DREAM #.062810: "PARTY MACHINE"

   In my dream, I'm designing the perfect party with a licensed expert  in "psychodynamics".  He wears a turban and weirdly angular sunglasses and henna tattoo bandages all over his face.  He explains that every party constitutes a kind of invisible "ambience engine".  All the guests and all their behaviors are moving parts, as are their reputations and their possible futures.  The specialist has studied complex collages based on every potential celebrant.  I can feel all the money ooze away as he paces through the emptied chambers of the house I have parties in.  He's pantomiming cocktail banter, sometimes seeming to make out with himself, sometimes violently arguing with himself.  Each shift in persona is telegraphed by his vocal timbre and body language.  He's paid by the minute.  By the time this routine has no doubt paid for a house of his very own, I can almost see the geometries of friction and flirtation that his multiple possessions have traced in the mental space, like sparkler scars on the fabric of a summer night.  The party itself, at this point, would be beside the point.  It feels like it was these shapes I was after all along, anyway.  The best parties are merely hypothetical and never vulgarize themselves by escaping the blueprint stage.
     He makes me understand that the seating at dinner should alternate: Somebody/nobody/Somebody/nobody/etc..., so the vibrations of fame can be conducted and equalized.  In every direction there will be famous beauty for the gaze to settle on as the ear delights to the prattling of mere mortals and their stupid problems.  There's a shift in scene and setting of some kind, then it seems to shift back, then I'm lecturing imaginary old ladies at a garden party (a la the original "Manchurian Candidate"s bloodcurdling brainwash sequence)  about the power that certain stars can have over someone like me.
     "There are certain starlets possessed of such a constant, effortless Otherness that most of their human interactions are composed of smouldering glances, disquieting sighs, lips moistened with coquettish anticipation.  I've seen them and I've trafficked with them.  There are women amongst us, in these catacombs of luxury, whose every utterance is scripted, who otherwise live in silent films.  I've seen how they burn in their silence, how it purifies them for the camera.  It seems that most of us dissipate our charisma with endless chit-chat.  This silence of theirs, it's a kind of saintly anorexia."
      All the love and fun she could have had lives and dies with that little red light.  It means the camera is on.  It indicates eternity.