Still on deadline, riding the train of pain to a place called catharsis, followed by temporary coma, or what civilians refer to as "a nap."
Meanwhile, click on over to check out Tom Watson's post about Jenna Jameson and the irresistable rise of the pop cultural semi-pro, "We Live in Public."
This phenomenon was brilliantly anticipated and analyzed by the late Albert Goldman, whom many regard and will forever despise as the Anti-Christ because of his biographies of Elvis and John Lennon. The result is that his pop journalism remains criminally underrated; and like so many scattershot geniuses (Seymour Krim, Lester Bangs, R. Meltzer, Nick Tosches), his best work was often done on the fly or for zero-prestige rat-bag publications. I've quoted this passage before from Goldman's Disco! (a coffeetable book that looks as if it had been coughed up after a rough sea voyage), but I'm going to quote it again because it's so prophetic and so apropos to Watson's post:
"Everybody sees himself as a star today. This is both a cliche and a profound truth. Thousands of young men and women have the looks, the clothes, the hairstyling, the drugs, the personal magnetism, the self-confidence, and the history of conquest that proclaim a star. The one thing they lack--talent--is precisely what is most lacking in those other, nearly identical, young people whom the world has acclaimed as stars. Never in the history of show biz has the gap between amateur and professional been so small. And never in the history of the world has there been such a rage for exhibitionism. The question is, therefore, what are we going to do with all these beautiful show-offs?"
Porn and Paris Hilton point the way.
