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"  It&amp;#039;s been 19 years since the last Indiana Jones movie, and apparently we can blame the generation-long lag on a skull. Lucas wanted Indy traipsing around Mexico for crystal Mayan death&amp;#039;s-heads, and Spielberg and Ford didn&amp;#039;t. As it turns out, they&amp;#039;re lucky it took so long. The skull, the most ancient of symbols, has suddenly become hypermodern, totally in and of the moment.  Nobody could have predicted it. If you were a man in the nineties, a skull on your T-shirt was the perfect complement to bad teeth, split ends, and musical taste that led to early tinnitus. It was the kind of look that said, Sure, I like to key a beer or twelve at a bush party, but I&amp;#039;ll chill with a doobie and a Poison power ballad, too. Today, the guy with a skull T-shirt is waiting at the bar for Amy Winehouse in &amp;quot;You Know I&amp;#039;m No Good,&amp;quot; and he&amp;#039;s probably just come from snorting coke off an Olsen twin&amp;#039;s tits. What used to be a symbol for borderline-sociopathic tough guys with weird design fetishes -- Hells Angels, pirates, Nazis -- has become a trope de luxe, the kind of image you find on Gwyneth Paltrow&amp;#039;s scarf when she&amp;#039;s taking baby Moses for a stroll.  No one has embraced the image of the skull as an accessory like Damien Hirst, the forty-three-year-old British provocateur and darling of the nouveau riche. He set a standard for himself when his tiger shark in formaldehyde, &amp;quot;The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,&amp;quot; sold for $8 million in 2004. Now he&amp;#039;s ensured his status as the world&amp;#039;s most expensive living artist with &amp;quot;For the Love of God,&amp;quot; a diamond-encrusted platinum skull, sold in 2007 to an investment conglomerate for $100 million. What&amp;#039;s even more incredible than the price tag is that the buyers got their money&amp;#039;s worth. &amp;quot;For the Love of God&amp;quot; is a work as powerful in its way as Duchamp&amp;#039;s urinal, so simple and so perfect a gesture that it&amp;#039;s instantly unforgettable. Hirst ends what Warhol began: Art as commodity cannot go any further.  At the glittering, chilly heart of the work&amp;#039;s success is a combination of the oldest truths and the latest superficialities. The diamond skull is both an expensive version of the mall rat&amp;#039;s skull-covered Vans and the inheritor of the grand tradition of the Christian memento mori. A kind of Hamlet with Yorick&amp;#039;s skull, set in the food court. For Hirst, the aura of profundity is just another luxury good. He ordered up a celebrity from Bentley &amp;amp;amp; Skinner of Bond Street, and already it needs bodyguards.  The memento mori originated in medieval Europe, born out of a desire to recognize mortality and the ephemeral nature of the material world, but even then, the skull was an opportunity to make gorgeous little trinkets. Skulls carved in Germany open like pop-up books to reveal minutely carved, highly detailed scenes of the crucifixion or apocalypse on the inside. Others show lifelike snakes crawling through the eye sockets of once-beautiful maidens. Perhaps the most elaborate of all these death reminders is the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, where whole skeletons of dead monks have become decorations: elaborate curlicues of vertebrae on the ceilings, rosettes of human shoulder bones, wall stands of skulls. A sign on the floor reads, &amp;quot;What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.&amp;quot;  All is vanity. That&amp;#039;s what the skull says, and that&amp;#039;s what it has always said. For medieval Christians, that truth was a call to recognize a reality deeper than the physical world. Not for us. Our skull art says, Death? Who cares? Recently, Kristin Davis, the madam of a high-end Manhattan brothel that was at one point connected to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, appeared in court wearing, according to The New York Times, &amp;quot;a black-hooded jacket emblazoned with rhinestones in the shape of a flaming skull.&amp;quot; Davis&amp;#039;s lawyer described her as &amp;quot;clothed with the cloak of innocence.&amp;quot; We stare into the face of death and ask ourselves, Can I get it in pink? It&amp;#039;s spiritual daredevilry: How materialistic can we go? Look, it says, I know that wealth is ephemeral, and I know that all flesh is grass, but I still choose ephemeral wealth. I choose the flesh that I know is going to rot off my face. You don&amp;#039;t have to go to the movies if you want to see the kingdom of the crystal skull. It&amp;#039;s called Western capitalism right now. When the street artist Skullphone posted his logo, a skull using a phone, on Clear Channel screens across L. A. in March, his fellow artists thought he&amp;#039;d hacked into Clear Channel&amp;#039;s system. Nah. He had to pay for it just like everybody else.  Nietzsche said that it takes courage to live on the surface of things. Indiana Jones is full of that courage, which is why the crystal skull is the perfect MacGuffin for him -- and for now. All those circuitous trips around the world, all the tight scrapes and near misses, all those beatings, and in the end, he gets to keep nothing. My favorite moment in the whole series comes at the beginning of &amp;quot;The Last Crusade,&amp;quot; when River Phoenix stumbles onto treasure hunters digging up the Cross of Coronado. &amp;quot;That cross is an important artifact,&amp;quot; he seethes hilariously. &amp;quot;It belongs in a museum.&amp;quot; By the standards of his younger self, Indiana Jones is a complete failure. The Ark of the Covenant is lost in bureaucratic shuffles, the Sankara Stone has to be returned, the Grail disappears down a crevice during an earthquake. Inevitably, whatever Indiana Jones struggles to possess slips out of his hands once he touches it. Indy, like us all, is living with the poignancy of commerce mixed with death: It&amp;#039;s so beautiful, it&amp;#039;s so luxurious, it&amp;#039;s all going to go away so soon. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a4682/indiana-jones-0708/>