Too much of a good thing

is what comes to mind. Worth1000 appears, in fact, to BE 1000, more or less. These are essentially novelties, but when you scroll down 43 of them in a row guess what's lost?

But people enjoy making them, and apparently the joke doesn't get old in some quarters. That sounds patronizing, I know, when in fact I for years was the proud owner of a poster of an obscure ad that a friend on the fringe of the advertising industry gave me. It was a print ad for a tomato sauce offered in both "regular" (image of the Mona Lisa) and "chunky" (image of a chunky Mona Lisa). It was essentially the same kick as all these re-cast Renaissance classics, but I didn't know anyone else had it hanging on their wall and that made me feel like I had something special. Maybe in the not-very-becoming way of relishing a new band because you found it before everyone else has. But maybe also because it is, in fact, newish and clever.

Like Malcolm McLaren, the craven carrot-top behind the Sex Pistols, laying a syncopated groover under the death aria of Madame Butterfly in 1984. http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/music/artist/songs/0,,461449,00.html
Probably not intended as a mashup, and on the online excerpt the voiceover sounds vaguely ridiculous. But at the time...at the time there wasn't anything else like it yet. Now, as we're all noting in these posts, there's plenty enough.

I'm not sure I see all this as ramming it back at The Man, though. Unless clipping apart magazines to make a collage amounted to burrowing under Madison Avenue to hasten its collapse. Or talking back to the TV.

The import, to me, is simply that everyone gets to put it out there. When I wrote a tv column for a daily newspaper I got the satisfaction of an annual mash-up column, one imagining hybrids of existing shows (St. Elfwear: 24 hour Smurf fashion channel). It was a gas to put together, and now everyone gets to do it. And yet...

And yet I don't think anything I've ever found on the net gave me the sense of delight, of happened-upon genius that I remember getting after picking up and leafing through certain 'zines. Remember 'zines? Might they have been to blogs as daguerrotypes were to silver emulsion photography?