What's Under the Anorak?

When I was a kid, Christmas shopping involved trips to Chicago. After hanging with the in-store magician at Marshall Field's, Dad would usually drag us down to the Abercrombie & Fitch store on Wabash.

This did not involve waxed abs on billboards. It was a time portal into a now lost prewar world of the great white hunter. A gentlemen's excursion outfitter, the kind of place where a 1930s pulp hero would get his gear for an expedition to find a lost city in the Amazon or hunt the killer Yeti on the road to Shangri-La. Guns, mackinaws, and old school snowshoes. A Gore Tex-free zone of leather, fur and cordite. The place where young Hemingway stopped before heading up to Michigan and Teddy Roosevelt shopped for his African hunts. (There was another one on Madison Avenue in New York across from the original Brooks Brothers, enabling one-stop shopping — it even had a shooting range in the basement.)



We all know what the brand is now — half-naked twenty year olds displaying their shellacked, machined Apollonian bodies across every bus stand and billboard in urban America, the ultimate commodification of American teen sexuality. The taciturn WASPs of Ralph Lauren's 1980s appropriation of prep after they take off the ties and more: stoned, liberated and vacant. A consumer culture meme so powerful that its product placement rates its own review by Times TV critic Virginia Heffernan.

"No catalog models were harmed in the making of this film."



The Economist just scratches the surface of what's going on here when it argues Madison Avenue has coopted Continental crit and mixed it in a cocktail with a little von Hayek — "Post-Modernism is the new black." Consider how pop semiotics interrelates with the longstanding American insistence on each individual's freedom to reinvent himself (the founding motive force driving Benjamin Franklin's autobiography), and it starts to make more sense.

How does a place for fat middle-aged white businessmen to buy itchy anoraks morph into an existentially vampiric project to enslave their great grandchildren in a subconscious servitude of hypersexualized consumerism? By selling compelling new identities for all-American weekend hedonists.

There's a self-evident family tree at work here. The original early '80s Banana Republic, where, for a period of time, you could buy an honest to god pith helmet to transform trips to the grocery store into an adventure worthy of Haggard. At the same time, Ralph Lauren sexualized the buttoned down attire of bond traders and their children, conquering Middle America with an invasion of magazine models recruited from an anachronistic Fairfield County of the imagination. And then J. Crew appeared, each catalog a visual narrative of the fantasy weekend chino orgies those kids invented while their dads were away at the Bohemian Grove and their moms at the spa with Martha. Through to today, where we see the complete triumph of surface over substance.



One wonders what the Chinese slaves who make these pre-distressed garments think of it all.

What do you do with a generation of overgrown mall kids weaned on hormonal chicken and Diet Coke, their brains wrapped in stonewashed denim and clogged up with dreams of body wax?



Might they make the perfect troops for our new 21st century wars, next generation ambassadors of our way of life, reinvigorating their frontier hunter heritage with vintage gunmetal? Envision the shirtless wonder boys with night vision goggles and assault rifles, gleefully spelunking the dark corridors of Sadr City and the wintry Stalinist tombs of Pyongyang, collecting each other's beautiful body parts from the battlezone, their post-Teutonic female counterparts interrogating enemy combatants in pink and green Abu Ghraibs, playing pick up soccer with severed heads in the base camp. Imagine the recruiting posters looming over your freeway commute.

If suburban kids dressed in Baudrillard's latest designs can succeed in making it real by starting their own fight clubs, isn't parachuting them in to take it to the Mooj a natural evolution of things? We await the platoons of photogenic special forces in elegantly ragged camo cargo pants, accompanied by their embedded fashion photographers and funded by next generation military-industrial-consumer product placement, bringing a new order to the world: Pax Abercrombie.

CHRISTMAS AT THE CHUSHINGURA CAFÉ

"Joy to the world," the balding man in the houndstooth jacket warbled, "Goodwill to men." Behind him, a holovid of the Chiba-Disneyland boy's choir moved their lips out of synch while neon subtitles in English and Hiragana ran across their robes. I tried not to shudder, and turned to watch Kinnison, the manager, toying with his teriyaki chicken. "Thank Christ for Christmas," he said. "Without it, I'd probably have gone under years ago."

"Uh-huh."

"Suicide rate goes through the roof, you know? Especially when it's winter, too. Shortest days of the year, no sunshine..." He shrugged. "I hate it myself; I catch the same plane back home every January first and play golf 'til Easter."

"Where's home? Hawaii?"

"Queensland. Australia. Lots of Japanese tourists, and you'd be amazed how much more you can charge for fish and chips if you call it tempura - but don't quote me on that."

The man in the jacket - I can't call him a singer - put down the microphone, bowed, and picked up a knife and napkin. I glanced around. We were only a few blocks from Little Tokyo, but I couldn't see anyone who looked Asian apart from the waitresses and the tattooed swordsman. "Tourists," repeated Kinnison. "Where would we be without 'em, ay?"

I shrugged. I'd been a travel writer for about seven years, and if I had a dollar for every tourist trap I'd seen, I could buy the Sphinx and use it as a piggy-bank. The man on stage dropped to his knees and thrust the knife into his abdomen.

"Where did you get the idea for this place?" I asked, as the swordsman raised his katana.

"Chushingura? One of the cooks suggested it; it's a Japanese movie about forty-seven students who commit suicide because they can't get into a university, or something." The man in the jacket was grimacing horribly, but he was mercifully silent; the katana seemed to disappear for an instant, and then something was rolling across the stage. "It's supposed to be a true story, so I've never had any copyright problems - never seen it myself; don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for the Japs, but I can't sit through one of their films."

The swordsman wiped the blade clean, while one waitress picked up the head gingerly with a knife and two figures in black ninja suits carried away the body. "I meant the idea of hara-karaoke."

Kinnison grimaced. "Karaoke seppuku, if you don't mind. Well, I was running a karaoke restaurant in Queensland - probably the only one that served blowfish sashimi. Very ritzy, very popular with tourists and yuppies; we used to get lots of office parties. Anyway, someone got a piece of blowfish that hadn't been cooked quite right, and died. Coroner said it was fugu poisoning.

"Anyway, it seems there's this tradition among Japanese cooks that if your client dies of fugu poisoning, you're supposed to commit seppuku - and he did. Turned up to work the next night, came out onto stage in his whites, put a disc of 'Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word' on the karaoke machine and stabbed himself. Didn't even have a second to cut his head off. I thought I was ruined. Well, I was wrong. People started turning up just to see if anybody was going to die.

"For a few weeks, of course, nobody did; the new chef was being extra-careful about the blowfish, which was more popular than ever. Then one young guy turns up with his girlfriend; wanted to propose to her, even ordered blowfish to impress her. Anyway, he didn't even get sick. He pulled this ring out of his pocket and proposed to her, and she said no. So he asked the DJ to put on a disc, I can't even remember the song, and then he gets up there and sings. Second verse, he sees she's getting up and walking out." Kinnison shrugged. "There's no easy way to save face after making that big a fool of yourself in public, so he pulls out a Swiss Army knife and tries to commit seppuku. Made a horrible mess of it, but we managed to get him to hospital okay..."

"And people started coming back."

"Right. They knew they could make total idiots of themselves in front of their friends and not have to worry about it in the morning. I made sure there was always a sharp knife near the microphone - didn't want a repeat of that catastrophe - and put more TV screens in and started playing lots of anime and Japanese TV game shows for the quiet nights. Eventually, the Health Department found an excuse to close us down, but by that time, I'd bought this place and registered it as a Church of Ninja Buddhism. Haven't had any trouble since, as long as we don't play any heavy metal... except the place isn't doing as well as I'd like, of course." He glanced over his shoulder, where a middle-aged man was tapping the mike and waiting for his cue. "I hope your magazine sells well; there's no such thing as bad publicity, ay?"

"I'll send you a copy," I promised, as the man began wailing 'Only the Lonely'.

Kinnison nodded, and dropped his voice slightly. "I hate to do it, but if things don't pick up soon, I'll have to try some sort of gimmick. Do you think topless waitresses would help?"

First published in Space and Time #87

"Amarcord"

Here is the cover of my new story suit. It's titled "Amarcord" ("I Remember") after the famous Federico Fellini film. The cover art is Philip Wilson Steer's Young Woman on the Beach, Walberswick (1886/88).



The book should appear in my own first English language "Polaris" edition by the end of January 2007.

(As always, it is not meant for sale, but to provide interested foreign publishers with reading copies.)

Here is the table of contents of "Amarcord":

Part One: Amarcord

1. Crime and Punishment
2. Vanity Fair
3. Great Expectations
4. Sentimental Education
5. Dead Souls
6. Lost Illusions
7. Les Miserables
8. The Magic Mountain
9. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
10. Fahrenheit 451

Part Two: The Square

The Tick-Tock of the Doomsday Clock

Alexis Glynn Latner here. Due to events in my life right now, I’m going to be blogging about our topic – no fear of the future – and how it hits home for me.

In the early 1980’s, in the lobby of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, I happened upon a physical replica of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. That was (and still is) the emblem of that journal’s editorial board’s opinion about the world’s nuclear danger. When I saw the replica, the hands of the clock stood at several minutes before midnight. It was scary. The sliver of the analog clock face looked way too thin for comfort.

That was a fear of the future moment in my life.

Another such moment was several days ago, when I sat with my mother in a medical clinic while she had an MRI. The MRI machine ticked, tocked, clicked and thrummed as it imaged her brain. The results aren’t in yet, but it’s likely that the final diagnosis will be senile dementia. Someone famously said that being human means knowing that you are a being who will die. I might add that if you’re unclear on the concept, just have a parent who's dying by unpredictable degrees – memory, coordination, judgment and sanity guttering like a candle flame. If that won't make you fear the future, nothing will.

Of course there might be a treatable medical condition – diabetes, transient strokes – causing my mother’s mental and physical symptoms. Modern medicine may do a low save on her wellbeing and give her a few more good years. I hope so. Her friends hope so. Medicine and biomedical science are very good. Especially when they go up against a well-defined illness with a specific cause and effective cure. Senile dementias, unfortunately, are none of the above. Not easy to define, no specific cause, no cure. I am not a happy camper about this happening to my mother. In other words, I am afraid of the future.

Yet the MRI machine was really cool. With its clicking, ticking, and bursts of loud thrumming – loud enough that the technician gave my mother earplugs, and handed me a pair too, even though I was in chair in the far corner of the room! – it was doing something marvelous: imaging a living human brain. The MRI machine is an extremely cool tool in modern medicine's tool bag for seeing and sometimes healing the biological stuff of which we're made.

Why not fear the future? Sometimes, I don’t know why not, and right now is one of those times. Yet... there is wonder in the world, including the revelations of science and the wonderful as well as terrible fruits of engineering. There’s age, death, and a Doomsday Clock. But there is also wonder. That's far from a complete answer as to why not fear the future. But it’s a start.

Separated at Birth? (Life During Wartime edition)

Mingolla's Sikorsky pilot homey from the 1987 cyber-magic realist classic.



"The American Pilot," off-Broadway, 2006.

(Evidencing the persistence since the Vietnam War of the image of the visor-helmeted pilot as the archetypal American cyborg soldier of techno-empire. It's a mirrorshades thing.)

Invaders from Mars?

Theories of panspermia have literally been floating around (ha!) for millennia, from the (very) early musings of the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras to the earnest yet wonky hypothesis of Fred Hoyle to the downright loopy advocacy of "directed panspermia" by Richard Hoagland. While the very base idea at the heart of the theory (and note that I use "theory" in the colloquial sense here, rather than the strict scientific sense), actual falsifiable experiments have been hard to come by--the expense, logistics and timeframes involved are prohibitive for any meaningful direct observation.

But there's been some baby steps forward in recent years. Texas State biologist Robert McLean inadvertently found himself in possession of a panspermia experiment following the tragic destruction of the space shuttle Columbia. McLean's results aren't perfect by any means--salvage work of this nature rarely is--but it was significant enough to warrant publication in Icarus earlier this year.

Now comes a report in Mars Today regarding a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology arguing that terrestrial radiation-resistant bacteria are actually transplanted samples of Martian organisms (the full paper downloadable in PDF format here). The paper is fascinating reading--if you have any interest in astrobiology--and the authors present a compelling case. Consider:

Where in our solar system do the radiation doses indicated in the laboratory “training” cycling experiments occur naturally? The challenge is that high radiation dosages necessary for radioresistance training must accumulate during a bacterial lifetime. At present, if radioresistant bacteria are in the active metabolic state, they can survive any observed radiation level on any object of the solar system (including radiation exposure to the unshielded cosmic rays in space) and repair the resultant DNA damage. The only way bacteria could accumulate sublethal doses of radiation exposure is during dormancy. Natural radioresistance training cycles are, therefore, likely to occur in environments where high levels of ionizing radiation are the norm and bacteria experience long periods of dormancy in cold, dry, or cold and dry conditions followed by periods of population re-growth in favorable warm, wet, or warm and wet conditions. Warm periods could be very short because even a couple of days would be enough to re-grow the bacterial population. Based on our laboratory experiments (Fig. 1), we calculated that a minimum of 100 training cycles would be required to increase the radioresistance of ordinary bacteria to the levels observed in radioresistant bacteria.

Earth’s low background radiation makes such “natural” experiments practically impossible. For example, to accumulate a 10–20 kGy radiation dosage, the duration of each dormancy period would need to be several million years, and the total duration of the training process would take more than several hundred million years.

As discovered during the Mars Odyssey mission, environments shared by present-day Earth and Mars include permafrost regions or polar terrains where ground ice accumulates. Though some bacteria are known to fall into a state of dormancy in permafrost, neither ground ice nor permafrost would be stable for long enough periods of time on Earth for dormant populations to accumulate high radiation dosage. Furthermore, some permafrost biota on Earth do not cease metabolic activity even under 20°C (Rivkina et al., 2000), and such biota cannot accumulate any substantial irradiation dosage while metabolically active.

The long and short of it is, Earth's natural background radiation isn't sufficient to generate the evolutionary pressure necessary to generate this level of radiation resistance. That is one of the lynch pins of the argument in favor of Martian origins of these organisms. If you're like me, however, the Oklo natural nuclear reactors immediately come to mind. Almost two billion years ago, heavy deposits of uranium in Africa underwent a series of natural reactions over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. This process would result in Proterozoic populations of bacteria and eukaryotic cells being repeatedly exposed to high levels of radiation, followed by a "recovery" period. Isaac Asimov himself references a variation on this idea somewhat in Robots and Empire. If, over the course of several hundred thousand years distinct populations of microbes developed high levels of radioactive resistance at Oklo, might the resistance we see today be a vestigial legacy? But the paper's authors have already taken this into account.

For example, if one considers the 1.7-billion year old Oklo uranium deposits near Gabon, the radiation level could not exceed 1 Gy/h  100 rad/h (Nagy et al., 1991), while D. radiodurans bacteria are able to grow continuously even at 60 Gy/h  6,000 rad/h. Furthermore, to be exposed to any significant radiation level in any active zone of “natural” nuclear reactors, microorganisms had to withstand the extreme heat generated from the nuclear fusion reactions (up to 360°C). Therefore even the dosage of 1 Gy/h was most likely unreachable for any living bacteria in Oklo. This example underscores the fact that, on Earth, there is no hypothetical place where terrestrial biota would need to withstand high radiation levels.

Being the enthusiastic lay person that I am, however, I remain unconvinced. I want to believe, but I have suspicions that force me to remain skeptical. The authors are dismissive of the "side effect" phenomenon as a potential explanation for the radiation resistance--a trait that evolutionary pressures select for turns out to have a benefit unrelated to the original purpose of said trait. A good example are insect wings. Intelligent design advocates and creationists argue wings could not have evolved, because what good is half a wing? But it's been well-established that insect wings developed from external gills, and that flight was a happy afterthought.

It's with points like that where I get an itchy feeling in the deep nether regions of my brain--some of the arguments these researchers are using to bolster their position strike me as suspiciously similar to those espoused by the Intelligent Design crowd. The paper discusses how radiation-resistant populations of microbes were easily and rapidly developed in laboratory conditions, and since these conditions never existed on Earth and may, in fact, exist on Mars, this shows that radiation-resistant microbes must originate on Mars (I am grossly simplifying this, mind you). But IDers and creationists use much the same logic when discussing, say, the diversity of canine breeds. Since dog breeds didn't diversify into the various types we have today until humans began selectively breeding them, the argument goes that this "proves" the Hand of God is necessary for any speciation to take place. The whole thing brings to mind the old "watchmaker" argument for design from William Paley:

Since watches are the products of intelligent design, and living things are like watches in having complicated mechanisms which serve a purpose (e.g., having eyeballs to enable sight), living things are probably the products of intelligent design as well.

The scientific authors in Astrobiology--Anatoly K. Pavlov, Vitaly L. Kalinin, Alexei N. Konstatinov, Vladimir N. Shelegedin and Alexander A. Pavlov--obviously aren't IDers, and have done some fascinating work here. But from my admittedly unscientific vantage point, the vast majority of their evidence is indirect and circumstantial. The fact that they were able to create radiation-resistant microbes so easily in the lab suggest to me that all cellular life (or single-celled organisms, at least) boasts this adaptability to some degree, rather than the opposite stance that a Martian origin is necessary. In any event, I suspect molecular biologist and biochemists will have more to say on this issue than I, as it should be a fairly straightforward task to break down the genetic ancestry of these supposed Martian transplants to determine if they vary from expected microbiological parameters enough to either suggest or dismiss extraterrestrial origins.

Don't you just love the unknown?

Invisible Literature for the Age of Celebrity

The Assassination Inquest of Diana, Princess of Wales Considered as an Unintentionally Ballardian Remix of the Warren Commission Report



In 1966, J.G. Ballard authored one of his most famous experimental works, "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" (itself a remix of Alfred Jarry's "The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race").

"Oswald was the starter."

Ballard has frequently described the Warren Commission Report as one of the great avant-garde works of the century, an iconic masterpiece of "invisible literature" unintentionally transforming chapters on bullet trajectories and custody chains of cardboard boxes into simultaneously rich and minimalist prose poetry that charted the cartographic nodes of mass consciousness at the dawn of the 1960s. The text was clearly a primary source not only for the aforementioned short, but for the entirety of his masterful exploration of the intersection of sex, violence, technology and media in The Atrocity Exhibition.

''The latent sexual content of the automobile crash. Numerous studies have been conducted to assess the latent sexual appeal of public figures who have achieved subsequent notoriety as auto-crash fatalities, e.g. James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus. Simulated newsreels of politicians, film stars and TV celebrities were shown to panels of (a) suburban housewives, (b) terminal paretics, (c) filling station personnel. Sequences showing auto-crash victims brought about a marked acceleration of pulse and respiratory rates. Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living, and later used one or another of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.''



So, one can't help but imagine the smiles in Shepperton reading this week's sequel, "The Report of the Operation Paget inquiry into the allegation of conspiracy to murder Diana, Princess of Wales and Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed." Eight-hundred-plus pages of pure clinical Ballardian detail remixed with Spectacular Baudrillardian celebrity media fireworks. If reading the Iraq Study Group's recipe book for imminent apocalypse has got you down, download this puppy, pull up a chair by the crackling fire, drop the needle on Herb Alpert's Mexican Road Race, turn to page 143, and consider this program book for the ultimate Formula One of the Zeitgeist:

"The following paparazzi or press agents were identified as being present at the Ritz Hotel at the time that the Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed left via rue Cambon:

Present in rue Cambon (rear entrance)

• Jacques Langevin (grey Volkswagen Golf)

• Alain Guizard (grey/blue Peugeot 205)

• David Odekerken (Mitsubishi Pajero)

• Fabrice Chassery (black Peugeot 205)

• Serge Benhamou (green Honda scooter)

Present in Place Vendôme (front entrance)

• Laslo Veres (black Piaggio Scooter)

• Serge Arnal and Christian Martinez (black Fiat Uno)

• Romuald Rat and Stéphane Darmon (blue Honda 650 motorcycle)

• Nikola Arsov (white BMW R100 GS motorcycle)

• Pierre Suu and Jerko Tomic (red BMW 750 motorcycle)

• Pierre Hounsfield (black Volkswagen Golf)

• Stéphane Cardinale (white Citroen AX)

• Dominique Dieppois (white Renault Super 5)

• Colm Pierce (no vehicle)"

Not enough? How about this:

- The testimony of Madame Myriah, the holistic healer that traveled with the Dark Dauphin on his yacht "Jonikal" and examined the Princess.

- Earnest consideration by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington and his fellow inquisitioners of the potential that HRH Prince Philip is a looming gangster mastermind, his Upper Class Twit public persona masking a sinister Machiavelli ordering hits from his green country sanctum.

- The inquest's sophisticated computer sims of the crash (if that isn't the ultimate Grand Theft Auto add-on module, I don't know what is).

- Henri Paul's previously unnoted life as an aviator, his failed career as a private eye, comprehensive inventories of his apartment, and a novel length anatomical exposition on the forensic toxicology of his post-mortem anatomy.

- Deadpan evaluations of conspiracy theories involving MI5, MI6, Mossad, CIA, NSA, the Freemasons, the Scientologists and the Royal Mafia.

- Voyeuristic views from every surveillance camera in Paris.

- Unintentionally fetishistic dissections of the black Mercedes.

- Oliver Stone film clip glimpses of the Princess's contorted post-crash body position and cryptic last words.

In sum, a perfect pathology report on the end of the twentieth century.



In Los Angeles, they learned the lessons of Diana's death long ago, the Peugeots having paved the way for a new extreme paparazzi of the privacy-free 21st century. Last year, the NY Times reported on the increasing trend of celebrity photographers literally chasing down movie stars in cars in an effort to get more intense, emotional, real-life action shots:

***Routinely now, law enforcement officials said, paparazzi use several vehicles to ''box in'' a celebrity's car; try to force stars off the road; chase them at high speed as they do nothing more than run errands, often with their children in tow; and recklessly put pedestrians, other drivers and even themselves at risk.

... The photographers have long been a fixture in Los Angeles, on red carpets and outside fashionable restaurants and nightclubs, and there has always been a kind of symbiosis between them and celebrities, and particularly celebrity publicists. But veteran stars, publicists and entertainment lawyers say that certain photographers, and the publications they sell to, began increasing the pressure several years ago and seem to have changed the rules of the game -- transforming Los Angeles, even more than New York or other hot spots, from a somewhat safe haven into a hostile environment.

''They weren't always as invasive,'' [Halle] Berry said. ''There was some healthy respect about it -- they kept a certain distance from you. You weren't chased at high speeds through the streets where you endangered other lives and other innocent people who really don't know what the heck is going on.''

[Cameron] Diaz said screeching tires and honking horns had become a kind of personal soundtrack for her whenever she ran errands -- typically with three or more paparazzi cars in pursuit. ''People used to ask me how I could live in Los Angeles, and I'd say it's the best place, everybody's so jaded,'' said Ms. Diaz, who appeared in her first movie in 1994.

''That's how it used to be: I could go to the dry cleaners or to grocery stores. In the last few years, it's gotten to the point where you literally cannot walk outside your front gate without being literally attacked.''



Ms. Diaz recalled walking in the street with Mr. Timberlake and a friend and his dog about two years ago, when a photographer in a Toyota 4Runner roared up from behind them, knocking the friend to the ground, then shot pictures of her and Mr. Timberlake coming to the friend's aid. ''We're so used to not having any rights, we didn't think we should call 911,'' she said.

Photographs of the incident wound up in the next US Weekly with a caption saying, ''Cameron and Justin race to help a friend'' after the friend's dog was nearly hit by a car.

Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly...acknowledged that the market for photos of stars' unguarded moments might have eroded Los Angeles's status as a safe haven. ''But anyone who's a celebrity in this day and age knows this is part of what being a celebrity is, for better or worse,'' she said. ''Its a 24-7 job.''

Still, stars say the risky behavior is becoming untenable. The actress Reese Witherspoon said in an interview that her car was sideswiped a few weeks ago when she tried to leave her gym and was hemmed in by photographers. ''After last month, I feel the boundaries are slipping,'' she said. ''One tried to ram the back left of my car. That had never happened before.''***


These predatory photographers, and the magazine editors they feed, didn't need the researchers at Cal Tech to tell them that human beings have single neurons dedicated to each celebrity. The stars are our cathode ray Olympians, arrayed in neurological constellations across the drive-in movie screen on the back of our foreheads.

If the celebrities and their masters are the airhead tyrants of our collective consciousness, the paparazzi may be unwittingly evolving into a vanguard of culture jamming guerillas, telephoto Nikons as postmodern Kalashnikovs in an amped-up L.A. cell of the Billboard Liberation Front. Imagine if they acted with deliberate revolutionary intent, seeking to capture the most hideous possible images of movie stars, the pampered skin of their faces pulled back into horrifying contortions by disused tendons provoked out of their Botox slumber. Surely that would hack the Spectacle, at least for the fifteen minutes before it morphed into the new sexy commoditized cool.

In the meantime, we wait for the secret boxes of evidence collected by Operation Paget to trickle out into the Internet-of-Things via eBay.