lensification: the glam of the cam.

My friend Nadine stands trapped behind glass. It's hour 26 of her nonstop shoeshop of just being in a window on the main drag in downtown Tucson. You can see the madness in her eyes, the tight rictus of skin supported by nothing less than fraying enthusiam, nicotine, booze, and the structural integrity of four drywalled coats of yellow Mac base and a greasepaint blue raccoon mask under high birdsnest hair, like some fugitive from NYC's late-1990s clubbery. I watch on the webcam feed from work and laugh at how silly, logging in bits of supportive chat, remembering she was only talking about doing this promotional bit a month ago over drinks at a bar just before she quit work to chase her dream. And, oddly, I'm eating it up, unable to pull away from her ridiculous lure. Hours later, I'm in the window on the other side of her loaner laptop's lens.

"Hey, I brought you a cigar. And I'm sure you're tired of the prop balloon animals you've got so I brought my favourite pair of real Springbok horns I gluegunned on a hairband to play with!" She puts them on, a wide-eyed hallucinatory child, and we proceed to drink these bullets of blueberry ale a fangirl brought her. I usually hate blueberries -- they're the devil's fruit. But in frosted scones or well-crafted microbrew at 8% they get a pass, and while showboating in a window to hundreds of passerbys it's the nectar of goodtimes.

And we're totally showboating. I suddenly find myself not only talking to 'Dini but to the camera, like it's a real person in the room, and not an inanimate apparatus. Before you know it, we throw on the Beastie Boys' "Root Down" and we shake arse, doing the Michael Jackson Woo Crotch Grab and The Shopper. Nadie sprays a Windex knockoff on the inside of the glass, sticking her flyers up with the moisture for people to read, as oggling boys put their lips to the dirty outside and blowfish back at her. Oh, and there's some way cute 20-something girl who got slipped a ruffie passed out on the couch in our little 4'x12' room. But we're live and feeding to the world and being fed in return, heard by the responsive chatroom audience. And some of them even know me. Sure, it's no more than nine voyeurs from cyberland at any one time, but it's the dynamic that counts.

You realize that the webcam, or just cameras in general, make one performative. You know people are watching in realtime, or during some later date in forever future, and even the least bit extroverted will shamelessly amp themselves up. The observer affects the observed. But the phenomenon is even more pronounced on the other end. We watch people everyday whom we don't even know, whether that's just pimping it on the street, on television, or streamed on the internet, and they seem bigger than us in some fashion because the camera refracted through our mind's eye magnifies them. They are the presented examples, the stars of our show, and we've willfully submitted to their presentation. There's an active/passive validation at work and its magick is hellahypnostrong.

As I left an audience member typed in, "Oh, you guys are having the best time!" Nadine and I look at each other and guffaw. "That's what she thinks!"

"But Nadine, from the outside it looks true! Just being up on the screen makes it seem 20 times better than that, so it doesn't matter because the interpretation is what sells it." Then I speak to the laptop. "But you Tucson kids out there are more savvy than that, right? We really do love you all." 

Tonight I got to taste what it was to be both supplicant and deity. It's fun to be a local god again. Thank you for your prayers, and this is my sincerest of gospels.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.