I Have No Idea Why this is on My Mind.

The Andy Warholian concept of ‘ironic celebrity’ is ultimately a flawed one because it treats celebrity itself as if it is something which contains nuanced gradations, which it does not; it subsumes them. The ironic celebrity, accurately described, will always actually be: Celebrity, ironic.

That’s the only reason you’ve ever heard of a conceptual artist from Pittsburgh who was born 87 years ago. Not because he was profound, but because he was famous. And even if he did actually believe his life to be an elaborate piece of performance art, he still cashed the checks. Doing it with a sneer or a smirk doesn’t change the fact. Keep in mind that when he died he was working on a commission for Mercedes-Benz, which now sits in their corporate art collection.

I’m not sneering at Andy, but sometimes I have trouble thinking about him without rolling my eyes.

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Depravity and Wonder.

I’m reading an essay by Michael Chabon entitled “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes”. It is in his collection of essays Maps and Legends and I just came across a line I wanted to share with you, “Secret sharers, deception and disguise, imposture, buried shame and repressed evil, madwomen in the attic, the covert life of London, the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world”

Here he is talking about the motifs of Victorian literature, but I think that something about revealing “the concealment of depravity and wonder beneath the dull brick facade of the world” might as well be part of a writer’s job description. I would have just highlighted the line, but this is a library book and they keep yelling at me for doing that! So instead I am making a note of it here.

Oh! and just in case you are trying to decide if it is pretentious of me to be reading - for fun, no less - an essay by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Chabon in which he opines on the writing proclivities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, well then let me just save you some time: Yes, it is HUGELY pretentious. But that’s not why I’m doing it, I’m doing it because I like the way Chabon writes and because reading his nonfiction is a lot like the experience of hanging out with a hugely intelligent, slyly funny, but ultimately well-mannered college professor.

If I was going to be pretentious I would tell you about the time I read a Jonathan Lethem piece in Granta about the work of John Cassavetes. Even I had to not talk to me for awhile after that.

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Clockwork

As the post below makes clear, I am sitting in a bar reading. I do that sometimes. I grew up in a house with a lot of kids and a lot of noise and I actually often feel more comfortable reading in a noisy place than I do in a super quiet apartment. 

So I am here having my deep thoughts, but I don't completely tune out and so I will give you a rundown of what's going on in the bar. We will do this clock-style because I always wants to be a fighter pilot because I saw Top Gun when I was too young to know that it is basically the best American soft-core gay porn ever made.

Anyway ...

At my 1 o'clock is a young couple that is t going to last. She is decked out to the nines for a dinner taken in the bar and he is wearing black gym shorts with white stripes which match his sandles. He also has one if those weird cowlick things going on. Now to be clear, I'm not saying that they don't have a future. I'm not saying that they won't get married and have kids and buy a house and get fat together. When I say theyre not going to work out, I just mean that they won't be happy.

At my 3 o'clock is a couple that is either on a terrible first date or who have been together for more time than they had things to talk about. I LITERALLY don't thing they have spoken to each other the whole time I have been here. Makes me think of the lovely and talented Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when she talks about the dead people.

At my 6 is a table full of college kids dressed like hoodrats but hoodrats don't drink here, so they're just kids who didn't have to move home when the semester ended. They're loud but harmless.

At my 8 o'clock are some bros. They look like BMW bros, as opposed to pop-Christian mega church bros (BIG difference, but that's for another time), so basically they're human equivant of annoying insects.

At my 9 o'clock is - surprisingly - a middle aged Indian couple. He looks like my childhood pediatrician Dr. Patel (I'm not being racist here, he actually does look like Dr. Patel, who I have a deep and abiding love for, BTW, and wish I could still to to) and she is wearing one of those "traditional" sari type things.

I would tell you more, but I think they're closing the bar and kicking me ...

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