Marilyn Manson Lives In My Neighborhood

I don't actually know where Marilyn Manson lives.

But I was at Borders the other night buying The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss. I was buying it not because of any profound love for the music of Marilyn Manson, but because I've been going through a mini-phase of reading rock bios. I like rock bios like I like riding the bus. You learn that people out there are leading these lives that are unimaginably different from yours and it expands your sense of possibility which is nice when the world starts to get a little claustrophobic.

Anyway, I'm buying this book, along with some other books, and the Borders clerk said, "One of my customers was just talking about him." I said "Oh, really?" He said yeah, that this customer claimed to have seen Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinema (where, according to the website, movie lovers belong). And I laugh, because although US magazine tells me every week that Stars Are Just Like Us, I still find it funny to imagine Marilyn Manson at the Arclight Cinemas, buying his $8 coffee and maybe some of that tasty caramel corn.

And then the clerk says that the guy was a tourist and maybe just confused one of the standard issue Hollywood types for Marilyn Manson. I said maybe.

Gorbachev is appearing in Louis Vuitton ads these days. The new Tom Ford perfume ads are, at least to my eye, genuinely shocking. (It is a measure of my shock that the previous link was not to the pictures. Link via Jezebel .)

All of this has a strange apocalyptic feel to it. Marilyn Manson hangs out at the movie theater near my house. Or maybe the people who hang out at the movie theater near my house are identical to Marilyn Manson when seen by the naked eye. Former Communist leaders advertise luxury luggage by adopting fake spy poses. And people are using sex to sell things.