Confidential launch party in New York, where he didn't recognize her until she reminded him about the interview in L.A. So many lunchtime Q&As, so little time to remember everyone you've charmed ...

(Am I the only one who thought Cooper's character in Wedding Crashers was way too much of a jerk for Rachel McAdams to even consider tying the knot with him? She ends up with Owen Wilson at the end of the movie, of course—yeah yeah, spoiler alert, whatever—which is why I found it interesting that in Midnight in Paris, released six years after Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson's protagonist is engaged to Rachel McAdams, who's way too much of a jerk for him to even consider tying the knot with her. Full circle?)

Last night Saturday Night Live reran its October 10 episode, in which host Amy Schumer devoted part of her monologue to talking about hanging with Mr. Cooper at a celebrity event for half an hour and then wondering, "Am I dating Bradley Cooper? Like, I don't know how Hollywood works, but I'm pretty sure that I'm dating Bradley Cooper. And I changed my Facebook status. Well, I'm like, it's not complicated—I'm engaged to Bradley Cooper."

Ms. Hancock, you're obviously not alone.

The future is now. Seriously, right this minute.

In addition to forecasting that the Chicago Cubs would win the World Series this October, Back to the Future Part II, released in 1989, predicted a "Jaws 19" in 2015. That one seemed like a much more obvious joke 26 years ago, especially after the fourth Jaws bombed in '87, but Universal, the studio that distributed the three Back to the Future and four Jaws movies, had one of the biggest hits of this year with Furious 7, the latest installment in a franchise that appeared to be running on empty after its third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, performed poorly at the box office in 2006.

(Much like the fictional "Jaws 19," the Fast and/or Furious series has been refreshingly honest about its age in recent years, especially since other series tend to drop the numbers from their movies' titles after the third installment. For example, compare Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7 to the fourth and fifth entries in the Mission: Impossible series, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and last summer's Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation.)

Now Universal's planning to make three more (and a fourth Riddick movie, presumably to keep Vin Diesel, the star of both franchises, happy). I predict that the inevitable series "reboot" will go into development the day after "Fast + Furious X" leaves theaters.

Now where my food hydrator at, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis?

Paul Kos

Part of my freelance work for PBS LearningMedia since last October has involved kicking the tires, so to speak, of its online videos to ensure that picture and sound are synced properly, the two-sentence descriptions of the videos don't contain any typos, and so on.

One video I enjoyed watching centers on conceptual artist Paul Kos, who talks about how an artist has to be "in shape" to be creative:

"An artist goes in and out of shape, and by that I mean very similar to being an athlete: When an athlete's in shape, every movement that they do comes intuitively. And in art when you're in shape, ideas are coming faster than you have time to make them. Being in shape is really being able to see accidents; accidents are much more interesting than that which we can contrive while sitting at a desk. But if you're not in shape you don't even see it happening. And when you are, there are accidents all around, probably, every day that are wonderful to take advantage of."

Later in the video we see Kos playing la pétanque with a few other men:

"I find [it] really interesting as a metaphor for art for the following reason: There's a little wooden ball, and that's the target. When you make a piece, if you're too conservative you're copying your older work—it's short, it's on this side of being avant-garde. If you go too far culture can't see it, perhaps it's too personal, and it's way out there—you miss it. But there's no excuse not to make one in three fairly good art pieces. The third one should be somewhere in between, and with the right finesse it'll be right on and you hit the target."