In Wild Guitar, Bud Eagle comes to town--from Spearfish, South Dakota--on a motorcycle with a guitar strapped to the back in a cardboard case. He wants to be a rock star.

He gets a manager.

The manager promotes his career.

Behind the scenes, the manager is negotiating with the presidents of the local Bud Eagle fan clubs at Los Angeles high schools. They are on his payroll.

They are trying to decide what to make his fetish be.

They decide on eagle feathers.

One of the fan club presidents asks the manager where he's going to get eagle feathers, and he says, "Chickens, turkeys, magpies--what difference does it make."

Later, one of them mentions payola, to disk jockeys, and getting air play, for Bud.

The manager says, "Payola, buzzola...just call it ola--that's my business."

Bud Eagle says, "Why does everything have to be so phony?"

You might have noticed at the Oscars people wearing blaze orange wristbands.

They are in support of the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. That's the color of the jump suits the prisoners are given to wear.

Pyle wore an orange watchband, without the watch, for his fetish. For the Large Pyle fan club.

So President Bush inadvertently got people wearing Large Pyle fan club fetishes.

Larry McMurtry at the Oscars asking people to honor the culture of the book.

Ray Dennis Steckler, who directed Wild Guitar, and his wife, Carolyn Brandt, who starred in several of his low-budget movies, may have been the model for Gene Hackman and Rene Russo, in Get Shorty.

John Travolta, film buff, would know. He knew all that shit. In the movie.

Pyle didn't know.

Dick Gregory called his autobiography Nigger.

He told his mother, "Whenever you hear that word, they're plugging my book.

Whenever people wore an orange bracelet they were plugging the Large Pyle fan club.

George Bush was playing into Pyle's hands.

Pyle thought he'd use his beachcomber picture for the cover of WORKING TITLE.

He had a title and a cover picture. But no book.

He would write a book around his picture. His picture of himself in costume.

It wasn't a costume. It was how he normally dressed.

I think of Goya's Black Paintings.

I think of his Chronos Devouring His Children.

These are the kind of visions I have when I overhear passive conversation.

One of the de Goncourts said nothing hears so much silliness as a picture in a museum.

I once wrote a column in which I said the Edvard Munch painting The Scream was the painting's reaction to what people were saying about it.

Past glory.