Friday, October 10, 2003
Warning: Contains no spine bending humor or quick insights
I remember when the realization landed, though it took years for the understanding of it to eventually gain enough mass to roll over and somewhat flatten the affect for all of us for a time.
Like an asteroid which appears to inch its slow-mo way across the vast distances of outer space, the plot and track of which people have been following for many years before it finally crashes through earth's protective atmosphere to wreak the destruction it so naturally carries with it when moving anywhere outside its natural element of a large vacuum.
These rough thin thoughts and observations I am about to let fly one after another, totally unplanned and so unedited, are hardly as earth-shattering as that, but this all has to do with point of view and perception. You see, if some alien lifeforms were riding that imaginary asteroid, they might be commenting excitedly one to the next on how fast they're travelling and how they seemed to really be going somewhere.
My early realization wasn't so terribly shattering or profound, but mildly disappointing. We weren't all really singing from the same song book, however much I might wish we all were. And that likely meant we viewed many other things differently as well.
It landed kerplop, without much ado. It was during one of the free concerts at Provo Park in Berkeley, you can guess this was far back in the day, one of those small gatherings that betoken a bigger expression of people and community and other larger concerns.
By chance, I was standing behind a woman from New York who was talking about her one abiding and real interest in life, making money collecting and selling valuable old jewelry. But in the meantime, until she started her dream boutique where she could reside perpetually surrounded by her element and be supported in luxury forever from her acquired market skill of buying cheap and selling dear, she was some sort of booking and touring agent for young and aspiring English rock acts. There she was, a decade or so older than the crowd, fashionably but unobtrusively dressed though for a much more formal sort of business setting. Though she seemed to be so terribly out of place away from her New York neighborhood sidewalks, she was casually chatting someone up about getting her bands some exposure at the (her face said "strange" while her eyes said "dirty little hippy") gathering.
Not so much with the idea of generating any kind of groundswell of interest from those quarters, but more with the notion that some form of credibility might rub off and that would make her acts seem more credible to an eventual larger audience.
It was a little like in the land of multidimensioned psychedelia, she was asking about the possibility of bringing in a truckload of free beer to really get the party rocking for the frat boys. You're familiar with the tone and attitude despite the attire and pretensions of grace and class: it was the basic thoughtless fool hogging both sides of the road, straddling the double yellow stripe, very middle-of-the-road. Like the faux homey friendliness and big smile of the otherwise pushy motor-mouthed red neck who think he's sized you up by figuring out what your needs are and most importantly what you're willing to spend, all in order to sell you as much as you can afford in the way of a beater off his used car lot.
So that's how it was Leslie West and Mountain soon performed their utterly inappropriate for the times and spirit blam blam blam "uh huh uh Mi-th-ith-ip-pi Queen" bull caca set at Provo Park one summer Sunday, by simple virtue of their connections with Felix Pappalardi's connection with this Manfred Hermit boys in matching brown wool suits booking agent or something. It was LARD-y, all right. Like I said, her area of expertise was handling the fading-from-current interest English acts but still had something resembling connections despite the new rock palace trend and so knew how to get them in to all kinds of places. These types of people just started intruding where people in their shared reality of let's say extended summer of love honestly opened their arms and welcomed them. Little did the blessedly naive know the money grubbers with the bad attitudes were beginning to uncoil and slither out from the nest to search out and devour, the long-haired gentle loving crowd being viewed exactly the same as anyone else, as so many slow moving fattened frogs just begging to be parted from their greenbacks.
At the time, all that said to me was that she (let's expand that to say "they") didn't really understand. But I began to suspect that they really didn't care. They really didn't give a damn about what any of this they were seeing before them might be about, it was merely viewed as an opportunity that presented itself and one to think about grabbing, squeezing, and milking. And moreover they didn't care if we knew it or not, they were out to use us all.
Flash forward to me bending my elbow with my rich cup of coffee this very morning and my first blurry waking thoughts. While I can honestly say and believe that people like her and by extention her clients may have not have had very much to offer themselves, they did indeed manage to win something for themselves. In fact, everything for themselves. Short term or long term, they got it. Every single bit they could squeeze out of any one or any connection and all for themselves and like kind. All of that and even more. They ended up getting so much, in fact very much more than all that they were originally planning on or even wishing for themselves.
This small event, one of many vignettes destined to take place everywhere, was but there and then a mere speck, a briefly blinked back irritating mote generally unnoticed by the eye of history. But when combined, this form of irritation became denser in magnitude, like the endless mounds of bland mush tossed by a cook at the wall; without taste buds he's devised another method to see what will stick, and to measure the full effect, he must step back to see how deep and wide the pool of pablum once its dribbled down, puddled, and settled into form. For more poetic sorts, maybe this all was like the mitsou dripping from an angel's eye. I don't really know, and would it matter?
My only real understanding and connection with what is called the New Romantism was a poster portrait of Boy George a person I knew stuck up on her commune wall in 1982 or so -- an overly large and brightly colored visage which usually irritated her room mates every bit as much as she likely suspected it would, merely by reminding them of the world at large existing outside the walls of their house.
I know nothing about New Romanticism or who might represent them musically. So I'm guessing here:
How the New Romantics might really be (the spiritually deprived, politically unaware, and socially unconscious) unclaimed descendents from leftovers of the '60s:
The art set in Britain’s sixties and seventies tended to draw parallels between the Futurists and themselves. The Futurists, you will recall, provided the momentum for the subsequent Dada movement. In a nutshell, Dada as a group flourished during the first world war in Europe,
“having as its program the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional cultural and aesthetic forms, by a technique of comic derision in which irrationality, chance, and intuition were the guiding principles.” As a group, they said they arose in direct response to the war, and most often their poetry was a confusing array of images sprayed out like machine gun bullets.
Although the intent was to shock the bougeoisie by presenting the absurd, the taboo, and the commonplace out of context, their art was of the moment. They were famous for their “happenings,” and Dada has been described as rather like a circus, to which each performer contributed a turn. No specific style evolved, they utilized every medium including typefaces and print, but the longest lived style was collage.
While Dada was a shortlived movement, and not very well documented, it had a lasting impact on what was seen as art from there on out. Dada as you can suspect lead to Surrealism. Anyway, in the swinging London of the sixties and seventies, many artists believed they had found their own surrealistic roots in the Futurists and Dadaists (happenings after all were happening everywhere, and it was easy and wonderful to see it was happening, man), and so they began seeking out representatives.
As I recall Dali was still living in Spain at that time and most of the well-heeled British musicians joined with other representatives of European nobility and high society, travelling there to pay homage. All of which ended up as more like a prolonged exposure to the living surrealism of his beach parties. And for some reason the British “trendies” of those times also took hold of New York artists Andy Warhol and William Burroughs and embraced them as their own (as many surrealists had fled to New York in the time of WWII and so by propinquity had some influence on the art that followed) and eventually went there to pay homage to them.
Here is where my attempt at anology can end abruptly. In the '60s, what war did the young English artschool design set see themselves reacting to?
From what little I saw at the time in Britain, they essentially being far removed from the realities of the Viet Nam and the civil rights protests that had immediately preceeded that conflict in the U.S., this conflict took the form of a generational war on youth. The older folks were seen merely as “stodgy” representatives who wanted to close down (let’s say) “the sock hops” to keep the younger folks from getting out of hand. The young folks saw that as grouchy old people complaining because the kids were having too much fun. The young folks saw that as an intrusion on their freedom to “be who they were.” Something like that. It wasn’t very much in the way of “warfare” and it wasn’t a very unusual response.
Philosophically speaking, it wasn’t very much in the way of philosophy, either, and if the war motif is carried on, “the enemy” can easily become any one who isn’t on exactly the same sort of trip.
The '60s -- this era I'm sure you are tired of hearing about was genuinely a time of tremendous exploration.
But the truth is nearly every generation reacts in some way against its predecessor, and at this time (for certain UK design set) the challenge to old forms was taking on the tone of humorous disrespect. I could imagine some of the young folks as they were relegated to the social dumping ground of British art schools saying something about it, that some highflown etheral pun would eventually result, one man's savoir-faire being another man's flip remark, whereas people in America could be every bit as simple, “Guess I’ll go to collage and study Arp.”
I'll say right now I'm going to persist in purposefully misusing a word just below -- the first half of the standard everyday dictionary definition of "synesthesia". Maybe I am too lazy at the moment to find a more appropriate word or I am trying to make a point: ("synesthesia" defined (1st half): "A phenomenon in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another."
Let's try right now to rub out for the moment the last part of the definition, which goes on to explain "as the hearing of a sound results in the sensation of the visualization of a color," or even a taste. An impossible definition, although in a real sense this misplaced sense and sensuality of New Romanticism may very well be all that has ever resulted as a response to a real stimulus.
So ok I am drifting here, reaching for this idea, but the first half of the definition is moving towards what I am trying to outline: a stimulation of one thing that evokes or influences the sensation of another.
There is an assumption of a response, but there is no assumption that this is in any way an appropriate or genuine response, is there? In fact the very word I choose as a descriptor implies I believe the response is outlandish, perhaps difficult but not at all impossible to fully understand, in fact one hardly worth the effort of even taking too seriously.
I saw that the British “arts” crowd had accepted the "synesthesia" of the sixties, but they’d been won over by the sensual aspects and never got much farther than that. They were subsumed by hedonistic aspects, and because I was American, it seemed to me they’d caught hold of only part of the big message and so had “missed the big trip” entirely. Their form of hedonism, consisting of what could become an unending quest to experience new physical sensations (music, clothes, dope, exotic experiences, which required exotic locale) was actually an expression of the same rapacious appetites that they believed they were reacting to in their parent’s generation. They merely took on new forms.
But as this expression of theirs was not a global quest for domination of resources, such pilferage considered a “bad thing”, this form of what I'm mistakenly insisting on calling "synesthesia" (“I’m just doing my own thing” and not bothering anyone else) was not considered “a bad thing.” Plus it was connected to an exploration of “inner space”. Nonetheless, they were benefitting from the cornucopia provided to them by various “colonial” endeavors and relying on the stability of infrastructures that others provided.
The world of "synesthesia" as I think of it must be a self-absorbed personal place, and if you’re at all familiar with the mentation attached to smoking “herb,” you’ll recognize that much of that “high” is associated with slowly become aware of your senses and how they are playing throughout your body. The world of the senses becomes enhanced and the subject of total fascination.
Anyway, they had their silks and spices and everything nices. They’d talked themselves into believing they had better taste than their parents. I had hoped this was a temporary pose, but as that music part was a part of entertainment and that had become a big business that seemed destined to become bigger, it was guaranteed to go on long after its period of usefulness.
Although I love some of them to bits because they made art that touched a large part of my life, it’s kind of pitiful in a way, really, that “pop” musicians and their album cover “artists” (the photographers and the designers) are the most notable examples of my generation’s “artists.”
Because of the very numbers of people putting out records, there was a dedicated and prolonged pillaging of images and techniques from what had gone before, history as it was preserved in our collective unconsciousness. We didn't have too much of the fop, dandy, or twit as icons, but the wild west cowboy images were immensely popular with people working in Los Angeles, but those designers went on to devour and spew out a variety of other images that were recognizable. They went on and on with this, gobble and spew -- images that had made their way into our consciousness by previous advertising success, until eventually they started making those music videos. And the sad truth is that all of these people, without exception, painted their own roles as large, expansive, and terribly important.
The problem I have with New Romanticism, as I know little about it, I don't know what values if any they were imparting.
Such things don't come through any of the music that I've heard. And some of this may be due in part because they keep to their own society, and as every one there was terribly important because they were part of that society, so had to be the next guy at the table. So the tables were crowded with very important people.
I’m glad they keep to their own society. They haven’t really been a part of any but their own community for close to three decades. In fact, I found myself wishing for a global geography to be set apart for them under some international agreement.
Perhaps an island that would keep them contained to their own exclusive company. That way they can write songs about each other, take photos of each other, go to see each others movies, be invited to appear in each others movies or write soundtracks for them, talk of each other, talk to each other, and just generally stay the hell away from everyone else.
Fairly soon, if they live long enough, they’ll be driven to creative desperation and start making references to each other’s songs and videos in their own songs and videos and leave our shit alone.
They really don’t have a lot to contribute to the real world sometimes, do they? and they barely draw from it in that they chew up the predigested images of who they think we are and spit them back out at us. All to make some money in order to live apart anyway. Then they tell us in a variety of ways we’re too easily fooled and perhaps too stupid to know the difference between their staged presentations of “reality” and a tape played backstage looped out through the speakers. They’re so much cleverer than any of us because, you see, we’re falling for their act.
So that’s why they’re already buying properties in England with the idea of drinking tea and getting knighted. So why don’t they just close in that little open space on the Jungian “C” and close the circle entirely? They can only really share common experiences with each other. What the fuck can they tell me anyway about anything? What they have to impart is nearly useless information for me.
Why would I care to learn anything of the stress of fitting a manicure into a busy schedule before engaging in eight minutes of the false convivialty of a tv talk show host?
They provide advice and gossip one to the next so I suppose that’s a form of communication that might be valuable to them to make a living. All right then, you boys tell each other how to better dry the nail polish.
But, really, twenty, going on thirty years of this. These people just go on far too long, an overextended callow youth eventually growing into a callow adulthood, snacking themselves silly on perpetual panini, and now they want to make themselves even bigger while finding their places in history.
I've no solution, but what I decided was the really beautiful people are somewhere else.
¶ 10/10/2003 07:56:00 AM
I remember when the realization landed, though it took years for the understanding of it to eventually gain enough mass to roll over and somewhat flatten the affect for all of us for a time.
Like an asteroid which appears to inch its slow-mo way across the vast distances of outer space, the plot and track of which people have been following for many years before it finally crashes through earth's protective atmosphere to wreak the destruction it so naturally carries with it when moving anywhere outside its natural element of a large vacuum.
These rough thin thoughts and observations I am about to let fly one after another, totally unplanned and so unedited, are hardly as earth-shattering as that, but this all has to do with point of view and perception. You see, if some alien lifeforms were riding that imaginary asteroid, they might be commenting excitedly one to the next on how fast they're travelling and how they seemed to really be going somewhere.
My early realization wasn't so terribly shattering or profound, but mildly disappointing. We weren't all really singing from the same song book, however much I might wish we all were. And that likely meant we viewed many other things differently as well.
It landed kerplop, without much ado. It was during one of the free concerts at Provo Park in Berkeley, you can guess this was far back in the day, one of those small gatherings that betoken a bigger expression of people and community and other larger concerns.
By chance, I was standing behind a woman from New York who was talking about her one abiding and real interest in life, making money collecting and selling valuable old jewelry. But in the meantime, until she started her dream boutique where she could reside perpetually surrounded by her element and be supported in luxury forever from her acquired market skill of buying cheap and selling dear, she was some sort of booking and touring agent for young and aspiring English rock acts. There she was, a decade or so older than the crowd, fashionably but unobtrusively dressed though for a much more formal sort of business setting. Though she seemed to be so terribly out of place away from her New York neighborhood sidewalks, she was casually chatting someone up about getting her bands some exposure at the (her face said "strange" while her eyes said "dirty little hippy") gathering.
Not so much with the idea of generating any kind of groundswell of interest from those quarters, but more with the notion that some form of credibility might rub off and that would make her acts seem more credible to an eventual larger audience.
It was a little like in the land of multidimensioned psychedelia, she was asking about the possibility of bringing in a truckload of free beer to really get the party rocking for the frat boys. You're familiar with the tone and attitude despite the attire and pretensions of grace and class: it was the basic thoughtless fool hogging both sides of the road, straddling the double yellow stripe, very middle-of-the-road. Like the faux homey friendliness and big smile of the otherwise pushy motor-mouthed red neck who think he's sized you up by figuring out what your needs are and most importantly what you're willing to spend, all in order to sell you as much as you can afford in the way of a beater off his used car lot.
So that's how it was Leslie West and Mountain soon performed their utterly inappropriate for the times and spirit blam blam blam "uh huh uh Mi-th-ith-ip-pi Queen" bull caca set at Provo Park one summer Sunday, by simple virtue of their connections with Felix Pappalardi's connection with this Manfred Hermit boys in matching brown wool suits booking agent or something. It was LARD-y, all right. Like I said, her area of expertise was handling the fading-from-current interest English acts but still had something resembling connections despite the new rock palace trend and so knew how to get them in to all kinds of places. These types of people just started intruding where people in their shared reality of let's say extended summer of love honestly opened their arms and welcomed them. Little did the blessedly naive know the money grubbers with the bad attitudes were beginning to uncoil and slither out from the nest to search out and devour, the long-haired gentle loving crowd being viewed exactly the same as anyone else, as so many slow moving fattened frogs just begging to be parted from their greenbacks.
At the time, all that said to me was that she (let's expand that to say "they") didn't really understand. But I began to suspect that they really didn't care. They really didn't give a damn about what any of this they were seeing before them might be about, it was merely viewed as an opportunity that presented itself and one to think about grabbing, squeezing, and milking. And moreover they didn't care if we knew it or not, they were out to use us all.
Flash forward to me bending my elbow with my rich cup of coffee this very morning and my first blurry waking thoughts. While I can honestly say and believe that people like her and by extention her clients may have not have had very much to offer themselves, they did indeed manage to win something for themselves. In fact, everything for themselves. Short term or long term, they got it. Every single bit they could squeeze out of any one or any connection and all for themselves and like kind. All of that and even more. They ended up getting so much, in fact very much more than all that they were originally planning on or even wishing for themselves.
This small event, one of many vignettes destined to take place everywhere, was but there and then a mere speck, a briefly blinked back irritating mote generally unnoticed by the eye of history. But when combined, this form of irritation became denser in magnitude, like the endless mounds of bland mush tossed by a cook at the wall; without taste buds he's devised another method to see what will stick, and to measure the full effect, he must step back to see how deep and wide the pool of pablum once its dribbled down, puddled, and settled into form. For more poetic sorts, maybe this all was like the mitsou dripping from an angel's eye. I don't really know, and would it matter?
My only real understanding and connection with what is called the New Romantism was a poster portrait of Boy George a person I knew stuck up on her commune wall in 1982 or so -- an overly large and brightly colored visage which usually irritated her room mates every bit as much as she likely suspected it would, merely by reminding them of the world at large existing outside the walls of their house.
I know nothing about New Romanticism or who might represent them musically. So I'm guessing here:
How the New Romantics might really be (the spiritually deprived, politically unaware, and socially unconscious) unclaimed descendents from leftovers of the '60s:
The art set in Britain’s sixties and seventies tended to draw parallels between the Futurists and themselves. The Futurists, you will recall, provided the momentum for the subsequent Dada movement. In a nutshell, Dada as a group flourished during the first world war in Europe,
“having as its program the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional cultural and aesthetic forms, by a technique of comic derision in which irrationality, chance, and intuition were the guiding principles.” As a group, they said they arose in direct response to the war, and most often their poetry was a confusing array of images sprayed out like machine gun bullets.
Although the intent was to shock the bougeoisie by presenting the absurd, the taboo, and the commonplace out of context, their art was of the moment. They were famous for their “happenings,” and Dada has been described as rather like a circus, to which each performer contributed a turn. No specific style evolved, they utilized every medium including typefaces and print, but the longest lived style was collage.
While Dada was a shortlived movement, and not very well documented, it had a lasting impact on what was seen as art from there on out. Dada as you can suspect lead to Surrealism. Anyway, in the swinging London of the sixties and seventies, many artists believed they had found their own surrealistic roots in the Futurists and Dadaists (happenings after all were happening everywhere, and it was easy and wonderful to see it was happening, man), and so they began seeking out representatives.
As I recall Dali was still living in Spain at that time and most of the well-heeled British musicians joined with other representatives of European nobility and high society, travelling there to pay homage. All of which ended up as more like a prolonged exposure to the living surrealism of his beach parties. And for some reason the British “trendies” of those times also took hold of New York artists Andy Warhol and William Burroughs and embraced them as their own (as many surrealists had fled to New York in the time of WWII and so by propinquity had some influence on the art that followed) and eventually went there to pay homage to them.
Here is where my attempt at anology can end abruptly. In the '60s, what war did the young English artschool design set see themselves reacting to?
From what little I saw at the time in Britain, they essentially being far removed from the realities of the Viet Nam and the civil rights protests that had immediately preceeded that conflict in the U.S., this conflict took the form of a generational war on youth. The older folks were seen merely as “stodgy” representatives who wanted to close down (let’s say) “the sock hops” to keep the younger folks from getting out of hand. The young folks saw that as grouchy old people complaining because the kids were having too much fun. The young folks saw that as an intrusion on their freedom to “be who they were.” Something like that. It wasn’t very much in the way of “warfare” and it wasn’t a very unusual response.
Philosophically speaking, it wasn’t very much in the way of philosophy, either, and if the war motif is carried on, “the enemy” can easily become any one who isn’t on exactly the same sort of trip.
The '60s -- this era I'm sure you are tired of hearing about was genuinely a time of tremendous exploration.
But the truth is nearly every generation reacts in some way against its predecessor, and at this time (for certain UK design set) the challenge to old forms was taking on the tone of humorous disrespect. I could imagine some of the young folks as they were relegated to the social dumping ground of British art schools saying something about it, that some highflown etheral pun would eventually result, one man's savoir-faire being another man's flip remark, whereas people in America could be every bit as simple, “Guess I’ll go to collage and study Arp.”
I'll say right now I'm going to persist in purposefully misusing a word just below -- the first half of the standard everyday dictionary definition of "synesthesia". Maybe I am too lazy at the moment to find a more appropriate word or I am trying to make a point: ("synesthesia" defined (1st half): "A phenomenon in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another."
Let's try right now to rub out for the moment the last part of the definition, which goes on to explain "as the hearing of a sound results in the sensation of the visualization of a color," or even a taste. An impossible definition, although in a real sense this misplaced sense and sensuality of New Romanticism may very well be all that has ever resulted as a response to a real stimulus.
So ok I am drifting here, reaching for this idea, but the first half of the definition is moving towards what I am trying to outline: a stimulation of one thing that evokes or influences the sensation of another.
There is an assumption of a response, but there is no assumption that this is in any way an appropriate or genuine response, is there? In fact the very word I choose as a descriptor implies I believe the response is outlandish, perhaps difficult but not at all impossible to fully understand, in fact one hardly worth the effort of even taking too seriously.
I saw that the British “arts” crowd had accepted the "synesthesia" of the sixties, but they’d been won over by the sensual aspects and never got much farther than that. They were subsumed by hedonistic aspects, and because I was American, it seemed to me they’d caught hold of only part of the big message and so had “missed the big trip” entirely. Their form of hedonism, consisting of what could become an unending quest to experience new physical sensations (music, clothes, dope, exotic experiences, which required exotic locale) was actually an expression of the same rapacious appetites that they believed they were reacting to in their parent’s generation. They merely took on new forms.
But as this expression of theirs was not a global quest for domination of resources, such pilferage considered a “bad thing”, this form of what I'm mistakenly insisting on calling "synesthesia" (“I’m just doing my own thing” and not bothering anyone else) was not considered “a bad thing.” Plus it was connected to an exploration of “inner space”. Nonetheless, they were benefitting from the cornucopia provided to them by various “colonial” endeavors and relying on the stability of infrastructures that others provided.
The world of "synesthesia" as I think of it must be a self-absorbed personal place, and if you’re at all familiar with the mentation attached to smoking “herb,” you’ll recognize that much of that “high” is associated with slowly become aware of your senses and how they are playing throughout your body. The world of the senses becomes enhanced and the subject of total fascination.
Anyway, they had their silks and spices and everything nices. They’d talked themselves into believing they had better taste than their parents. I had hoped this was a temporary pose, but as that music part was a part of entertainment and that had become a big business that seemed destined to become bigger, it was guaranteed to go on long after its period of usefulness.
Although I love some of them to bits because they made art that touched a large part of my life, it’s kind of pitiful in a way, really, that “pop” musicians and their album cover “artists” (the photographers and the designers) are the most notable examples of my generation’s “artists.”
Because of the very numbers of people putting out records, there was a dedicated and prolonged pillaging of images and techniques from what had gone before, history as it was preserved in our collective unconsciousness. We didn't have too much of the fop, dandy, or twit as icons, but the wild west cowboy images were immensely popular with people working in Los Angeles, but those designers went on to devour and spew out a variety of other images that were recognizable. They went on and on with this, gobble and spew -- images that had made their way into our consciousness by previous advertising success, until eventually they started making those music videos. And the sad truth is that all of these people, without exception, painted their own roles as large, expansive, and terribly important.
The problem I have with New Romanticism, as I know little about it, I don't know what values if any they were imparting.
Such things don't come through any of the music that I've heard. And some of this may be due in part because they keep to their own society, and as every one there was terribly important because they were part of that society, so had to be the next guy at the table. So the tables were crowded with very important people.
I’m glad they keep to their own society. They haven’t really been a part of any but their own community for close to three decades. In fact, I found myself wishing for a global geography to be set apart for them under some international agreement.
Perhaps an island that would keep them contained to their own exclusive company. That way they can write songs about each other, take photos of each other, go to see each others movies, be invited to appear in each others movies or write soundtracks for them, talk of each other, talk to each other, and just generally stay the hell away from everyone else.
Fairly soon, if they live long enough, they’ll be driven to creative desperation and start making references to each other’s songs and videos in their own songs and videos and leave our shit alone.
They really don’t have a lot to contribute to the real world sometimes, do they? and they barely draw from it in that they chew up the predigested images of who they think we are and spit them back out at us. All to make some money in order to live apart anyway. Then they tell us in a variety of ways we’re too easily fooled and perhaps too stupid to know the difference between their staged presentations of “reality” and a tape played backstage looped out through the speakers. They’re so much cleverer than any of us because, you see, we’re falling for their act.
So that’s why they’re already buying properties in England with the idea of drinking tea and getting knighted. So why don’t they just close in that little open space on the Jungian “C” and close the circle entirely? They can only really share common experiences with each other. What the fuck can they tell me anyway about anything? What they have to impart is nearly useless information for me.
Why would I care to learn anything of the stress of fitting a manicure into a busy schedule before engaging in eight minutes of the false convivialty of a tv talk show host?
They provide advice and gossip one to the next so I suppose that’s a form of communication that might be valuable to them to make a living. All right then, you boys tell each other how to better dry the nail polish.
But, really, twenty, going on thirty years of this. These people just go on far too long, an overextended callow youth eventually growing into a callow adulthood, snacking themselves silly on perpetual panini, and now they want to make themselves even bigger while finding their places in history.
I've no solution, but what I decided was the really beautiful people are somewhere else.
¶ 10/10/2003 07:56:00 AM
