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the list is kinda cool.
any list that contains the olsen twins and george armstrong custer is a priori cool.
and then there's bono...um.....what?
so who gets to be famous, to have themselves made over in the ways that seem entailed by the term.
what matters is the story, not you. so get a boswell.
and what matters is what the story says, not what you actually do.
once upon a time, it was good to put yourself in a position to do alot of whacking and dismembering of other people. but what you really had to do in order to go beyond being just another sociopath with power is to put up a bunch of monuments to yourself that would spin the whacking and dismembering so as to make it flattering. by flattering i mean consistent with the image of yourself and your whacking and dismembering. so you explain it, largely by publicizing yourself. the carnage in this place represented yet another Heroic Stride Forward for the Important Category of Your Choice, which is, of course, embodied by you. there are any number of options: Histoy, Humanity, Progress, Glory blah blah blah. people believe all kinds of stupid shit about what they do but not everyone gets to put up monuments that make that stupid thing seem more legit. something about putting it in rock erases the underlying lunacy of thinking that you embody History, for example.
and people are passive so they construct stories for and about themselves based on the Stuff they find around them, and so it makes some sense for you, in your hypothetical position as sociopath in chief of some flying wedge of history, to put up really fucking big rocks with these stories carved all over them. you know, something that'll last. something that'll become part of the stories of subsequent generations, long after reality has dropped away.
or you could these days hire a publicity team. its not much different, but the cycles are faster and typically fewer people end up whacked or dismembered as a function of the Mighty Strides you Undertake in the Process of Becoming What Your Destiny Requires of You. or something.
for that, the basic formula is easy: repetition.
it doesn't matter who you are or what you do so much as it matters that your image is repeated alot.
o sure, you could include in that repetition one of standing next to nelson mandela if that's the direction you want your image to go in, and if you go that way, you can go from being a mediocre singer for a washed-up pop band to being some sort of Image Saint. you know, heal people by touching them at your tedious shows. that sort of thing.
o you could just really like cocaine and like liking cocaine in alot of places. here again, it doesn't matter so long as your image gets repeated alot.
you get the idea.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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