Tuesday, April 3, 2007

dead men smell no smells

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

“He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said, adding that “it went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Monday, April 2, 2007

you and me talking

The pun may be deliberate. Likewise, so may be my decision to begin with the previous sentence. A style I will label 'stealth introduction'.

JUSTIN.TV dot-something. Oriental youngblood wears a live-wire camera on his hat 24/7, pipes the signal non-stop into an internet portal called JUSTIN.TV.

Just(as in 'only')-in-TV.

But I doubt it. The deliberateness of the pun, that is. Probably accidental. But apt. The nature of media celebrity resides in media presence alone.

Real-life events that are broadcast through no more than a physical corpus in the perceptual vicinity of other physical beings un-mediated sensoria are peripheral to celebrity. (How many words does it take to describe 'plain reality'? Unaffected by media?) Celebrity happens 'online'. Kilroy was never here, only his name chalked on countless shipping crates and box cars.

Ironically, my mind offers a simple example from a made-for-tv movie. Made-for-TV movies are themselves a form of reality encased in another: a movie not designed to be played in theaters but broadcast through the airwaves into television sets tuned to a national network. More confusing terms: air waves, national network... a reader will know, roughly, what these mean.
Their reality is vindicated by the roughness of their understanding, for while we all know roughly what is meant by reality, specifically, we cannot say.

The made-for-TV movie has a scene where Willy Nelson tells the young hero, "This is just you and me talking, right here, right now."

I guess that is what we mean when we say 'reality', even if, as is often the case with a blog or the space between our ears, we are only talking to ourselves.

I go now to do something at least as weird as wearing a camera hat on a date with your girlfriend: I go to work on a novel. One man talking; hopefully, many people reading. But, before I go, and because this is, after all, the internet(s), I point out that the title of this post is poised to hyperlink you to a very special moment in time.

Singing tuta-lura-tura-li...