"...In a society that fancies itself the freest ever, spending time with communications machinery is the main use to which we have put our freedom. All human beings play, but this civilization has evolved a particular form of play: wedding fun to convenience by bathing ourselves in images and sounds. The most important thing about the communications we live among is not that they deceive (which they do); or that they broadcast a limiting ideology (which they do); or emphasize sex and violence (which they do), or convey diminished images of the good, the true and the normal (which they do), or corrode the quality of art (which they also do), or reduce language (which they surely do)..." - Todd Gitlin
it's that I woke up this morning to another giant head on the television
and I realized the talking heads are breeding.
Shoulders, upper torsos, and heads with mouths that never stop moving banging and bumping and sliding over each other are spawning newer younger looking heads with vocal semen shot shotgun through ovular ear canals / soon legions of celebrities will be marching across the land listening to each other talk about each other and then talk about the talk about the talk about each other until the din of this massive horde of floating heads starts pouring over the land hunting for amusing and pontifical sidebars,
striving to summon the nation to truths all of us are supposed to believe,
feelings all of us are supposed to feel,
as they poll opinions, call talk radio solicit e-mails -
O... O. O. E... O.
Oh look there's Roger Ebert's cloned head giving a tongues up to the reanimated intelligence of Gene Siskel.
There's a news group professing it's superiority to a search engine.
Cokie Roberts is laying a Verbal smackdown to China.
An industrial music spokesperson is screaming coffee grinder like at Sage Francis
all the while this collage of Hundreds upon millions upon tens of heads are searching for you following a master plan For your ears your eyes your brain. A torrent of images, songs, and stories streaming like the piss of god
aimed directly at you
Olympic reports NBA plays of the day terrorist crime the latest celebrity gossip Oscar forecasts "West Wing, water cooler discussions" "South Park gags," Oprah confessionals, Howard Stern aural pornography, / World Wrestling Federation theater, Rush Limbaugh reviews, profiles, commentaries, gossip, trivia and bulletins about hits and celebrities, rising and falling stars, blazing and cooling fads, trends and gadgets, the ebb and flow of executive careers / endless corporate takeovers of other media corporations being taken over by bigger corporations and then all going bankrupt / IN back-to-back stories, talk-show banter, fragments of ads, soundtracks of musical snippets of lies, skews, shallow pleasures, as the heads sell you 24/7 wraparound spectacles / - O. J. Simpson, Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Clinton-Lewinsky, Condit-Levy, Afghanistan, Enron, WHEN BUSHES ATTACK!
The newspapers: The newspapers try to battle back. Editors and reporters start spewing stories in the Financial Times The Village Voice Wall Street Journal Computer News Daily New York Post New York Daily New York Observer New York Times Newsday Staten Island Advance / more authors, more newspaper columnists, and the all Internet Organizations galore publish headlines galore on the importance of all these freaking freaky looking disembodied heads littering the mass unconsciousness.
Ted Kopel moves to a cabin in the woods.
Morley Shafer lobbies the public on the air.
Andy Rooni just dies.
But the heads. THE HEADS JUST KEEP FEEDING.
Growing so fat they're starting to pull parts off them selves off:
Noses flying into the air
ears thrown as Frisbees
eyes like balls
breasts as footballs
balls like balls
their air born flesh turns into Books and journals disguised as tomes on our "information society," our "information age." our "information propaganda" we print it you read it we all believe it then reproduce it, consume it, and shit it out / so we can accumulate it / we demand faster Net access, to put up more Web sites, promote more listservs, publish more tracts all in the name of "comfort," "convenience," "pleasure," "fun,"
while boats crisscross a placid Nantucket Sound, looking for debris
and the camera shows only open water;
During the state funeral, the wedding, the hijacking,
longueurs take over.
The impounded plane sits on the runway. The reporter, at O.J. Simpson's mansion, crouches in the bushes, and at the house of Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives, another reports breathlessly
that nothing is going on,
the Challenger explodes,
O.J.'s white Bronco cruises down the freeway,
the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City stands as an instant ruin,
the fireman holds the dead child,
Monica Lewinsky hugs President Clinton at the rope line,
Clinton points his finger and denies having sex,
Kenneth Starr carries out his garbage and refrains from comment,
hijacked jets smash again and again into twin towers.
and the heads,
all the heads stop and pause for a moment of silence
so they can lick their lips.
