Somewhere in between the Mona Lisa’s smile and the Golden Arches of the McDonald’s infotainment-paramilitary, burned into the back of my brain like the Shroud of Turin, resides the debatably “sad-turtle-face” of friend, roommate, fellow Tullahoma-brethren, and cartoon-Beetlejuice of my Elysian Fields: Lex Bearden. After years of both quantitative and qualitative research, recent data suggests that the aesthetic implications of his Rosetta Stonesque-visage seem to articulate a thought, feeling, or idea yet to be grammatically Webstered before the next funkified-paradigm shift. However, for the sake of discussion, let us refer to this groovy phenomenon simply as “The Mona Lisa’s Smile.”
Throughout the years, The Smile has successfully wormed itself into the minds, and hearts, of all those subjected to its tyrannically golden proportions. Some Tullahomians exposed to The Smile at an early age, such as myself, have not only built their lives upon the foundation of its image, but also utilized the motley visage as some sort of existential singularity with the intent to communicate a contemporary, and collectively, hyperbolic state of being:
As the years went by, the material propagation of the image reached a critical mass, whereupon, in the late 2000’s, it ecstatically entered the digital sphere of idea-exchange: the Internet. The Smile’s kernal of primordial truth found its way to the top of Google searches via word combinations like “PBR+hipster.” Presently, The Smile has been displayed on websites such as averagecollegeguy.com, hipsterjew.com, and latfh.com (Look At This Fucking Hipster.com). While these web-occurances allude to The Smile’s eponymous nature, they fail to properly exhibit the true potential of its emergent properties. So, sorry “hipster demographic,” but you can’t Constantine THIS Mona Lisa:
Since “hitting the big time,” Lex's frosty mug has been rhetorically imbibed with the microbrew of all those seeking to drink from its flaming chalice. However, while he remains theoretically unopposed to offering sips, his visage's insertion into various etymological koozies does raise serious concerns about possible contextual limitations regarding the panoptic nature of his “Mona Lisa's Smile.” He woefully describes this slippery ontological slope as being, “delicate like a flower made of brittle glass in the cold November rain.”
As if written in a twisted Constanzian dystopia, these specific concerns of misappropriation have begun to ominously gain credibility within the online-marketplace. Due to the proliferation of this “hipster-connotated” visage, a ghastly false-consciousness attempted to dispossess its inherent “Mona Lisa’s Smile,” thus manifesting a drunken, yet mobile, bird-dogging simulacrum. This belligerent “evil-twin-Frankenstein” has recently tagged itself in the free Iphone App entitled “Punch A Hipster.” This smarmy “I just farted in your little sister’s shower,” Nexus-6 Replicant actually begins to reveal its true Frankensteinian nature once you tap it a couple of times through the glass, but only, and always, merely through the glass:
As The Smile continues to qualitatively prosper in the face of a blasé hyper-reality, the original witnesses of the visage’s divine spark have rushed to its aid, in attempts to preserve this national, if not universal, treasure:
Personally, I have made a significant lifestyle commitment to The Smile and its Tullahomian order, The Dark Knights Templar. I have been sharing horses with my bro-thren for years, monk-bunking, eating bugs, burning incense to his likeness, and even opened a chapter of The Order in Nashville, TN; providing sanctuary for the Frail-Grail himself at just under $500 a month.
In conclusion, Lex’s visage and its intrinsic “Mona Lisa’s Smile” represent something intangible and not-yet fully articulated in our “post-modern” world. As of now, the closest to words mankind has ever come to describing the all- inclusive-beauty of The Smile exists in the approximation between these two statements:
“God does not play dice.” ~Albert Einstein
and
“Yep, that’s exactly what it’s supposed to look like.” ~Dir. Stewart Copeland
Perhaps it is the “awesome/not-Judge Dreddlocks/space-between subatomic- particles” that is missing from the vernacular of a Wally World of secular materialism. Perhaps it is the “aura” of Walter Benjamin “doing weed.” Perhaps it is some sort of psychoid-Jungian archetype that is only able to materialize due to the propagation of individualism, or it merely exists as a tenet of regional mythology on Spacebook and MyFace. Maybe its just beautiful and is best served to be left undefined lest it fall into the wrong, or anyone’s, chainmail robot-hand, but regardless, I can honestly say I am its biggest fan:
Pujol
Sept 2011
*FYI: In addition, PUJOL drummer and documentarian/director Stewart Copeland could be starting a short documentary elaborating on this phenomenon entitled I Have A Meme and I am probably writing a song about this for the next LP.
