Saturday, January 5, 2019

Welcome Stranger!


As a poverty stricken teenager I spent hours and hours sifting through thrift stores searching for hidden treasure. My entire wardrobe and half of my belongings were excavated second hand discoveries. It was one of the happiest times of my life. Today I can afford most of the cheap crap I consume and my time is valuable so I don’t go thrifting anymore. I do waste an incredible amount of time on Instagram and Twitter though. If you didn’t end up here from one of my links on those pages you can follow me on Instagram @spottless_marxx or on Twitter @SpottlessMarxx. One of the reasons I’m so addicted to those sites is that I ‘ve found many hidden treasures there from all around world in the form of people. Interesting, happy, social, active, isolated, alienated, scary, lonely, angry, insanely creative people.



Some of them, but not all, have huge followings. In my online life everybody knows who these stars are but in my offline life nobody has ever heard of them. For this reason I have bestowed upon them the name “secret celebrities.” 

My portrait of @fesignkh brilliant University of Tehran art student on Instagram who did the original Francis Bacon Portrait in a hoodie found in the video below. I added background, "The Blues" by Chuck Barry & snow. 


Iranian artist and student @fesignkh  pictured above only has around 3000 followers at this moment. I consider her a secret celebrity, however, because everything she posts gets hundreds of likes. That means she has a captive audience, which includes me. I don’t consider myself a secret celebrity but I do consider myself worthy of YOUR attention, and here’s why:

Years ago I was a radio journalist. Although I worked in the realm of non-corporate community radio I was constantly being encouraged to produce what was described to me as a clear, natural and professional sounding news product. What that meant was hours and hours of editing interviews, removing any and all  “umms”, pauses, interruptions, awkward phrasing and, most importantly, “cutting to the chase." In other words, eliminating all tangential information and making people sound concise and articulate even if they didn’t actually speak that way. It still fascinates me that nearly every person I interviewed believed that is how they actually spoke. The rare exception was when I was accused of taking something out of context to make somebody look bad. Truth be known, those were bad and/or stupid people who said bad and/or stupid things and got busted. But that’s another story. Pro editing tips I constantly struggled with also included the unofficial requirement that no single soundbite exceed nine to fifteen seconds. Anything longer than that was considered indulgent and distracting. If you haven't seen the movie ROMA I highly recommend it. When I hear people criticize the exrodinary long shots in that graceful film it reminds me of the shit I used to take in the newsroom.




Anyhow this process of making things “professional” was one of the reasons I got out of journalism. It was particularly painful when I was interviewing nuns who were organizing labor in the unholy maquiladora factories in Latin America that NAFTA gave birth too. These strong but peace loving women were receiving government sanctioned death threats as a reward for addressing toxic working conditions, extremely low pay and violent union busting. Meanwhile I’m being forced to censor them to make sure they sound “clear and natural” and respect my audiences short attention spans. 

I'm not saying this is wrong. I appreciate journalists more than ever now that they are being demonized & attacked by our President, arrested by dictators and even killed. One of my favorite protest signs I've been noticing says "Then they came for the journalists and after that... we don't know what happend." Nonetheless, you've probalby already guessed that I'm the wrong person for making complex realities bite sized and digestible.  

The reason I’m telling you this is that you are, at this moment, in a dusty, lonely (and I hope) interesting, corner of the Internet. A hidden treasure. As far as I can tell, Blogger is all but dead. They don't even have an App. You are quite the adventurous one to even click on a link with the word “blogspot” in it. When Blogger was created it was all the rage but had many critics warning of the "Vanity Press.” 




Back then I didn’t think too hard about what "vanity press" actually meant but certainly agreed it was tasteless... and probably something I should be doing. Years later Blogger has gone the way of AOL and MySpace but maybe it's only problem is that it was ahead of it's time? I currently spend many hours watching strangers from all around the world on my phone talk about their menstrual cycle, do their laundry, draw a picture, rant, rave, dance, feed their bird and pet their cat. And I’m not alone. A literal army of  virtual peeping toms are doing the same thing. Why? I think it’s because we crave all that vain, overindulgent, tangential and awkward information that has ended up on the cutting room floor without our knowledge or permission. We’re tired of being force fed rehearsed and hollow talking points coming from corrupt politicians and corporations. We’re not interested in “clear, natural and professional” ... we want the awkward, ugly and often boring truth!




God bless those who do, but I'm not one for sniffing my armpits and spilling my guts to strangers on the Internet. I'm pretty comfortable sharing myself with the few restless, curious and driven voyeurs (aka you) who are willing to go out of your way to click on an obscure link to Blogger. This is sorta the closest thing I have to a diary. If you decide to read more you will learn quite a bit about me. If you stick around you may learn a lot more. If you leave a comment, I'll be thrilled to find out I'm not alone and I'll be more than interested in checking out your neck of the woods, if your into that sort of thing.

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