Postmodern Angst

Journalists have always slandered dead artists. If you’re anyone at all, in the weeks after you die some little gnome at the Weekly or the Times will go to your detractors and spurned former lovers and compile whatever malice their hurtful hurts display as truth. This is why everyone in Hollywood is such a bastard: when you die, they are going to say you are a bastard whether you are a bastard or not, so you might as well enjoy the benefits, however dubious and few, of being a bastard while you’re alive. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to be a bastard to one of those victims of failed imagination who populate the tar pits of local journalism, who will perhaps in turn write the post-mortem wherein you are dubbed a bastard, proving that there is some rough justice in this world, no matter what the bastards tell you.