Not-So-Funny Mirror

I'm noticing many whispers beyond the range of ordinary hearing in things said recently on Letterman and Conan. I believe in the past few months I've been able to prove my point from time to time regarding my influence on these shows, and so believe these less-demonstrable observations are worthy of consideration.

To describe something I find to be a problem with the specific content of these particular whispers, I will describe a movie scene to which I periodically refer, something from Amy Heckerling's movie, "Johnny Dangerously". Johnny is in the prison cafeteria, where one prisoner whispers something to the prisoner next to him, who then "passes it along" to the next prisoner, and so on, until it reaches Johnny, the person for whom the original message was intended. Yet though we hear the message continually get more and more distorted as it is "passed along", when Johnny receives "it", somehow he understands what the original message was verbatim, because he is absurdly streetwise to the precise degree and manner in which messages passed along are prone to be distorted. These whispers I hear, innocent in and of themselves, contain built into them, perhaps unconsciously, an easy potential for a kid to accidentally stick his finger into a light socket, or to put it another way, they would make the kid feel inclined to stick my finger into a light socket were he to receive the distorted version that might easily emerge somewhere down the line following my response. I will include the distorted version I foresee of each of these whispers as well, to show specifically what I min.

In my June 18, 2009 blog, I mention that my video, "Adventure At The Pasadena Batman Estate", has been no small influence on various things that have come out of the "entertainment industry" (for lack of a handier phrase). One influence I had that I specifically referred to was the Tony Awards. I was thinking of the 2005 Tony Awards opening, in which Billy Crystal joined the host, Hugh Jackman, onstage. I was also thinking of the following evening when Billy Crystal made a surprise appearance on the Letterman show and continued/resumed making an inside-reference to this video of mine. I mention these things now because, on last night's Letterman, Billy Crystal went into an anecdote about encountering people outside the security gate of his estate. I could not help but connect his anecdote in some way to my video, in that Crystal is among those who have previously referred to my video, which has much to do with something happening in front of the security gate of an estate.

Potential Distortion Set-Up By Crystal: His anecdote included an overly-persistent woman after money repeatedly ringing his intercom. The implication that one is to be associated with this creepy person, whose actions also impaired, at least momentarily, Crystal's relationship with his grandchildren, paints a Crystal-clear target on one's insignia. And what is more overly-persistent than a person who insists on something that is not common knowledge, which regards someone with more money than he? Heavens!

Of all the innumerable instances of people in "show biz" interconnecting with me/my material, only one did so in relation to a contest (unless something's slipped my mind - I sift through quite a number of things done in relation to me/my material by people to make this statement). That person was the great comedian Norm Macdonald, who had some contest or another in relation to some sitcom or another that he starred in. So who was the main guest on Conan the night Conan announced the winner of his big "I Want To Blow Up Your Car" contest? You guessed it.

Potential Distortion Set-Up By Macdonald/O'Brien: By giving me to feel that Macdonald and O'Brien may well have gone to a considerable length for my benefit, this being a huge contest, and then announcing that Macdonald will be performing stand-up in nearby Irvine later this month, I'm put on the spot. If I don't go to see Macdonald, I'm treating this important, inside-reference like it means nothing to me. If I do go, I'm on the spot anyway, I'm some person standing outside the security gate of someone's estate. Maybe if I mention all this in a blog I can remain in neutral territory, though this must all seem amazingly obscure at best to those who don't remember Macdonald's sitcom, or the sitcom contest, or don't know the degree to which my secret importance has permeated big things in the past. At worst, I'm the nutjob again. Such is the price they like to make me pay. Well, at least by writing this blog I can feel an absence of guilt from my not planning to see Macdonald.

In my previous blog of September 2nd, I referred to the moment Sean Lennon and I encountered one another as extremely important for both of us. Naturally, this is a patently insane-sounding idea to those not familiar with my serious importance in relation to Sean Lennon's father, John Lennon, or in relation to Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, The Beatles, The Stones, etc. for that matter. And were my statement to bring to the minds of the ignorant the idea of an uppity peasant to see the encounter that way, I would certainly be getting off easy. However, my motivation in writing my blogs is neither to twitter away my life, nor is it to conform what I say in order to fit pre-expectations/presumptions regarding who I am, what I have done, and what my experiences have been. I occupy an extremely special place in this world, a one in a billion space, whether it is generally known or not, and the world itself is in an extremely perilous place, in certain ways reliant upon those of us who occupy such spaces, and I will not dilute and obscure the important truth about myself out of some adolescent desire to avoid ridicule and maintain a normal status among fools. But to continue. Last night, the day after my blog posting about how my encountering Sean Lennon was extremely important for both of us, Conan O'Brien joked to Sandra Bullock (yet another person in show biz on whose work I have been an influence), that it must be a big deal for her (Sandra) to get to meet him (Conan), as it is a big deal to meet someone whom one idolizes. I realize this isn't the first time anyone has ever joked in this manner in relation to celebrity, nor do I doubt that Conan has himself used this joke from time to time. However, that he said this the very next day following my blog, combined with the fact that I am a frequent influence on what Conan says/does, leads me to interpret his remark as being deliberately related. Additionally, Conan's conversation with Sandra Bullock touched on timeouts for children, and also, on microwave oven repairmen. It so happens that my most recent weekly Monk/Steinhoff videoclips that have appeared with my blogs include references to timeouts for children, and to a refrigerator repairman.

Potential Distortion Set-Up By Bullock/O'Brien: Can't a woman's conversation naturally segue from talk about her husband's profession of being some kind of super-mechanic, and can't a mother talk about her children, without some nutjob jumping up and down that it's all secretly about him? Isn't this exactly the kind of person a Lennon should be insulated from, especially if the nutjob is operating under some delusion about importance in relation to the son of a Beatle? All valid, even important concerns, if the basic situation is skewed in a way that suggests the less you know about me the better, as opposed to the more you know about me, the more you would see that I base my position on a wealth of facts, however unlikely those facts can seem outside their proper context. Sean Lennon was very recently involved in creating a variation on that famous photograph from the last photo session his father was in, specifically, the photo showing a naked John Lennon with a clothed Yoko Ono, taken the day before he was killed, which made the cover of Rolling Stone posthumously. It could therefore be that someone who knows might wish to goad me into divulging what I know about the original situation on which that original John Lennon/Yoko Ono pose was based.

Well, I'm done for the moment with what will surely be seen by some as a paranoid rant. I mean, who has ever been legitimate in his concern that he had somehow grown to become such a threat to the interests of the super-powerful that efforts were being made to undermine one's believability through organized goading and distortion.

And finally, a comment I posted on HuffingtonPost yesterday seems to me like something I may want to occasionally re-read, not because I expect I will each time believe unequivocally in its points, but because I believe there might be substantive things "alongside" its points that are concisely expressed (I often value a point for possessing this quality):

"I just love the process by which public opinion gets molded. It's like there's some weird funny mirror factory somewhere, and then the public gets to think it's sort of seeing itself instead of seeing some massive, vast, unknown thing, and then the Internet hits or ratings appear to be up there regarding some so-called perspective, probably people manipulating the real numbers because of there being so much power there in terms of money and influence than there is with Diebold election machines, and that's how we think we're finding out who we are and how we feel.

"Even if Obama's numbers go down, or go up, so what, if somebody sneezing makes the numbers dramatically shift the other way? Stop looking at what everybody else appears to be thinking, they started fabricating that image a long time ago."