April 20, 2006
FISH, FISHERMEN
Last night, I ate at Next Door Nobu. At approximately 7:17, La Lohan and her posse swept in and took the nearest round table. There she was, mere feet away. Yazoo! Her newsboy cap came off. On the street, no looking! In here, Please See Who I Am, Mr. Fish Man. The posse: Lohanella; her little sister Aliana (a pinched face under an unhappy halo); The Momager (who looked like she'd been rolling around in a clothes dryer for three days); two young women; and a man. Guesses of provenance, in order: publicity, choreography, friendship. Lohangiano and her friends played with their Blackberrys, musique non stop. LL Cool L looked uncrazy and stable, though distracted, tired, and maybe even plain old sad.
"Be Part of The Phenomenon" is the tagline for the forthcoming Da Vinci Code movie. See the billboard? White letters (or are they numbers?) break off from a thick clump in the lower left corner and begin flying over the Mona Lisa face. (Nerd bukkake? The linked poster is slightly different from the rectangular billboard on 42nd and 8th. No idea what the enormous one looked like.) A puzzle you'll be solving, rabbit. Maybe a game, now it is.
Perhaps we're building to the most embodied commodity of NOW, a product synergistically co-branded with two big market stars: a video game that will bring back Christ. Video games are subscriber goods (I made that up: apologies to economists for not using the proper term of art), a hybrid of software and hardware: you have to buy the thing over and over, never fully getting the goddamn thing, which gives the game an aura of regeneration (like Christ) and impossibility (like Christ). (By contrast, new cars are bought every five to seven years, on average, but when they fall apart, companies keep you in the spending loop with peripherals, accessories and repairs, though they can't be sure you won't pay these monies to a third party.)
Anyway, the prospect of making Christ return will have the youth buying new cartridges forever (or putting in quarters, if you're all Missile Command). How the game will promise this matters little, like most promises now. SPECIAL EXTRA-CHRSTY UPDATE: This just in from Eric Church, via song: "I believe the Bible is cold hard fact, and I believe that Jesus is coming back before she does."
Posted by Sasha at April 20, 2006 12:44 PM | TrackBack