Can't help but notice amongst the armchair elite -- a fitting metaphor, given their predilection for (sweat)panting and drooling from the safety and insulation of their homes; a bit of physical activity, i.e. work, seems to elude these petit bourgeois pseudo-proles, of course! Have yet to see any of you chaps at a rave/conference -- a new call's been made for so-called reading comprehension, a favorite new whipping boy amongst the Hilton hordes. 'If only you'd take the time to truly read our words, they wouldn't be such anathema; indeed, if only you'd re-read them, they would set you free!' Of course, one can play this card as many times as he (why 'he,' always 'he'?) wishes, merely a sleight of hand to cover one's own darker allegiances (or shall I entertain the farce that your professed poplets are genuine artistes?). I have, of course, seen the full deck, as it were, where sausage is made and Intellectual Three-card Monte is played. Shall I go so far as to re-read and (sigh) quote you on it, sirs (why 'sirs,' always 'sirs'?)?

digital gunk

Ah, so now it's gunk, this enlightening enterprise, of which you all once felt so confident you protested that, of course, for one to see differently from the company line is unfathomable, calling to arms your more extreme ideologue brethren (why 'brethren,' always 'brethren'?) to do some of the fighting for you! Of course, when challenged on the veracity of your passions you hide behind qualifiers, exceptions, 'filibusters,' as the Papatimist so often calls them! 'But if you'd only truly listen! Well, not to the "gunk," surely, never the gunk, but what lies beyond the gunk!' A simulacrum within a simulacrum, or perhaps the libido has, for one brief moment, been outmatched -- a semblance of that tricky public school 'reason' still nags, doesn't it, as erotic fantasy subsides and sunlight hits the cortex, or perhaps brainstem?

And, from Big Other himself:

performers are dependent upon their audiences for power

Well, at least we're consistent, aren't we? First it's 'my terms' and next it's 'the artiste's terms' (which, of course, amounts to taking a Paris Hilton at her word, or at least that of her reliable publicist mouthpieces) and now it's strictly 'they,' that elusive populist mass, validating our own decisions only when it's most convenient. Of course, the relativist impulse here amounts to nothing more than chasing shadows across the plains of a distinctly 21st-century incarnation of Neverland (ah, fitting since the passing of the so-called King of It, no?), always elusive by definition -- Das Ding as a schoolboy's fling. Except, of course, for the sheer conviction of such a chase, from which we must begin to get at motives and baser motivations, pulsating as they do from the loins to the mouth, or, perhaps, from sweatpants to the public aether of any number of social networking breeding grounds for, as they once said, dissensus. The contrarian spirit gives way to something more primal, more unsettling, as these aged adults (such as they are) feed the (newest) beast in the name of their very own heterotopic (why 'hetero'? Always 'hetero'?) digital colonies, perfect spaces for feverish fancies that quickly mutate from thought experiment into a more sinister sort of hounding for the ripest flesh! For these lumpy old men (why 'men'? Always 'men'?) feed upon it; it restores them, and, of course, will only bring newer flesh, fleshier flesh, into the flesh fold.

As always: Your words, not mine. Or would you like me to read it back to you again?

A rather troublesome matter in this so-called "poptimist" crusade to obliterate taste -- vindication of ressentiment, a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which the projection of our misplaced sense of coherent self (the proverbial phallic lack, though certainly not for lack of a phallus, eh!) onto the glistening labia of various and sundry US pubescent pop princesses traverses the prickly pastures of preconscious into full-forced orgasm/id-spasm onto the luscious ruby lips of whichever tart they're cramming down our throats THIS week.

That is to ponder, Britney as captive, or Britney as captor? Certainly the former seems in line with the schadenfreude-shilling mode of excess typified by this particular pom-pommed purveyor of libidinal relocation into the realm of the raunch. Yet the latter is just as captivating, if you'll pardon my pun, in its protection for pusillanimous popti-mystics -- pop culture peripatetics, "nomads" in the words of the Overlord, conflating their own privilege with the populist impulse. Of course, try and get one of these blokes on a bus and we'll see how quickly such an impulse breaks down!

For the unspoken LACK of which the poptimists seek (and, though they dance about it, SPEAK) is precisely that which they have been denied -- the very root of the populist impulse, indeed, a kind of crypto-proletarianism that eludes them even as they share what they believe to be the sweat of the "masses" on dancefloors. Yet we all cower in our respective niches -- some with more dignity than others -- and this is a self-loathing NICHE worth of NIETZSCHE. Surely the poptimist ubermenschen are an inverse elite force the likes of which the the Loony Brigade should will straight into existence without a moment's hesitation were it not for those pesky parameters of guilt and shame rearing their ugly, insistent little heads -- those very bugaboos intended to be obliterated in their manic discursive scramble for so-called "multiplicity" in meaning, a relativistic nightmare of missed connections, late arrivals, and flat-footed rhetorical frippery barely worthy of the scummiest dregs of the public schools from which they've emerged -- indeed, that very cycle of boorish gladhanding that keeps these proles-of-the-head circulating through elitist institutions without any apparent capacity for thought!

Which is all to say that if you haven't parsed the new Burial, my friends tell me you've really been missing out.