Word: demigods
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...upstage a CEO keynote that includes a live appearance by George Lucas (playing hookey from the script for the next Star Wars movie), an extended solo by guitar demigod Steve Vai, and the public debut of both the Playstation2 and a digital music player barely bigger than a stick of gum? Apparently it's not that hard - if you have an operating system named after...
There is a red light right at the start. In 1994's Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick movingly, and with the greatest empathy, showed the unlikely and glorious shaping of a poor white boy from the Deep South into a musical demigod. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown; 767 pages; $27.95), the second and concluding volume, is a long coast on the dark downside, a story of ugliness and indulgence and encroaching desperation...
...demigod family had the unthinkable wealth and size to inspire story-tellers. In one of Disraeli's novels a character named St Barbe--a caricature of Thackeray--holds forth in praise of his hosts at an extravagant Rothschild-style dinner: "What a family this is! I had no idea of wealth before! Did you observe the silver plates?" The Rothschilds, however, considered such hospitality an unpleasant duty. Nathan complained to his brothers in 1843, "Here we have stinking balls night after night. You have no idea how sweaty the old French ladies smell after a long waltz...
...musical demigod like yourself, it shouldn't be too difficult to envision your girl's heaven: constant breakdancing showcases of precarious elasticity and acrobatics; trains bombed for everyone to enjoy the bangin'-est graf pieces since the first street kid fiddled with aerosol paint: DJ battles where everybody's at least as nice as Roc Raider: every MC rhymes at least two syllables every couplet...
...their three children in an inexplicable fit of rage and is condemned to perform his superhuman feats as a way of atonement. There's a lesson here, maybe, about the disproportion between human ability--mental or muscular--and our capacity for moral reflection. But in the movie the tormented demigod becomes "Herc," an ultra-buff teenage superstar who adores "Meg" and addresses the Great Goddess Hera as "Mom." Maybe Disney didn't realize that Socrates was forced to drink hemlock for impieties far milder than that. What next? Medea, who kills her own sons after Jason jilts...