Into the great machine B, popped D, like the mandatory 1 rupee coin but with 6 duffel bags and a recycled mineral water bottle. Delivered from the suburban constituency of G to the great railway station of B, he was packed into a giant air tight human mass that propelled him past the samosas and the stench onto the road where it dispersed into buses and taxis and the assembly line that traversed the great B footpath – stretching from office to market to home to
miscellaneous. His taxi delivered him to a large municipaltic block where it subtracted half his financial corpus. Green lines between the cheap mosaic took him to a rusty lift door that left him at the fifth where he gained entry subject to verification of Rs. 50,000 deposit and Rs.7500 monthly rent by roommate. Following which he was on the assembly line with portfolio as lubricant, seeking entry and achieving ejection like a rogue VHS does from a moralizing VCP.
After not making it to the position of advertising executive for a tolerable time period, D sought exit. His application, with razor to wrist, was approved.
This was the exact moment the pug from the H advertisements had achieved exit on account of a piece of bone too large for his oesophagatic function. The resultant dispatch to the H office led to the emergency meeting function being operated for the second time that day. Here, the points of the MD’s syphilitic predicament, cockroaches in the coffee machine, the hot new intern and the dead pug were tabled and discussed (in that same order). The resolution that the concerned advertising agency locate the solution was delivered to the advertising agency with ‘the deadline was yesterday’ as appendix.
Following the protocol of 3 Navy Cuts, 2 coffees and seventeen crumpled sheets of unrecycled paper, the advertising executive gave ‘I can’t do this’. After receiving a ‘Syntax error. Does not compute.’ from H, he operated the mentor function on his telephone which gave ‘Yeah, we had to bring a dead celeb to life once. Try this guy.’, providing a logical spiral that led him to an underground city beneath a carpet shop with attending necromancer demanding cadaver with ‘fresh and suicide’ as added attributes. On further inquiry, the necromancer gave, ‘I don’t know. Try the fucking yellow pages.’ Following up on the fucking yellow pages, he was routed to a BPO facility in Shanghai, which forwarded him, via underwater trans-atlantic fibre optic wires, to a low cost facility in the Ukraine, which forwarded him to a lower cost facility in Harare, which forwarded him to a yet lower cost facility in Memphis, which forwarded him to a lowest possible cost facility that was half a block away from his present location where D’s former room-mate provided service. ‘I need a corpse’, gave the advertising executive, ‘should be a fresh suicide.’
‘My room-mate just offed himself’, gave D’s former room-mate, ‘I was planning to sell his organs, so if I could get a sum that qualifies I’d get his corpse across to you.’
The former room-mate’s estimate, visible on hand scrawled piece of paper with hidden cost incurred by advertising executive for the purpose of purchasing delirium, was tabled and discussed with the intern’s compatibility with double penetration, the thriving cockroach colony in the coffee machine and the MD’s travel plans (in the reverse order). The resolution that the money be paid with the appendix ‘this had better fucking work’ was sent via quick footed secretary to Finance which prepared a cheque to be added to the package to be delivered to the
agency.
The agency, on receipt, delivered it, via flyer equipped with helmet and bicycle to a money launderer who converted it to hard cash in duffel bag (Rs. 5 per hour on returnable basis) and delivered it back to flyer busy operating his groin scratching function out in the sun. The flyer, as per his preset program, delivered the hard cash in duffel bag to advertising executive who, post subtracting his cut, proceeded to the proposed rendezvous point with D’s former room-mate who converted the hard cash in duffel bag to empty duffel bag and cadaver in large black plastic packet. ‘Why’s it so twisted?’ gave the advertising executive. ‘Rigormortis’ gave D.’s former room-mate, ‘and the fridge was too small.’ Following which the cadaver was delivered to the attending necromancer who gave, ‘fuck, you actually managed’, and made application, via mini axe and happy goat, to the netherworld to operate an ectoplasmic lever meant for such reanimations. D popped back into B via pug substituting ‘Fuck. I’m a dog’ for the former ‘Mama.’
‘He’s talking’, gave the advertising executive, ‘why the fuck is he talking?’ ‘Maybe because of too much proximity in their time of deaths’ gave the necromancer, ‘It’s been known to happen.’
‘What do I do now?’ gave the advertising executive. ‘I don’t know’, gave the necromancer, ‘try the fucking yellow pages.’
The added property of sentientality gave the pug a decision operation which it didn’t have before, which D had access to on account of the possession. Using it, he accessed brand opportunities beyond those offered by H using an economic model which provided it co-equity in the added brand spaces, activating a realignment that supported a favourable monopoly. The activation switched on a resistive mechanism run by a reactionary coalition between SRK and AB (constituting the predominant power dynamic). The mechanism pushed artificial clamps on demand, using the vaccum created to set up microcosmic revenue structures for the coalition.
On adequate dissipation of financial corpus and consequent lack of prostitutes willing to do it doggy style, D operated the mentor function on his telephone. ‘Fuck dude, I thought you were dead’, gave mentor. ‘No yaaar’, gave D., ‘acha, tell me how to deal with this predicament na. We’ll talk about your short film later.’ ‘The resistive mechanism is dependent on the coalitions’ influence in the film industry’, gave mentor, ‘this in turn is a function of a third world construct such as ours where advertising works as a derivative of cinema.’ ‘Why are you speaking like
that?’ gave D, shocked at the response. ‘To keep this short story short.’ gave the mentor.
Accessing a global cinematic archive provided D with the answer that a format with a non speaking comic as USP was possible and covertly delivered the final residue of his revenues to a debutant director for conversion to film. The film overrode the clamps on demand, which had exponentiolised on denial, eroding the coalition to zero and achieving the status ‘big hit.’
In the consequential circuit, AB left for offshore colonies to access a nostalgia function by converting limited budget art house productions into currency flows, SRK sought exit from the eighth floor applying to concrete floor downstairs with possible heart attack on the way and D found himself on the receiving end of an affection impulse while on PC’s lap, en route to a felicitation ceremony at the Governor’s residence. Transported, in close proximity to PC’s diva like mammaries, he was granted free mobility on the Governer’s front portico past the stairs. On
interaction with a tall colonial column, his nervous system involuntarily switched on the excretement function as a result of which he raised his leg and started to pee to which PC gave a delighted giggle, D’s soul gave a silent ‘shit! This is embarrassing!’ and the left side of the pug’s cranial muscle gave ‘I fucking own this place.’
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
dead professors
I had a strange disease.
Not to say there aren’t stranger diseases. My mother once mentioned a man who got an asthmatic attack every time he saw a cat jump over a cupboard and walk along
a carpet, another time an acquaintance claimed to have suffered from a bout of madness (the neighbours called it possession) after he took a piss on a grave. I could go on, but that would be deviating, not to mention boring (Anumitra sips on her coffee pretending oh so politely to look interested).
This is about my disease.
I kill professors.
I don’t know exactly how. It happens like this. Over 10 years ago, Ma’am B. Bobb gives our class a lecture (Class VIII C with an asbestos roof in what used to be a mad bounty hunter’s exaggerated crypt) on the moral inadequacy of theft. Seven years later, as I present an idea I stole from an intern in a client meeting, Ma’am B. Bobb dies.
Similarly, around 3 months ago, I notice a mullah sitting next to me in the airport lounge (Aeroplane crashes into WTC on a 21” colour screen, thank you Rupert Murdoch) and I go and report him to security. 2 guards walk upto him and drag him, indiscreetly, to a security kiosk. There, they strip search, humiliate and arrest him for a can of shaving foam and a razor (quite like the one in my bag).
3 years ago, Professor Deo is giving a lecture on how ethnic discrimination is malevolent to the concept of public spaces (‘take Peer to Peer software’, he says, ‘closing out a community might mean closing out an entire pool of material.’). 3 months later, at roughly 3 in the afternoon, while eating lunch at the high table, he dies. ‘His body just shut down’, said the doctor to the sister to her friend to a reporter. That was around the time I reported presumed Osama Jr. to
the cops.
Till date, I’ve killed at least 7.
And I say at least 7 because a lot more have died.
The 7 I’m sure about, I’m sure about because of Venn intersections in taught curricula and my inaptitude in the same in a real world environment.
For instance, because of the event mentioned in the above diagram, my Economic Development Professor, Mrs. Leema Prakash Mohan died.
So, in no uncertain terms, we’re talking about 7 murders.
7 complete universii destroyed.
7 sets of possibilities, tending to infinity, rubbed off the board.
Not that I’d give a damn. It was just that there was this really hot Politics Professor who taught us a sectional on Ultra Left Radicalism and wore a red lace bra, the straps of which were often visible behind her white shirt (top two buttons left undone).
I was born to graduate in English. Family, however, decided that the course was for girls and forced me into Economics. I used my instinctual understanding of the Arts to good effect, throwing around ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in Macroeconomics, Milo Minderbender in General Equilibrium, Orwell in Systems, Beckett in Statistics and Marx in Math (I obviously mean Groucho here).
Nobody fell for it.
That is, nobody except Anumitra.
Anumitra, half French, with light grey eyes, skin as white and soft as milk, a Paris Hilton haircut that looked its best when she was naked, a frame that had found and kept its niche when she was thirteen and a bastard heavenly cocktail of marijuana and whisky as breath, was my politics professor.
The hormones had kicked in in my first tutorial with her. In the nervousl flowchart that mapped fight/flight, my adrenal gland followed the synaptic straight line to perform. If my natural talent had been singing, I would have broken into song, if it had been Math, I would have proven Bernoulli wrong (or was it Fibonacci). Given that mine was talking, I simply talked her into bed.
We’d avoid eye contact during classes and have the tutorials in her quarters on the kitchen table, in the shower or with her blindfolded and tied to her bed posts. Somewhere, between orgasm and orgasm, she unwittingly gave me a lecture on the Naxalite movement in Bihar and its importance in a socio economic context such as ours. I asked no questions, eager to move the discourse to more relevant topics.
After graduating, my marks were good enough for absolutely nothing. A brainwave said
Advertising. Another couple of them agreed.
In the business, I was a roaring success. I was the toast at Cannes, New York and wherever else they celebrated triviality. I was exchanging numbers with the hottest film stars and sexual favours with contracts.
Unbeknownst to me, all this while my mind had been working on the algebraic equation of my life, taking the vast and swampy material that constituted the autonomous (what happened to me) and the exogenous (what I did) and differentiating it with respect to what was happening around me.
One night, with the suddenness of a coupon popped out of one of those railway weight
measuring machines, it shot out a result.
I woke up to the realization that I loved her and was going to kill her.
If my career in Advertising had killed my Economic Development Professor, it was only natural to presume that my Politics Professor was already dead.
My arterial muscles shattered against my cardiac walls, giving the sensation of falling to a hundred pulpy bleeding pieces.
I went across to a nearby 24 hour pharmacy and bought a carton of cigarettes. I smoked and smoked till the night dissolved to day and my tally stood at 7 20’s and 3 (N.B. I had stopped smoking since I had started believing the 1 cigarette for 5 minutes statistic, so this was me committing suicide five minutes a time).
I felt the nicotine move in my blood. The tar from the No Smoking TV Commercial moved like worms in my veins. I swallowed hurt, thick, mucousic, slowly. There was an ache in my stomach that said ulcer, a heaviness in my lungs that said lung cancer and a sting in my mouth that said mouth cancer. I was a discarded cigarette packet that I was tossing into a dustbin with the used tissues, the crumpled balls of paper and the pubic hair. Thankfully, shortly it was 10 and I could stop pretending to be Saul Bellow.
A large number of kilometers and a few traffic lights away, a phone rang in a college office.
Hello, said Michael Bannerjee, with Gandhi glasses and long sideburns.
Is Anumitra Breuiller dead?
No, she is alive.
The roof above me opened up and there was a pillar of light stretching from DX-12, Kendriya Vihar to the heavens. The angels of high surrounded it in a symmetrical spiral that resembled a creeper. I believe, there in the sky, I saw god, smiling at me and saying, ‘she’s all yours, go fuck her.’
But I knew this was just the joy.
I couldn’t let her die.
I’d leave my life, travel to the war torn districts down south and start fighting for justice, for socialism and (what was infinitely more important) for her.
Around a year later, I was out there in the wild, gun toting and a lot less fatter than I was in the city. Ripe in my mind was our last conversation.
‘No, I’m not in Advertising anymore.’
‘Oh’, she said, ‘so you’ve moved to the client’s side.’
‘No’, I said, ‘I’ve moved to a jungle in central India where I’m a terrorist. I work in the typewritten threats and general nuisance department’ (delivered like Eddie Izzard without the cross dressing).
We made love then.
It worked out. She, the academic with the cause for a boyfriend, me, a freshly sucked cock glistening with joy.
I tried to make it at least once in 2 months. Camp fires became UV, mineral water became beer and Navy Cuts became Camel Lights.
Speaking of Camp fires, a funny thing happened around one once. We were sitting around smoking some Malana Cream someone had sneaked in.
‘So’, said Commandante Maya, ‘what made ‘you’ decide to join the ‘cause’.’
The ‘you’ here was indicative of my academic inferiority to everyone about. They were all PhDs.
I was a yuppie Copywriter.
The emphasis on ‘cause’ was purely satirical and indicative of Commandante Maya’s incapacity for Copywriting (you can’t emphasise 2 things in a single line, it’s like praying for a baby with two heads).
‘It’s a funny story’, I said, and before I knew it I had told them everything you’ve read up till this fullstop.
‘Hey’, said Maya, ‘that happened to me.’
‘Oh’, I said, ‘you were in Advertising.’
‘No’, she said, ‘the dead professors thing.’
‘Me too’, said someone else. And then everyone kept saying it till everyone was saying it.
‘Very funny’, I said.
I went back to my bunker annoyed.
I hated ridicule.
Later, at night, the paranoia crept in.
What if one of them told Anumitra. What if she took him/her seriously.
She’d just have to put 2 and 7 together and I’d be found out.
And what then?
Would she be grateful, disgusted, dismissive, what?
I resolved to tell her myself to find out.
After, when the girl’s just starting to get in the mood and the guy’s trying hard not to nod off, I told her.
It turned her on and we made love again.
The next morning, we decided to go to McLeodganj, a nearby hill station.
On the way, she bought a blonde wig. Wearing it, she looked like Scarlett Johansson. I loved it for the enormous erotic potential.
We stayed at a place called Nick’s which only served vegetarian food. We weren’t vegetarians but it had the best view in all of McLeodganj.
The last night, she tied my hands to the bed posts and blindfolded me.
‘So, now you’re going to take my clothes off’, I asked (like Jude Law from Closer).
‘No’, she said, ‘I’m going to kill you. I can’t live hinged on your love.’
‘But I’d never’, I protested.
‘You’re only human’, she said, and tore me open with my pocket knife.
‘Does this hurt you?’, I asked.
She didn’t hear me, and I realized I was dead.
Not to say there aren’t stranger diseases. My mother once mentioned a man who got an asthmatic attack every time he saw a cat jump over a cupboard and walk along
a carpet, another time an acquaintance claimed to have suffered from a bout of madness (the neighbours called it possession) after he took a piss on a grave. I could go on, but that would be deviating, not to mention boring (Anumitra sips on her coffee pretending oh so politely to look interested).
This is about my disease.
I kill professors.
I don’t know exactly how. It happens like this. Over 10 years ago, Ma’am B. Bobb gives our class a lecture (Class VIII C with an asbestos roof in what used to be a mad bounty hunter’s exaggerated crypt) on the moral inadequacy of theft. Seven years later, as I present an idea I stole from an intern in a client meeting, Ma’am B. Bobb dies.
Similarly, around 3 months ago, I notice a mullah sitting next to me in the airport lounge (Aeroplane crashes into WTC on a 21” colour screen, thank you Rupert Murdoch) and I go and report him to security. 2 guards walk upto him and drag him, indiscreetly, to a security kiosk. There, they strip search, humiliate and arrest him for a can of shaving foam and a razor (quite like the one in my bag).
3 years ago, Professor Deo is giving a lecture on how ethnic discrimination is malevolent to the concept of public spaces (‘take Peer to Peer software’, he says, ‘closing out a community might mean closing out an entire pool of material.’). 3 months later, at roughly 3 in the afternoon, while eating lunch at the high table, he dies. ‘His body just shut down’, said the doctor to the sister to her friend to a reporter. That was around the time I reported presumed Osama Jr. to
the cops.
Till date, I’ve killed at least 7.
And I say at least 7 because a lot more have died.
The 7 I’m sure about, I’m sure about because of Venn intersections in taught curricula and my inaptitude in the same in a real world environment.
For instance, because of the event mentioned in the above diagram, my Economic Development Professor, Mrs. Leema Prakash Mohan died.
So, in no uncertain terms, we’re talking about 7 murders.
7 complete universii destroyed.
7 sets of possibilities, tending to infinity, rubbed off the board.
Not that I’d give a damn. It was just that there was this really hot Politics Professor who taught us a sectional on Ultra Left Radicalism and wore a red lace bra, the straps of which were often visible behind her white shirt (top two buttons left undone).
I was born to graduate in English. Family, however, decided that the course was for girls and forced me into Economics. I used my instinctual understanding of the Arts to good effect, throwing around ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in Macroeconomics, Milo Minderbender in General Equilibrium, Orwell in Systems, Beckett in Statistics and Marx in Math (I obviously mean Groucho here).
Nobody fell for it.
That is, nobody except Anumitra.
Anumitra, half French, with light grey eyes, skin as white and soft as milk, a Paris Hilton haircut that looked its best when she was naked, a frame that had found and kept its niche when she was thirteen and a bastard heavenly cocktail of marijuana and whisky as breath, was my politics professor.
The hormones had kicked in in my first tutorial with her. In the nervousl flowchart that mapped fight/flight, my adrenal gland followed the synaptic straight line to perform. If my natural talent had been singing, I would have broken into song, if it had been Math, I would have proven Bernoulli wrong (or was it Fibonacci). Given that mine was talking, I simply talked her into bed.
We’d avoid eye contact during classes and have the tutorials in her quarters on the kitchen table, in the shower or with her blindfolded and tied to her bed posts. Somewhere, between orgasm and orgasm, she unwittingly gave me a lecture on the Naxalite movement in Bihar and its importance in a socio economic context such as ours. I asked no questions, eager to move the discourse to more relevant topics.
After graduating, my marks were good enough for absolutely nothing. A brainwave said
Advertising. Another couple of them agreed.
In the business, I was a roaring success. I was the toast at Cannes, New York and wherever else they celebrated triviality. I was exchanging numbers with the hottest film stars and sexual favours with contracts.
Unbeknownst to me, all this while my mind had been working on the algebraic equation of my life, taking the vast and swampy material that constituted the autonomous (what happened to me) and the exogenous (what I did) and differentiating it with respect to what was happening around me.
One night, with the suddenness of a coupon popped out of one of those railway weight
measuring machines, it shot out a result.
I woke up to the realization that I loved her and was going to kill her.
If my career in Advertising had killed my Economic Development Professor, it was only natural to presume that my Politics Professor was already dead.
My arterial muscles shattered against my cardiac walls, giving the sensation of falling to a hundred pulpy bleeding pieces.
I went across to a nearby 24 hour pharmacy and bought a carton of cigarettes. I smoked and smoked till the night dissolved to day and my tally stood at 7 20’s and 3 (N.B. I had stopped smoking since I had started believing the 1 cigarette for 5 minutes statistic, so this was me committing suicide five minutes a time).
I felt the nicotine move in my blood. The tar from the No Smoking TV Commercial moved like worms in my veins. I swallowed hurt, thick, mucousic, slowly. There was an ache in my stomach that said ulcer, a heaviness in my lungs that said lung cancer and a sting in my mouth that said mouth cancer. I was a discarded cigarette packet that I was tossing into a dustbin with the used tissues, the crumpled balls of paper and the pubic hair. Thankfully, shortly it was 10 and I could stop pretending to be Saul Bellow.
A large number of kilometers and a few traffic lights away, a phone rang in a college office.
Hello, said Michael Bannerjee, with Gandhi glasses and long sideburns.
Is Anumitra Breuiller dead?
No, she is alive.
The roof above me opened up and there was a pillar of light stretching from DX-12, Kendriya Vihar to the heavens. The angels of high surrounded it in a symmetrical spiral that resembled a creeper. I believe, there in the sky, I saw god, smiling at me and saying, ‘she’s all yours, go fuck her.’
But I knew this was just the joy.
I couldn’t let her die.
I’d leave my life, travel to the war torn districts down south and start fighting for justice, for socialism and (what was infinitely more important) for her.
Around a year later, I was out there in the wild, gun toting and a lot less fatter than I was in the city. Ripe in my mind was our last conversation.
‘No, I’m not in Advertising anymore.’
‘Oh’, she said, ‘so you’ve moved to the client’s side.’
‘No’, I said, ‘I’ve moved to a jungle in central India where I’m a terrorist. I work in the typewritten threats and general nuisance department’ (delivered like Eddie Izzard without the cross dressing).
We made love then.
It worked out. She, the academic with the cause for a boyfriend, me, a freshly sucked cock glistening with joy.
I tried to make it at least once in 2 months. Camp fires became UV, mineral water became beer and Navy Cuts became Camel Lights.
Speaking of Camp fires, a funny thing happened around one once. We were sitting around smoking some Malana Cream someone had sneaked in.
‘So’, said Commandante Maya, ‘what made ‘you’ decide to join the ‘cause’.’
The ‘you’ here was indicative of my academic inferiority to everyone about. They were all PhDs.
I was a yuppie Copywriter.
The emphasis on ‘cause’ was purely satirical and indicative of Commandante Maya’s incapacity for Copywriting (you can’t emphasise 2 things in a single line, it’s like praying for a baby with two heads).
‘It’s a funny story’, I said, and before I knew it I had told them everything you’ve read up till this fullstop.
‘Hey’, said Maya, ‘that happened to me.’
‘Oh’, I said, ‘you were in Advertising.’
‘No’, she said, ‘the dead professors thing.’
‘Me too’, said someone else. And then everyone kept saying it till everyone was saying it.
‘Very funny’, I said.
I went back to my bunker annoyed.
I hated ridicule.
Later, at night, the paranoia crept in.
What if one of them told Anumitra. What if she took him/her seriously.
She’d just have to put 2 and 7 together and I’d be found out.
And what then?
Would she be grateful, disgusted, dismissive, what?
I resolved to tell her myself to find out.
After, when the girl’s just starting to get in the mood and the guy’s trying hard not to nod off, I told her.
It turned her on and we made love again.
The next morning, we decided to go to McLeodganj, a nearby hill station.
On the way, she bought a blonde wig. Wearing it, she looked like Scarlett Johansson. I loved it for the enormous erotic potential.
We stayed at a place called Nick’s which only served vegetarian food. We weren’t vegetarians but it had the best view in all of McLeodganj.
The last night, she tied my hands to the bed posts and blindfolded me.
‘So, now you’re going to take my clothes off’, I asked (like Jude Law from Closer).
‘No’, she said, ‘I’m going to kill you. I can’t live hinged on your love.’
‘But I’d never’, I protested.
‘You’re only human’, she said, and tore me open with my pocket knife.
‘Does this hurt you?’, I asked.
She didn’t hear me, and I realized I was dead.
This is it.
Someone close died recently. Someone close to all of us. The funny thing is no one noticed. There was no column in the newspapers, no mention in the little rolling bar beneath the news, not even a damn epitaph on his tombstone. And since I’m the only one who noticed he’s gone, I’m going to allow myself the privilege of a eulogy.
He was called the Eighties. And given that we spent most of the nineties recovering from the mullets, the plastic and the shiny pants, we could well say he was alive even then – pulsing and throbbing in our rabid disapproval of him. An introspection, however, offers that he wasn’t all that bad.
Sitting right next to the 60’s and 70’s is obviously doesn’t make him look pretty. But think about it. Fine, everyone dressed up in the 60’s but the hippy sack cloths of the 70’s more than made up for it (not to mention the smelliness). Okay great, the idealism of those drug addled years is aspirational, but just what did flower power achieve. Sgt. Peppers, Woodstock, Warhol, who gives a fuck. What remains? The sheer presence of Metallica negates everything the Beatles ever did (and let’s not even get into the Trent Rezners, the Marilyn Mansons and the Jay-Zs here, that’d just be profane).
Onto Woodstock and the Flower Children. You’ve seen fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right? It wasn’t the deep rooted urge for a better world that drove it. It was excess. Sex and drugs(1). The world has done more of it since, why do the 60’s get all the credit.
And Warhol. Okay, hear this. An Art Director friend of mine is in love with him. Not for his ability to create art but for his ability to create MONEY. Face it, Warhol blatantly subverted art to commerce. The kind of patronage and salability he received off the 60’s expresses the period’s inability to recognize him for what he truly was – an advertising guy. Pretty damn daft for a generation claiming to have seen the light etc.
Now, the enlightened might mention, what gives you eighties kids the gumption to pick on us. For starters, we destroyed the Berlin Wall. More has been done for humanitarian relief from the 80’s to the present than ever in human history. The invention of the internet – the closest we have ever got to the global village hippies ever dreamt of. And Michael Jackson. The Maharishi said that the Beatles were angels because when they made their first appearance on American TV, on the Ed Sullivan show, there was no crime in the US for that one hour. Fuck that. My illiterate Man Friday who hails from 110 Kuchlibari, Post Bajejama, dist. Koochbehar (read backwaters), cried when Michael Jackson died. Led Zepplin, The Beatles and Queen combined didn’t acquire the kind of reach this guy did.
That the profound import of this time isn’t blindspotted by history is, quite frankly, too much to ask of this eulogy. A bit of a reminiscence, however, shouldn’t be a problem.
So well, here’s to Jughead Jones, Michael J. Fox, U2, Kurt Cobain, Jack and Rose on board the Titanic, Tina Turner, R.E.M, Bret Easton Ellis, George Michael, Madonna, Baywatch, the T-1000, Michael Jordan, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Gianni Versace, Forrest Gump, UB40, Trey Farley and Muriel the talking dinosaur, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elton John’s glasses, Beverly Hills 90210,the X Files, the diplodocus appearing on the damn 70 mm screen with John Williams on Dolby DTS, the shapeless white t-shirts, the long curly hair, the cologne, the happy ending, the dreams, the hope, the hope, the hope…
(1)“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around -- the music and the ideas.” Says Bob Dylan. Don’t blame him, Shakira sells more today than he does. He has to feel nostalgic.
He was called the Eighties. And given that we spent most of the nineties recovering from the mullets, the plastic and the shiny pants, we could well say he was alive even then – pulsing and throbbing in our rabid disapproval of him. An introspection, however, offers that he wasn’t all that bad.
Sitting right next to the 60’s and 70’s is obviously doesn’t make him look pretty. But think about it. Fine, everyone dressed up in the 60’s but the hippy sack cloths of the 70’s more than made up for it (not to mention the smelliness). Okay great, the idealism of those drug addled years is aspirational, but just what did flower power achieve. Sgt. Peppers, Woodstock, Warhol, who gives a fuck. What remains? The sheer presence of Metallica negates everything the Beatles ever did (and let’s not even get into the Trent Rezners, the Marilyn Mansons and the Jay-Zs here, that’d just be profane).
Onto Woodstock and the Flower Children. You’ve seen fear and Loathing in Las Vegas right? It wasn’t the deep rooted urge for a better world that drove it. It was excess. Sex and drugs(1). The world has done more of it since, why do the 60’s get all the credit.
And Warhol. Okay, hear this. An Art Director friend of mine is in love with him. Not for his ability to create art but for his ability to create MONEY. Face it, Warhol blatantly subverted art to commerce. The kind of patronage and salability he received off the 60’s expresses the period’s inability to recognize him for what he truly was – an advertising guy. Pretty damn daft for a generation claiming to have seen the light etc.
Now, the enlightened might mention, what gives you eighties kids the gumption to pick on us. For starters, we destroyed the Berlin Wall. More has been done for humanitarian relief from the 80’s to the present than ever in human history. The invention of the internet – the closest we have ever got to the global village hippies ever dreamt of. And Michael Jackson. The Maharishi said that the Beatles were angels because when they made their first appearance on American TV, on the Ed Sullivan show, there was no crime in the US for that one hour. Fuck that. My illiterate Man Friday who hails from 110 Kuchlibari, Post Bajejama, dist. Koochbehar (read backwaters), cried when Michael Jackson died. Led Zepplin, The Beatles and Queen combined didn’t acquire the kind of reach this guy did.
That the profound import of this time isn’t blindspotted by history is, quite frankly, too much to ask of this eulogy. A bit of a reminiscence, however, shouldn’t be a problem.
So well, here’s to Jughead Jones, Michael J. Fox, U2, Kurt Cobain, Jack and Rose on board the Titanic, Tina Turner, R.E.M, Bret Easton Ellis, George Michael, Madonna, Baywatch, the T-1000, Michael Jordan, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Gianni Versace, Forrest Gump, UB40, Trey Farley and Muriel the talking dinosaur, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elton John’s glasses, Beverly Hills 90210,the X Files, the diplodocus appearing on the damn 70 mm screen with John Williams on Dolby DTS, the shapeless white t-shirts, the long curly hair, the cologne, the happy ending, the dreams, the hope, the hope, the hope…
(1)“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around -- the music and the ideas.” Says Bob Dylan. Don’t blame him, Shakira sells more today than he does. He has to feel nostalgic.
there's no getting out of here
no
no
sorry for the anti climax
but this story is far from over
i'm still trapped in nfc
and it's only legit that we follow this story to it's logical/illogical conclusion.
no
sorry for the anti climax
but this story is far from over
i'm still trapped in nfc
and it's only legit that we follow this story to it's logical/illogical conclusion.
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