Mug shot

All Summer Johnny was Prince of the penny arcade, arms around me on the tilt-a-whirl, mug-shot grins in the quarter photo booth, twanging his guitar for street kids on the hill who scored baggies of hashish and Panama Red.

The buddy list has a bunch of visual status clues. Your buddy may have included a mug shot, perhaps through Photo Booth.

All these parameters of the series (the mug shot, the means of mechanical reproduction, the desirability of the outlawed, the reversal of law and desire and even the photo booth) are unmistakably present in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.

After waiting some five hours to be called forward on an unusually hot, humid Summer’s day in London (I believe temperatures soared to around 30 degrees Centigrade or around 90F), I presented my mug shot to the perky female jobs-worth official.