Prison Writings, Interviews, Prison Art, and News About Death Row: June 2007

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

What are Others Saying About "Dead Man Laughing"

The Dead man Laughing Myspace, is getting commented on. Here is what one myspacer had to say about it:

http://www.myspace.com/peterschmideg

Is Google Forever? Current mood: amused Category: MySpace
Dead Man Laughing, a MySpace profile page set up for a death row inmate, is running a joke contest. The inmate, Patrick Bryan Knight, intends to tell the winning joke on his death gurney when he is executed by lethal injection, June 24th. Nothing better illustrates the existential heart of the web. I believe it was in The Myth of Sisyphus that Albert Camus wrote about a writer who committed suicide as a publicity stunt. As I recall, the book the writer killed himself to publicize proved a dud. Honestly, I can't remember whether Camus approved of the suicide or not. I very much approve of the Dead Man Laughing contest. I believe it represents a healthy harnessing of the web. The ultimate purpose of any communications medium is to expand human consciousness. How does a perverse online joke contest expand human consciousness? Simply by pointing out a human truth. For condemned prisoners life reduces itself to a joke. Really, there are only two ways to cope: deep spiritual faith or dark humor. Which brings us back to Camus and the existentialists, whose writings captured how modern society has lost faith in traditional belief systems. Patrick Bryan Knight is bringing that loss of faith into brutal relief.
Existentialism begat absurdist theater. Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, etc. Dead Man Laughing's online joke contest is a 21st century variation. I can't help but think of Beckett. Waiting for Godot, Endgame (obviously Endgame), plays wherein hopeless situations were reduced to comedy. Also, Genet. Like Genet, Patrick Bryan Knight is an unrepentant criminal. He has had the balls to plunge headlong into the cauldron of pop culture and transform himself into the central character of a psychodrama. I suppose it takes a psycho who cold-bloodedly murdered two innocent people to have such balls.
When I first became interested in the arts, I wrote plays along the lines of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. As I matured, gaining superior insight into human nature, I quickly lost interest in theater and all traditional media. I realized that emotionally/intellectually human beings were not only shaped by electronic media, but also bound together by it. Marshall McLuhan's notion of a global village greatly influenced me, ultimately leading me to the web and the launching of my website: Illumination Gallery. Now I find myself drawn to Dead Man Laughing's joke contest because it turns an execution into an online event, with MySpace serving as the obvious venue. Obvious because inmates have a presence on MySpace. While they cannot directly post material, inmates can contact people outside prison via snail mail and thus set up profiles. Doreen Hawk, a Massachusetts death-penalty opponent, set up Patrick Bryan Knight's profile. What makes Mr. Knight's MySpace profile truly unique is that unlike other MySpace inmate profiles it was not set up to proclaim the inmate's innocence or to announce that he or she is a changed person. No, it was set up purely for the sake of effect. His profile is completely transparent, entirely honest. In an article written about him, posted in the Blog section of the profile, Mr. Knight, who openly admits to committing the murders for which he is being executed, shows no remorse. He philosophically accepts his pending death, stating: "They think they're killing me. They think they're punishing me. They've already punished me. I've already had 16 years of punishment. They're releasing me. They're letting me go. That's helping me out. That's the way I look at it." Mr. Knight's joke contest offers him a fleeting taste of immortality, with the hope of establishing a permanent niche in the annals of pop culture. This is immortality not in any spiritual sense, but in the Google sense. Is Google forever? What a question? What a thought? Yet Google has democratized pop culture to an extent unfathomable in the days when access to media outlets was extremely rarefied. Today virtually anyone can post online. Google not only vectors audiences to a seemingly endless array of information/stimuli, but it also serves as an organizational entity. Sometime after Mr. Knight is executed, I am sure the Dead Man Laughing profile page will be removed from MySpace. Still, Mr. Knight will have taken a step toward online immortality. Unquestionably, he is googleable. I find this both deeply sad and absurdly funny. So if instead of merely cracking a joke at his execution, Mr. Knight wanted to infuse a bit of genuine irony, he could ask, "Is Google forever?"