One day I was eating in a shopping center with this friend. Across the way this large man walked dressed in black - black vest, cowboy hat, boots, and what looked like a gun belt containing his cell phone, a knife, and everything else except a gun.
"Look at that," my friend grimaced.
"That's the Gunslinger, " I said.
"THE WHAT," she exclaimed.
"The gunslinger," I explained. "You know. Steven King's books. The Dark Tower series. He thinks he's the Gunslinger."
Though she never read any Steven King books, I explained to her that this man was probably trying to think of himself as the character created by Steven King, the Gunslinger. He was trying to be and act like this fictional character. In other words, the Gunslinger had taken over his identity. Golly, I wonder what happens when he draws his cell phone gunslinger fashion. Do the ring tones sound like a gun shot?
Another incident of this behavior was at a health food store. There was this creepy guy that worked there who always wore a dark overcoat buttoned and walked in a stilted way when he wasn't zooming off on his moped. I told the woman manger who fired him that he probably thinks he's Nemo from the film The Matrix.
"Somehow I'll never think of that movie in the same way, " she shuddered.
These people are not all that unusual. Fifty years ago they might have been locked up in an asylum. Today this behavior is becoming the de rigueur . In Tokyo, lots of young girls dress up like they're living a Manga comic. In Paris and New York, you can see disco gothic, a vampire thing I guess. In Berlin, many avaunt guarde try to look homeless. Lets hope they're not
Jean Baudrillard wrote a cool book called Simulacra and Simulation. One of it's main premises is that we no longer think the actual object is the reality, but instead it's imitation becomes the new real.. The illusion of the reality, whether the BBC constructing a staged waterfall < simulation > because it photographs better then the one in nature, to facial nuances with digital manipulation in movies, is what people now identify with. It is no longer the concrete object.
This all gets very philosophical and I don't know if I really understand it. Perhaps this is a natural evolution as our society becomes much more abstract in it's thinking. Plato's pure idea has become the new reality? Maybe it's the way our media has changed. All I know is it gives me a headache if I think too much about it.
I guess for the economy, maybe this means it no longer matters whether we're losing our jobs or going bankrupt, but how much better, propaganda tells us, it is getting everywhere. Even our home town, where the main employer just crashed.
Guido likes quotes at the end of his articles - why is beyond my imagination..So here's mine -
"We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves from others, that we end disguising ourselves from ourselves." - La Rochefoucauld
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