I wonder if Edward Hopper’s portrayal of the ’20s automat is correct. Was it really a place a young woman could go at night… alone? Unless you are Angelina Jolie, (who apparently sneaks out to bars solo in New York and New Orleans) late night options are pretty much limited to movie theaters, indie rock shows, or Netflix at home. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem getting lunch at the bar with a journal, or even a drink up til about 8 or so. But after that one is opening oneself up to the possibility of unwanted attention. And the point of going out alone is to be alone. I suppose if Horn & Hardart were around today, it would get same kind of rowdy crowd as a late night falafel place. Maybe the contemporary equivalency of an automat is a sushi bar where you pick the plates off the train and they charge you at the end by numbers of plates. (Was thinking about this while reading Coolhunter on Minibar, the Amsterdam “automat”-style self-serve bar.)
No Twitter for the Rich
Siren by Marc Quinn (Kate Moss)
First, lets get something out of the way, for once and for all: if you work in media and you still don’t get Twitter (today, three years after you should have) you should probably just quit or wait until you are eventually fired. Really, if you are pitching a “who cares what you had for lunch” article to your editor, you are no different than a major car manufacturer who doesn’t understand what the fuss over fuel-efficient vehicles is about.
But Virginia Heffernan, whose NYT The Medium columns lately have been, uhhh, questionable, has an interesting take on the old MSM “twitter is narcissism blah, blah…” She mentions Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW on how the new sign of poverty is, “dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting… Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Rex when I was in New York. What celebrities won’t join Twitter? I said Angelina Jolie, but he pointed out she’d probably hire someone to post UN Press Releases. A non-Twitter-ing celebrity would be someone like Catherine Deneuve, or less obviously Naomi Watts. Someone who is essentially content with their station on the Hollywood totem pole.
Some will say, as @biz explained on The Colbert Report, they Twitter to create and control their own PR –a wrecking ball to gossip glossies. But all the celebrities on Twitter are in some ways striving for something. Just browse CelebrityTweet (yes, it exists.) Witness the enormous explosion among hasbeens like Liam Gallagher, Donny Wahlberg, Soleil Moon Frye, and Danny Masterson.
If the celeb-twitterer is someone who might not seem to be the sort to bother with this kind of thing (eg @bjork) the account is inevitably run by someone else as a PR station. (The two clear exceptions being @DAVID_LYNCH and @yokoono, which are part art project, part PR.) Maybe every celebrity will eventually have a Twitter account. But only the striving will be the ones engaging its social aspects.
The Celebrity Atheist List reads like a roster of The Tomorrow Museum’s favorite people: J.G. Ballard, Bjork, Ingmar Bergman, Vic Chesnutt, David Cronenberg, Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Stephen Fry, Rachel Griffiths, Diane Keaton, Mike Leigh, Stanislaw Lem, Cillian Murphy, Gary Numan, Bruce Sterling, and Angelina Jolie too! The page on Heather MacDonald is especially interesting, as she is a conservative. I adored her book The Burden of Bad Ideas, and many of her City Journal columns…ermm, well, right up until she started writing about why we don’t need civil liberties anymore. (via Technoccult, who adds, “And of course, one could write such a list for every major religion. My point here is that spirituality is not required for creativity and inspiration.”)
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