Fashion Week Satyricon



(image via culturecourt)

Is there anyone else out there amazed/ alarmed/ amused at the level of outright imperial decadence at large across the media landscape? The Tommy Lee-Kid Rock fistfight and the Britnification of the New York Times notwithstanding, all platforms are experiencing cognitive vertigo at the sheer weirdness of the American conversation. These United States only just became an official empire less than a decade ago, and yet we are well on our way in creating an historical versimilitude as sanguinary and as meatily decadent as that of late Rome.

It is almost ... too much, or, as the French might say de trop.

New York has, for the past week and a half or so, been transformed -- as if by gamma radiation -- into a hulking Felliniesque freakshow. At any moment one almost expects to be greeted on the streets outside ones own building to peals of theatrical laughter juxtaposed with the absurdity of a lion tamer dressed in fishnet stockings directs traffic.

The U.S. Open. The taxi strike. Fashion Week. It's all too goddam much! From the NyTimes:

"Fashion may be feeling the effects of the stock market wobble, but you could not tell amid the big spending and opulent theatricality. To present his Y-3 collection of high-end sports clothes on Saturday, Yohji Yamamoto annexed a city block beneath the High Line railway, transforming it into the kind of raw subterranean space that used to be common and that now requires event-planner sorcery to reproduce."

And, as sites like TMZ thrive, like social diseases in a Bankock massage parlor circa 1974, noble newspapers of record are undergoing a period of great tribulation.