SOME BEAUTY ON AN OFF DAY FROM INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

I'll tell you what my kick with this image is. Sitting here in the conservative heart of Washington State, the Inland Empire it's sometime called, it gives me a little kick of pleasure to send out a fashion image I got from a New York magazine, founded, I believe, by Andy Warhol. If he didn't found it, he had a hand in starting it up. Full of fashion and celebrity interviews, it's about as frolicsome and frivolous as a magazine can be. Even I can tell, now that I'm 68 years old, that what movie stars and celebrities say, can sometimes be a bit surreal. Even to me, it sounds something of a pose, like what's expected rather than what's real. And, then, they're such vulnerable targets for the conservative mugwomps, who like to slash and burn them!

I pity these stars for what their audience expects from them. How can they escape the toils of the consumer world when, after all, their personnae are items for sale just like a car or a conservative politician, so they have a pose and the media work off that pose, and so they are coopted by the world their characters' personnae fight against.

And, no, Abraham Lincoln could not be elected in modern America!

It's not that someone like George Clooney doesn't have something real to say, but when they say it in the glare of lights, outside the various characters they play, with all their millions glittering in clothes and jewelry, they can't compete with the characters they play which are more real than they are, so they come out lifesize and their words are reduced to the real world and thus what they say sounds tinny and unreal, like a poorly edited and shot film.