Conjuring Kafkaesque

   by  shaun lawton 

    It may have been conveyed by the singular countenance of a popular actor, someone whose name was on the end of everyone's lips when they traveled the circuit of late night television talk shows as a guest when certain other A-listers couldn't make the grade. A composite of Boris Karloff and Gene Hackman with a quarter pastiche of Martin Short for good measure, they were the darling of the Frank and Rita Mae Henson scene all the way down the line, twisting up pinners on a side line and one then more one hitters at the parties to while away the afternoons, and when it came to the harmonica a real slide blues player all along. There was always a real Big Brother feel to the proceedings, a sort of John Hurt sensibility they brought to their roles, a naked sort of raw American essence not able to be captured in letters, but exemplified in glorious two-toned panoramic Kodachrome widescreen grandeur. The motion painting of history merges through cinema in a torrid outpouring of impassioned human desire and ambition. 

  

    The panorama has long been subsumed by the cloud it is stored in. The perpetual rainy days are more than a repeated video loop motif, they're an ingrained byproduct of shared reality browsing. Trends and agglomerations generate similar minded material the consumer replenishes with even after having been regurgitated. The sense of branching off into an alternate future limb of our universe settles in its grip over the long term.  It can only be measured in and thus felt and expressed in terms of decades. 

    There was an elemental fashion to it we can never afford to forget. 

   This book marker conjuring Kafkaesque memoirs as if they were fading screenshots 

  of a newly televised world falling into fruition along with our postmodern condition has been left to note the point we broke off thinking about it.