The flip side of the pc one world immediacy is a sense of living a life which doesn’t exactly exist. A schitzoid sense of self in the chips and bytes where we live.
And that doesn’t concern me here though it is more than a clearing the voice.
I started twitterring a coupla weeks ago at Helen’s insistence and also because I noticed how many visitors we were getting from Helen’s social networking. Figured I would just tweet links to posts we write.
But then people began to follow me and I felt guilty not providing content, so I expanded it a touch: just to mention what I am thinking of writing about at any given time.
And then, I think again at Helen’s instigation, I began to follow Amanda Palmer.
And I began to expand my own tweeting: folks like me communicate through writing and not through speaking so I was quite comfortable 160 charactering a complex thought.
And Amanda was getting personal:
“feeling all kinds of wretched but losing myself in the moment of seeing @
“just planted myself at my toy piano in random backyard near the theater to do my personal…”
So, because I am following Palmer on twitter, and because we have such a close personal relatinship, and because Girlieaction blew me off, I figured I’d give Amanda a call… except… I don’t have he cell, er, I don’t know her.
I swear I forgot I didn’t know her!!! And I’m a media guy. I work in TV in my dayjob and on music all the rest of the time and I never mistake my position!!!
What gives?
Two things with twitter:
A) it is so similar to texting it is easy to forget it is a one way street. I read what she says but she doesn’t read what I say.
and
B) As opposed to media interpreted meetings between artist and consumer, nothing gets in the way at all when the artists tweets (pace Kanye)
It is all very strange and all very scary. Anybody remember “Strange Day” where virtual reality is so addictive it is illegal? This is the beginning of that. It is like a Phillip K. Dick story: it is weirdly bizarre. It is like a mirror where you look in but they can’t see you and it is scary because it seems to say: I know you… when I don’t know you.
About Amanda Palmer: she is the lead singer of Dresden Doll’s. Dresden Dolls? I don’t really know em. Apparently they are some sorta rock cabaret thingy. Helen loves em. I think their songs are resolutely ordinary and none of it is shocking enough. I did buy some tracks off Amanda’s radiohead covers on ukelele album. I liked em as well. More than the originals. But really, sex doesn’t sell the way it used and all this shock and awe crap is kinda old.
Except I don’t feel like that any more.
Now I feel like I’m her buddy and so I feel protective. I wanna write nice things.
And there is the paradigm in modern popdom.
A coupla months ago I was funning on a rock star on rock nyc and his girlfriend told me off: my entertainment was his privacy. She had a point and it is a tricky contradiction of a virtual world with virtual stories and virtual friendships and it gets even weirder when you think of Amanda and me. Because THERE IS NO AMANDA AND ME.
It is all a figment of my twitter fueled imagination where I read about her funning on “Fuck Perfume” and imagine I am a party to the funning. It isn’t real. Nothing is real. And I am home Halloween night…