Yo, Nige'--

There are times when all individuals are "up" and then "down". When "the buzz" is there-- like volts of electricity dancing through a select population's consciousness-- the presence of a crowd will always draw a larger one. How is a celebrity made? First, by their long journey with the faceless hordes to the mountain where most are long since "killed off" by discouragement and lack of fortitude. Then it's a matter of press kits and "exposure" and ceaseless "touring" that gets the name out-- "For it's a Long Way to the Top if you Wanna Rock n' Roll. . . . ."

You have those who put in the hard-core effort, and then "the cheaters". These are the shills, the con artists, the bit-players, the skittery flakes who fly through the universe like a crying wind, and then that underbelly of tabloid culture you border on.

Whenever "buzz" has visited me, it has always been in a dark way-- when one is desperately seeking attention, or to feel a sense of fixity & self-importance, to fill that void at the center with popularity or true romance or whatever it was I thought one might have coming for doing something "audacious"-- but typically it would only attract predators. What's worse is when you can't distinguish between good & bad attention and find yourself increasingly led astray until the truth of everything hits you at once and you bolt in revulsion. I think there is a certain impermanence in this business that can only fool someone who is 9 years old or someone who is emotionally 15 years-old who sentimentally yearns for that illusion of wholeness they had years before. . . . . whatever kind of rotten semi-adults we become.

If you are not a plump stork on thin legs, pecking after the bread-crumbs of fame's ephemera and name-dropping totems of celebrity in a fetish of obsessive-compulsion, I would honestly ask "what are you doing with your life" and how you can turn around and write trashy articles about your quarry if you really pretend to care about them. That is, instead of "cashing in" with short-changed ecstasy "that pulls everyone down" in the celebrity/media/public death-fuck.

You wouldn't have given Winona a second glance unless she was famous and I find it odd how all major books about her were released at the height of her career-- not one moment sooner, not one moment later-- and how none of you were with her "when the chips were down". Neither were they around for me. You watch me take over the world, and I will radically contort every interview format until the editor screams for mercy, until they like it, until it is bashed into their sodden, squishy liberal-arts brains that I am not a prepackaged box of "spotted dick" or worse to be tallied up like so many disposable units. For truly it is time "to split the diseased skull of liberalism with the pagan axe of hatred". The only "death-fuck" around here will be Jann Wenner's grinning noggin on my desk full of Donald Rumsfeld's old laser pens. WRRRAAAAGHH!

-- "Lawless"
http://www.dearwinona.com