Too Beautiful, the blog

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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

Labels: Bad Behavior, celebutantes, dystopia, economy, fakes, geeks, hoaxes, identity, writers ideas

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts

Forty years later, in a 2004 interview, Dylan talked about the kind of interaction that keeps him from going out in public if he can avoid it. "People will say, 'Are you who I think you are?'" Dylan said. "And you'll say, Ahh, I don't know. And they'll say, 'You're, you're him,' and you'll say, 'Okay, yes?' And then the next thing is, 'Oh, no. Are you really him? I don't think you're him.' And that can go on and on."

Susan Strasberg used to tell a story about walking around New York with an incognito-in-plain-sight Marilyn Monroe. "Do you want to see me be her?" Monroe would say, and Strasberg describes the star turning on some imperceptible inner switch, then beginning to glow. Within moments the people who had been passing right by were stopping in their tracks, scrambling for pen and paper.

From an essay by Michelle Orange on mistaken identity in The Rumpus.

Labels: identity, travel, zeitgeist