the smell of reason 1 - heil photo sapiens! 1998
(original uncut previously unseen Sleaze Nation column)
Dear ‘Sleaze Nation’...
DEATH
Flirting with 90’s Postmodern Existential Irony recently, I found myself
recreating the last tragic, drug-soaked joyride of Diana (Princess of Wales);
120 thrilling kph through the Parisian ‘tunnel of death’ in a French
car. Not something Nostradamus would have felt the need to predict, even
in his heyday, but worth a few minutes of Yr. Humble Narrator’s time.
Crouched in the passenger seat of the Peugeot, I snapped wildly, as lethal
concrete Stations of the Cross went strobing by (as advertised on TV, the new
Polaroid digital camera comes complete with a precision lens meticulously
razored from the living eye of the freshwater dolphin - Platanistidae ).
Optically perfect, the lens is a masterpiece of micro-corneal amputation
technology and also boasts minimum environmental impact - the charming marine
creatures are only required to render up one each of their wondrous ‘eyes’ to
optical science. The electric
stunning of the underwater brutes and the rough-and-ready laser surgery aspects
of the whole grisly business are carried out by local native wise men, leaving
our merry playfellows of the deep dazed, relieved and in many other ways
analagous to the late Sammy Davis Jnr., himself a functioning cyclops.
LCD
Thankfully, the drunk man at the wheel of our car had a keener sense of
self-preservation than the fool whose reckless antics cost the Queen of Hearts
her life and we emerged on the other side, laughing in the face of the so-called
‘grim reaper’ and philosophising randomly.
The tunnel photographs show up on the LCD like freeze frames from the
trip sequence at the end of ‘2001’ and in the minds of certain categories of
disturbed individual, these images may be seen as suggestive or representative
of the evolutionary leap towards a new form of purely photographic existence.
And in way, that’s what happened to the Artist Formerly Known As Diana isn’t
it? Wouldn’t you say?
She was photographed into a new plane of existence by Zeiss-eyed
assassins, comrades. Let Physics
take to the witness box and try to explain this particularly sickening new
method of cold-blooded murder or, indeed, answer the far more disturbing
questions I’m about to raise in the wake of my imitatio Diana. Always
remember, chums: for all they love to insist otherwise, the boffins and the
Hawkings of this world don’t always have all the answers.
Sometimes they don’t even have some of them.
TRANNY
’Death by photography now scientifically proven as cause of Di’s demise’,
claim the headlines and that explains a lot. And yet ...the
more you keep picking at it, the more it begins to seem that something truly
sinister slithers beneath the slick surfaces of our spin-doctored zeitgeist.
Somewhere down there, below the twisted J.G. Ballard fetish chrome
wreckage of Diana’s fairytale death, struggles the unbelievable truth about
humanity’s fate. (The ruined car!
The gorgeous corpse! The unanswered questions! It’s Kennedy, Monroe, James
Dean and Jayne Mansfield all in one. All we need’s a tranny and we can sell it
as an ad for Dr. Pepper! ‘Poster sales in the billions for the next thousand
years!’, say experts. ‘Diana elevated to the status of a modern Christ!
Elton in the Hymnal! If you
ask me, we’re all living in a Derek Jarman film!’ squeals sexy egghead
Joanne Guest, exposing her curvy IQ on page 3 of ‘New Scientist’ again.)
WHORE!
Deep in the jungle and the bush, where primitive men and women have always
instinctively feared the camera, squats the cornerstone of our modern nightmare.
Everyone now living agrees that today’s man has much to learn from
these throwbacks to simpler, happier times; times when capering shamans ruled
wisely and the Earth wasn’t just some mindless thing you’d rape as though it
were your Mother and a whore besides! Why, then, do these noble remnants of our evolutionary
heritage tremble before the image-capturing power of even the crappiest one-eyed
camera from Woolworth’s? Why do
tribal elders the world over insist, in story and in song, that the cold eye of
Kodak has the power to capture and transfix a living soul?
Could they be right?
PAPARAZZI
And if they’re right...consider Diana, (and try not to picture her as she
appeared in those last, awkwardly-posed crash photographs. Imagine her, instead,
the way you most want to remember her - as a bride, perhaps, or gently stroking
a black), quite literally the world’s most photographed human being and one
for whom the Guinness Book of Records was a second home (did you know, for
instance, that if you joined up all the photographs ever taken of Diana, the
resultant chain would stretch to the outer limit of the
disc of protoplanetary material around the star Beta Pictoris – an incredible
54 light years! Or that the temperature created by the instantaneous
incineration of every single image of the Princess published in ‘Hello!’
magazine alone would reach a scorching 6000 kelvin units - hotter than the
chromosphere of the sun! And during
the national week of mourning for the Princess, an area of fresh flowers
equivalent in size to the Duchy of Luxembourg was harvested every day, resulting
in a measurable global increase in the levels of carbon dioxide and other
so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases in the atmosphere!).
Now think about what we've learned from the wild men and then try to face
the nightmare the press won’t dare discuss.
Those paparazzi killers weren¹t just men, they were agents of a cruel
evolutionary imperative; they knew that Diana’s frail mortal flesh could no
longer support the intensity of her global renown and their orders were nothing
less than to engineer the creation of The Coming Race! Those snapping cameras
were the scalpels, clamps and canulas of a new and terrifying surgical process -
THE AMPUTATION AND TRANSPLANTATION OF SOULS! FROM LIVING BODIES INTO
PHOTOGRAPHS! Just like something
awful from the ‘X-Files’.
And believe me, no doctor can give you a prescription for that.
SKINHEAD
Now perhaps, you’re beginning to realise just what all those cameras on every
street corner are for. See what’s really going on in all those ‘fly on the
wall’ documentaries about cruise ships and neighbours from Hell?
For human souls have become the grisly currency in a worldwide social
experiment designed to accelerate the flesh-to-image transformation of every
human being now living! The viewfinders of the state paparazzi are trained on
all of us. The shutters whir, the tapes turn, the desire to somehow
‘be on television’ becomes as strong as the desire once felt by our ugly
seafaring ancestors to crawl onto the land and start building sheds.
If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in the wrong place at the right
time, your very essence will be devoured and shat out in the form of ‘Police!
Camera! Action!’ footage. 999! Robbers
and villains in the raw and on your screen! Knifing the wife when she’s
fucking pregnant, right there in the parking lot!
Bastards like these don’t know when to stop; here’s a couple of
skinhead cunts crippling a Gulf hero behind Safeways; a bachelor scoutmaster
with a grudge and a gun club membership; a tearaway in a hotwired Renault
somersaulting down the M6; the girl gang attack that left poor old grandad¹s
arse violated beyond the limits of current proctological understanding.
The videos are walking out the door: £9.99 on special offer at HMV.
‘It’s like Jeremy Beadle doing ‘A Clockwork Orange’, according to the
news (of course, as a movie buff, I’m not quite convinced yet by the
production values on show, though I¹m sure the march of technology will soon
have that problem solved and the abduction of tiny children from shopping malls
will finally seem almost as real as Godzilla demolishing Wall Street).
BEELZEBUB
’Soon we’ll all be nothing but pictures’, boasts child (4).
So
many flies on so many walls these days, it’s like the ‘Amityville Horror’,
where the priest goes mad in the buzzing, crawling presence of Beelzebub
himself. In the end, according to a
distraught Royal insider, Diana’s physical body could no longer withstand the
titanic stresses of containing her expanding fame; it had to be destroyed,
freeing the Princess herself to live on forever in a new world of endlessly
reproducing photographic images. Diana,
like some new Eve, must now be seen as a forerunner of that which all flesh
shall become in time. Not the meek,
thank god, but the photogenic stand poised to inherit the Earth.
We would do well, then, to learn from the late Princess of Wales and follow her
into a post-human future of beauty and understanding where the flowers grow
straight and true like soldiers in the army of the Lord.
For unlike false humans, as Shakespeare said, the camera never lies and
in the future, everyone will be famous 24 hours a day.
We don¹t want no stinking 60s70s80s90s revival, professor! We want the future
and we want it now!!!
HEIL PHOTO SAPIENS !¹
...I found the above sickening garbage in my young daughter¹s satchel. Do you
honestly think this sort of trash is suitable reading for a girl of her age
because I most certainly do not (she¹s 12 and quite bright though I keep trying
to convince her she’d make a great model).
Yrs. A Disgusted Father
