I'd have said nothing, but I see I've connected them three times now; once through their boots, once (and again here) their dress uniforms, and once in my vid "Star Trek, My Love: In My Life."

That makes me wonder...
ST was square in the late 60s, and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was hip. But they and their costumes share a sweetness, a lack of irony.
The '60s were full of rage and pain, but irony?
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I've started watching all of director Peter Weir's movies. Last night I watched The Plumber (1979, links to a good NYT review), a made-for-Aussie-TV film about a sunny sweetie of a guy, a working-class plumber, whose dark underside comes out in a relationship with an academic woman tenant--an anthropologist who totally can't fathom the guy tearing up her own bathroom.
Weir's films are often about the slip-slidey nature of meaning and the disconnect between "civilized" self-presentation and the "wild" subconscious.
In a special feature interview with The Plumber
--(actually, the film itself is a special feature on the DVD that features The Cars That Ate Paris, Weir's first feature film, from 1973, which was, he says, a failure, but an interesting one)--
Weir said people have very different reactions to the film, depending on how they read the characters.

For some, Weid said, the Manson murders ended the 60s, but that was it for him. A way of dressing that had signaled a political position had become a fashion statement.
''It's what you can't see that counts in plumbing," the plumber tells the academic.
[image of Weir from "Commanding Waves: The Films of Peter Weir"
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If there's a canyon, a rift, between "before and after" irony--the awareness that what you see isn't necessarily what you get--I'd put both Star Trek and [most of] the Beatles on the "before" side. (Does Let It Be cross over?)
Sweetieness survives, though, even in an ironic age. Like this one, for instance. Millions of adults--I know several of them--sincerely love Harry Potter, a most unironic tale.
I like it OK, bit find it hopelessly "before."
If I'd written the Potter tale, all would not have been well. Hermione and Ron would have died, leaving Harry a shattered shell, having saved the world at the cost of everything dear to him.
I'd end the series on the magic train platform to Hogwarts.
The parent standing there wouldnt be Harry, it would be Harry's stupid muggle cousin, Dudley... the befuddled father of a wizard child.
And thus the cycle would start up again.
There seem to be moments in history that crack the ground open.
But I'm not sure the most important cracks are those that happen in political history so much as those that crack the ground in front of our own feet.