Memoirs of a media zombie

Logo Manson: Nike Portrait/ Mixed Media/ Steven Lee Matz

Logo Manson: CNN Portrait/ Mixed Media/ Steven Lee Matz

Logo Manson: Apple/ Mixed Media/ Steven Lee Matz

The day is December, 19, 1969. You are John Q. Public, as you make your way through a mass of bad 60's hair, retro cologne, and cigarette smoke to get your news paper from the newsstand you happen across the latest piece of corporate media propaganda. Life magazine has a new star for a new style of media which turns crimes into spectacles and killers into superstars.
The man in the photo doesn't look so much crazed, rather confused and scared, like a trapped animal. Obviously a sentient creature, if not a man aware of being burdened with such bizarre circumstances as this new form of Neo-Roman modern American entertainment, which will come to be referred to in later years as the media circus.
A strange fusion of real life and what is shown on a television screen has come to color the psyche of modern man. Real life atrocities are filtered into our homes on fuzzy blue waves of ethereal entombment ( enveloping the viewer as amniotic fluid surrounds the fragile flesh of the fetus. ) in such a way as to enable them to settle comfortably into the common avenues of our neuro-pathways.
The real reason the man in the photo will become both reviled and celebrated in later years by different strata's of the modern caste system of American suburbia is because he exposes something about America. Not so much to the rest of the world, but to itself, which is an even greater transgression. In the U.S.A we tend to have a rather absurd notion of ourselves as progressive, when more often than not we are degenerative, like the Romans. For turning a mirror to the people of his own land in such a brutal fashion his physical self is stored in a concrete and steel cage, but his soul is scapegoated into the static dessert.
He becomes an example of what happens when one defies the authority of the state and it's God. He has taken on the swastika as a personal trademark of his in popular American culture. It would be very obtuse to think that this derelict convict has much knowledge in regard to the occult runology displayed in the overall aesthetic of the third reich. That distinction is reserved for the major corporate advertising cabals of our brave new world who profit from the ad space in between the horrors. In a world where men look to symbols to define them and gain some sense of self as well as belonging, the corollary between a rune and a brand logo is the logical point of conclusion.