But not one of us would have worshipped him until we were certain that everyone else here worshipped him too. Without a split-second timing among tens of thousands of us that blurred the sequential/parallel divide, celebrity would never have existed.

So where did celebrity come from? Certainly not from us. We were just blindly following each other's lead.

These days we had to go farther and farther just to feel. Maybe it was those genetic things they did to previous generations that we inherited, but the world of people today is all trumped up emotion. Sometimes we even speculate what it must be like in the world of animals.

Three years ago, after failing to make it (get on the gravy train) as composers, and after being laid off from Kudelski, we were suddenly free to (or forced to) roam around Europe and the States broke, cutting things up and running them backwards to look for emergent phenomena -- i.e. unexpected patterns that, when transduced to the right medium in the right way, become significant either to the individual or to his sworn enemy, society.

Eventually we started the first of our many NGOs, Boarding Houses Without Boarders, but quickly experienced the exterminating power of love.

After that, all our subsequent NGOs were based on quantum physics -- if ya know what I mean.

Of course, immediately, the cultural icons of high mediocrity called down their powerful failure of imagination upon us.

And we were forced to retreat to our Alaskan subsidiary, Boarding Houses Without Snow Boarders, where we immediately sat down and fabricated from scratch, a fully-registered and ID-carded, living, breathing, on-paper human being, just to see how far we could shove him up the ladder of straight-ass, kiss-ass achievement in the world of flesh, without a single nucleic or amino acid, let alone the least bit of actual genome.

And now we were sitting in the audience of our "success".

The man on-stage hadn't come from Central Casting, though. He'd come from Central Wipers -- a stretch of abandoned Afghan moonscape beyond the outskirts of Central Square, where all the beat up aspects of reality go to be refurbished again, and so where, obviously, people who try to fabricate a human into the world go to put together his reality when suddenly, like a run on a Ponzi scheme, his existence is questioned by too many people not to answer.

So we rented this stadium and took all the old clothes and stuff we'd bought for practically nothing and laid them out on stage at random and hoped either someone would actually materialize within them or the audience would create a person out of them, in their minds, so that reality would, once again, have to do absolutely no work that day.

And, though we didn't really know what it was that had us all hoping and dreaming and cheering and crying and screaming out now for celebrity-hero salvation, "only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled"1 would have had qualm One about our immediately being whisked off to Stockholm, all expenses paid, to have forced down our throats an emergency combo Nobel Prize for Selfishness, Irresponsibility, and Failure To Come To A Full Stop At A Handwritten Stop Sign 63% Obscured By Mud And Snow.

------------------

Notes

1. Goffman, p. 16

permanent link to this article