Friday Thoughts
As another Friday passes by, Ubiquitous Red Cup comes to me and asks me questions.
How is it that the ‘bags we examine each day can cover such a wide variety of shapes, forms and variations, yet they all converge into a single ball of societal douche?
Maybe we’re missing the key nexus point where contradiction converges: The spectacle of difference and the structure of sameness.
Maybe the spectacle of douchosity is not how we percieve it. Maybe it informs the erotic by virtue of its meaningless shell of exterior. The hott desires the glinty shell by virtue of its great irony — that within the visual spectacle of uniqueness, she will actually find the comfort of sameness.
Ours is a culture of cacophonous mutiplicity, mass marketed artifact. Yet, spread across the wasteland, from sea to shining sea, the baubles become devoid of content. Denatured of context. Form without meaning. Shells of Speed Racer mass produced masculinity, store bought Iron Man icons of rebellion reprocessed.
This is why the mohawk has been rendered ridiculous. It has become denatured of originary act, reprocessed as mass culture club going gimmick. Originality sold by the yard in the conceptual chain outlet of mass culture recoding.
Che Guevara club t-shirts. Dog-tags, once the requirement of a soldier’s potentially dead body, turned into brand-name trinkets sold at Armani outlets. A shiny metal object rendered as meaningless pseudo-masculine “bling.”
There is no meaning, so the spectacle becomes fragment. Strands of an originary cultural sameness.
Thousands of TVs reflect back to the Hott the bauble, the glint. The shifting brand names, the power chord rock song du jour, the follicle length of the month, Seacrest Approved.
These signifiers congeal into the singularity she calls “boyfriend” and validates her desire as cultural net worth. No words needed. Just icons.
We have become walking hyperlinks.
Bodies as intertextual echo of media super-spectacle.
Our physical presence no longer exists. We simply communicate the codes of market set value in the hopes of validating ourselves in the eyes of the collective other.
We trip the wiki fantastic and link across the wastelands, our belt buckles as hypertext, our A/X shirts as link exchanges. We charge our sense of selves on the collective power outlets of quick cut digital flash and the noise of the latest 31 Flavors.
The Hott intuits these values and pursues their market worth. But while the Hott may chase the Douche, she can never catch up to ephemera. It is a digital carrot on a pixelated stick — always out of reach at 29.97 FPS. A drop-frame simulacrum of structure designed never to resolve itself. Only to perpetuate the chase.
But once we shed the bling, drop the Goose and turn off the turntable, the image dissolves into actuality. The thumpa-thumpa noise fades, and the authentic body reemerges. Fixed. Present. Real.
In the end, they can’t buy and sell that online. Our bodies are still here. And the boobie is still firm and succulent.
So we got that going for us.
