NOTE. David Lynch begins all of his status updates on the social network with the salutation “Dear Twitter Friends,” so I decided to see how long I can keep up with the… therefore I… and you’ll notice also that… plus it’s better because… lastly, the sheer volume of… moreover, considering the most recent… with regard to the… nonetheless it’s important to consider that…
Dear Twitter Friends,
i'm so embarrassed now cuz i tried to follow the bright idea that i put forth in yesterday's entry, about allowing myself to type without regard for capitalization, like people do when they send instant text messages on their portable telecommunication devices...
what happened is that last night president trump was scheduled to give a short address to the united statesians (that means me: i am all of them), and i had an hour to spare before the address aired, so i decided to kill some time by typing on twitter...
the thing about president trump is that his haters criticize him for using twitter too much (by the way, to be clear, i count myself among his most hateful haters, but at the same time i see him rather as a symptom of a rotten system than as a distinctive danger, so that's why i don't focus much on critiquing him; but this could change any instant, for i possess a volatile temper)...
i say, the thing about prez tee is that his haters hate on him for tweeting tweets on twitter ("tweet" is a verb that means "publish an article via the printing press") ...we say he shouldn't tweet in such undignified fashion about every gosh-dang detail of this globe and turn everything into a partisan cockfight... ALSO prez tee has been known to tweet many tweets at once about a particular issue: this multi-tweet action is referred to as "a meltdown"...
so yesterday, for instance, i was browsing around on the blogosphere (the blogosphere is like a giant felt billiards table that resembles the outer spaces of our universe: it is green, and it contains every blog that has ever been born; each blog is ball-shaped, and they all knock into each other and spin), i say, i was skipping from blog to blog and reading their contents, and i heard one blogger – a trump-hater – declare something like:
event #9 just occurred: now i can't wait to watch prez tee have a meltdown on twitter!
so this had the effect of making ME want to have a twitter meltdown of my own, therefore i was looking for an excuse to perform one...
well then i saw that one of my dear twitter friends posted an article about a work by marcel duchamp... now, as you know, marcel duchamp is a hero of mine – i even named my book after one of his paintings – so i took interest in this article that was posted...
now the article ended up being about the work called "fountain" which is not a work that i've ever cared much about... the article talked about how new evidence has sprung up indicating that "fountain" is wrongfully attributed to duchamp: it is (according to the article) actually the work of elsa von freytag-loringhoven... so i read this article with great interest, and i thot to myself: wow, okay so elsa is the author of the "fountain"; i accept this...
yet then i read the comments on the article, for the article had grown many comments from passionate readers, and one of the comments was well-researched and convinced me that the article's claim was questionable, if not mistaken...
but here's the point of my mentioning all this right now: i'm not too concerned whether the article is right or wrong, because i don't really care very much about the artwork called "fountain"; nevertheless this semi-scandal intrigues me because "fountain" itself was apparently intended (by whoever actually "made" it) to throw into question the notion of artistic authorship itself: for it was signed with a pseudonym by whoever did indeed sign it, and it was not sculpted by the hands of a human being but rather manufactured by a factory that makes plumbing devices... thus when we argue about "who's the author!?" we're NOT talking about who physically made the artwork, because that might have been a blue-collar slave named mary or josh (i myself used to slave in a factory with both mary & josh, that's why i chose their names as examples just now; incidentally mary was a lesbian and josh was gay; and my boss at that job was a woman named cyndy, pronounced CAN-die, who spelled her name with two 'y's just like me, bryan ray – that's my most recent self; but it is not the Real Me: Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I AM... i mention these latter facts because our current cultural climate is dominated by so-called "identity politics" and thus my ex co-workers' sexual preference and gender seem worth emphasizing... if i was wrong to do this, i apologize: i'm simply trying to contribute to the national conversation), NO, i say, when we question the true authorship of "fountain" we're asking "who's responsible for executing this concept of choosing an item of merchandise off the shelf of a hardware store, telling someone to sign some fake name upon it, and then entering the product into an art show whose guidelines state that ALL submissions shall be welcome and no submission shall be barred?" – & then "fountain" got rejected by the self-styled non-judgmental committee – THAT's the joke that no artist could have forced to manifest; thus, in some sense, i suppose that FATE is the author of "fountain"... or at least co-author...
"Fate wanted this, not me."
—Officer Duke, to his mother
(from the 2013 film WRONG COPS)
so you can tell by my rambling and unfocused relaying of this story that i'm opinionated enough to fill up a tweet or two about its subject... by the way, for those who don't know, a tweet can contain up to 280 characters; so tweets're short, but you can string a whole bunch of them together like beads on a rosary... for this reason, they call a run of tweets a "thread" (not to be confused with a THREAT)... so that's what i did: after reading it, i typed my initial thots on the article, one after another, and published many tweets in a long line, one after the next: thus i accomplished my twitter meltdown...
*
but now today i awake on the morning after, & i am ashamed at the low quality of the thots in my tweets... that is the downside of speaking "off the cuff" without a plan and not being able to revise what you prophesied... so that's why i'm penning this formal apology: i feel ashamed at the spectacle of my shallow and repetitious thot-blob, parked thus bare-assed out in public for all to gawk at
"I'm gonna photocopy this and post it all over the place for everyone to enjoy."
—Officer Holmes to Officer Duke, regarding a photo of Officer Sunshine (from the 2013 film WRONG COPS)"...and they stripped him, and mocked him... and they spit upon him, and smote him on the head... and then they led him away to crucify him."
—Saint Matthew (from his Gospel, 27:28-31)
despite my shame, however, i'll allow my firstborn twitter thread to live... i won't abort it, cuz i always abide by the wisdom of billboard advertisements, and the last ad that i saw on the freeway had a picture of a fetus against a gloomy grey background with a warning superimposed that said:
don't delete your twitter meltdown, bryan! leave it up for all to enjoy: you may inspire future twitter meltdowns from upcoming prezzes even less mature than yourself; also consider: if this baby mammal that is depicted here on this billboard woulda got itself SLAIN prior to slipping into spacetime, then neither trump nor pelosi nor schumer would be with us on this day! sad-face emoji.
nancy pelosi and chuck schumer spoke after trump last night, that's why their names were on my mind... and then bernie sanders spoke after them... so it's sort of like how late night talk shows used to be, where the most popular talk show would be called "the late show" and it would have johnny carson on it, and then the show after that was called "the late, late show" and it would have david letterman or whoever; and there were subsequent shows like conan o'brien and andy richter on the "latest show alive"... i tend to like the graveyard shift; the people are realer and funner... that's why i'm a bernie guy at heart, and i recently watched the first season of "norm macdonald has a show" which has been filed in the card catalog of my library (the local library of the apocalypse) as "post-television late-night".
P.S.
here's my tweet thread, in case you're interested in serving rome as a centurion; it's job security, for there will always be christs to berate:
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