Roddenberry-Dali

When you first see the drawing it is not remarkable. You see a well drawn hand, but it is not wildly colored or melting, or distorted with eyes or doorways. Normal. Drawn in simple pencil. This normal looking hand, though, is holding a pencil, perhaps like the one the the artist used, and with that pencil, the drawn hand is sketching a sleeve. This roughed out sleeve bleeds into a completed drawing of a second hand, perhaps finished by the first. It is then you realize, that this hand is also holding a pencil and also sketching a sleeve. It is the sleeve of the first hand.

On the main page of icons on my iPad there is a folder called entertainment, it the place I store the various apps I have for TV and movies, podcasts and music. There is Crackle and Instacast, Pandora and my U-verse controller that lets me program my DVR from anywhere. The king of the dancing brightly colored icons, though, is Netflix.

I click the red Netflix icon and before my eyes arrive picture after picture of TV shows and movies, lists of what I have seen and what the recommend. I have dived into the screen and am enjoying just the variety of choices available. I use the little search tool and type in Star Trek. The Original Series, from 1966, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and it goes on. I select The Next Generation.

The Next Generation came out in 1987, before the Internet and wireless or even reasonably sized cell phones, but that is easy to forget. The captain sits in his office able to talk to a computer, asking how long it will be before they arrive at their destination. He taps a communicator badge, which allows him to talk to the rest of his crew. He is surrounded by thing which only existed in the imagination of the creator. A pencil sketching the sleeve of the future.

Jean Luc Picard's constant companion is a PADD. When these first came onto the screen they seemed to be something for engineering use. A big scanner, and interface, which looks like a book. Later, though, we see these used other ways. Captain Picard is often seen reading a classic book on one, but he can switch from this to doing research. In one of the scenes I can remember, they do the shoulder view, while research is being done and on the PADD you see the text description and then a short video shows the person being researched. A person from the past, from our era.

I pull back and in my mind am looking over my own shoulder. My iPad allows me to watch an imagined future, where a character uses his PADD to look into my present. For just a moment I imagine the hands of Gene Roddenberry and Steve Jobs drawing each other.