The Omniconduit

Ira Glass: I have to say, like, oh my god, this is such a job. Girls: Yeah. Julia: It’s like I’m– I’m a brand, and I am like– Ella: You’re trying to promote yourself. Julia: The brand. I’m the director of the– Glass: And you’re the product. Jane: You’re definitely trying to promote yourself. Julia: To stay relevant, you have to– Jane: You have to work hard. Ella: Relevance is a big term right now. Glass: Are you guys relevant? Ella: Um, I’m so relevant. Jane: In middle school. In middle school, we were definitely really relevant. Ella (SARCASTICALLY): We were so relevant. Jane: Because everything was established. But now, in the beginning of high school, you can’t really tell who’s relevant. Glass: Yeah. And what does relevant mean? Jane: Relevant means that people care about what you’re posting on Instagram. People– Julia: Care about you.

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation […]

The influence of economic power culminates by turning the electoral process into a political game of marked cards, an odious pantomime that turns the voter into a puppet, crumbling in one blow citizenship and democracy.