Celebrity Representation

He is not my representative against corporate treachery or slavery in the bureaucratic anthill. Not a libertine proxy for my lawless desires, or the rogue genius who, as Bret Easton Ellis would have it, lucidly deconsructs celebrity and brings it kicking and screaming into reality. If the crudest exhibitionism is the new news about American celebrity, stripping away veils from the hypocritical hesitations of the old "Empire" version of it, then somebody hasn't been paying attention.

Celebrity in this culture has always been about crude exhibitionism - about instructions from on high to the great unwashed. It mirrors and defines the disintegration bounderies of the personal and collective psyche, providing shifting suggestions for living with vanishing identities.

Savaging the transparent imbecilities of the "old" celebrity doesn't threaten the game. Sheen's antic oppostion is an outre accomodation to celebrity world shaped by the nihilism of that world, where bogus gestures of defiance claim to slay the monster. But given enough time, all this is flattened into insignificance.

What we don't need is wired futility, the passing fiction of another beautiful loser.

An Annoying Piety

It's an annoying piety that the internet, social network sites, and cell phone communications spark waves of libertarian fervor and democratic unrest, groundswells of spontaneous outrage sending repressive and resistant tyrants and dictators to the wall. But opinion is not opinion usable for concerted action, is not opinion at all until organized. Otherwise, atomized and precisly nothing. And the business of forming opinion servicable as a political weapon is an affair of interested parties with an agenda to prosecute. Via money, information/disinformation buried behind cynical smokescreens of liberatarian spontaneity, lurks the bogus ideology of the fictitious marriage between technological immersion and democratic aspiration (whatever that means). The perfect formula for that militant, tribal self-congratulation, our essential disease, miles away from reality or justice.

Courage...

The Ghost