Quentin Crisp wrote that when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in Rome, the public lavatories had no top on them, and the people were climbing up to look at them pissing. The solution to this, he said, is not to build higher walls around the latrine. It is to piss with style.
Our attitude should be existential, he said, which means to swim with the tide, but faster. If something is going to happen anyway, make yourself over to it immediately. If you can’t hide from the cameras and recorders and computers and monitors, then man up, like Letterman. “Yes I did. Deal with it.”
Eventually this will create an egalitarian society, as the walls between public and private fall in the famous and powerful, uniting them with the poor and disreputable.
This continues the process of unification of black and white represented in our President. We get something that’s not either one. We get something like Tiger Woods. What a name that is. Barrack Hussein’s got nothing on him.
“Tiger, as in tiger tiger burning bright, and wood, as in can we throw wood on the fire sweet sugar mama?”
“I thought it was Woods, as in, we’re lost in the woods.”
The golf club crashes through the window. ”Let me Sweden that for you.”
The shadow shows up in every play, because when the play begins to drag you bring in a man with a gun. The audience won’t know why he’s there but they’ll be glad he showed up.
That couple that crashed a state dinner was the man with a gun, and while the debate centers on whether they were or were not invited, there is a dreaming level where they are the trickster element in the play.
There are levels circulating around Obama, the innermost being his bodyguards, then the social secretaries who control access, another layer of security …
It’s hard to move through that layer into the inner circle, and those two people managed to get in and get photographed with everybody. They are duplicitous, social climbing, egoists. That’s a part of the American psyche that had to show up because it has become defining.
Nobody out here on the line can miss it. We see it all the time and hear it all the time, as the cameras devour those who want to be devoured, and then they learn to hang out on street corners staring at everybody with unblinking eye. ”Is this you?”
“It does look like me, but …”
There are dire warnings about how information can be used against you.
“Did you write this?”
“Is this you in this picture?”
“We just want to know who sold it to you.”
Who can escape the cameras and recorders and computer console logs? Your telephone can signal where you are and your credit cards leave footprints on the highways, at gas stations and restaurants and motels. If you find a briefcase full of cash there’s a responder in it. You can run but you can’t hide.
There’s nothing left to do but let all the players come to the party, and own them all.
So whatever your names were, who crashed the party, good performance.
