MY BRAIN HURTS
(When in crisis look to the old Python)
MY BRANE HURTS
(When in crisis look to string)

Unless you have the fortune to become a tediously predictable mega-star -- like Bono or the equivalent -- the artist-outlaw is essentially a scavenger, a semi-domesticated coyote, an opportunist wolf, a carrion bird, skulking on perimeters and peripheries of the massive and infinitely sluggish mainstream, living off the roadkill-debris and subverted medications of the culture, although, at certain other times, when pride dictates what might be another man’s folly, using his or her mobility to lope short ways up the untrod trail, all up ahead, and return with word – handed down whether they want it or not – that beyond the mountains we can expect the dawn. Or not.

The metaphor is of a vast nomadic Mongol encampment – patched yurts, walled-eyes ponies and no plumbing, but a TV in every pot – over-bloated so far beyond its functional capacity that it founders into the Phase of Lemming Transfixion , a Golden Horde now peeling gilt and verdigris, with no more world to conquer, pointlessly hoarding garbage for chicken comfort, and hardly covering a honest mile in a sweating day. Aimless fellaheen, sullen and lumpen trudge behind leaders from an exhausted gene pool, too numb for coupe or insurrection, too numb to cope, save to spread disease and rumors of disease, to feed on fear and craven recoil as, in the flash undirected feral fury, fights break out around the swampland gin mills and the temples of insanity – neglecting, of course, to educate the children in anything but the art of Molotov cocktail. (Is Paris burning?)

But more importantly, whole areas of prime cultural real estate wink out and reappear elsewhere in different form and shimmering guise by processes of complex phantomization. The Royal Library of Alexandra mutates to an electron stream, but who can haunt its stacks without, by necessity, becoming a phantom?

(This train was kinda set in motion by the following story in today’s New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/business/yourmoney/13frenzy.html?th&emc=th
Just the very idea that (say) the intro to the Kinks "You Really Got Me Should" be the ringtone on some asshole’s cell phone -- braying out in the movieshow or on line at bank, instead of calling us to arms or at least sexy drunken mayhem -- began building a head of steam on a Sunday when I would have been very happy to hide under the blankets humming "Make The World Go Away.")

More (probably much more) to...

The secret word is Come

CRYPTIQUE – Like TIE fighters* round the Millennium Falcon.

* http://www.starwars.com/databank/starship/tiefighter/