I registered this site more than a week ago; since then, I have waited for something to write about. There’s been no lack of subject matter — between the Mike Daisey fiasco, and the Invisible Children brouhaha, one could hardly ask for more timely and interesting subjects to comment upon. And, of course, I comment constantly — in my head. When the time comes to put it into blog form, I find myself suddenly paralyzed, acutely aware that in other blogs all around the blogosphere, people are saying what I would say, but in a more media savvy, more blogworthy way.

Besides, when one of the invisible children filmmakers goes overnight from “storyteller visionary humanitarian artist and entrepreneur” to “crazy naked screaming person and public masturbator” what is there to say that isn’t gilding the lily?

In short, I feel like a freshman at a high school social who would ask the girl he likes for a dance, if only other cooler boys would stop asking her first, or the guy from the fairytale who refuses to descend like a locust on the waiter passing appetizers, and ends up with his dignity intact, but with no mini hot-dogs in puff pastry (I am fairly certain this is a fairytale, but I may only have dreamed that it was. Either way, it seems terribly tragic to me.)

So I’m going to let Mike Daisey off the hook for now (“Thank God,” breathes Mike Daisey somewhere, in his monologist’s spider hole.) It’s not that I have nothing to say, but that it’s too late to say it. Part of me wants to go into a long discourse about mimesis, and about the function of art, but by the time I’m done shaping whatever that’s going to be, I will once again have waffled my way into irrelevence.

Except.

While I was in about how to end this blog post, it occurred to me that I was looking for some kind of beautiful dismount that would tie together whatever strands I had been working with; and that trying to impose some sort of shape on reality to make it more meaningful is precisely what Mike Daisey and even the Mad Masturbator are accused of doing in their work, making their stories a little more poignant, or clear-cut, or poetic, or truer than true, which is the privilege of art. And I realized that this observation would make the perfect end for this blog post.

And I realize now, that commenting on it in this meta way is even more perfect, and therefore more artificial, because now Skynet has gained self-consciousness, and there’s no way out of this self-referential mess except