The omnipresent Crooner: an era wearing his name and face

texture · UNDATED (standing, Subsidized era through YDAU)

• When: UNDATED — standing cultural condition across the Subsidized era into the YDAU present
• What: Gentle saturates the world he made without ever entering it. The period of the TV-advertising collapse "more or less overlapp[ed] with the waxing of the Gentle Era and Experialist Reconfiguration"; the InterLace home-viewing order is glossed as a "Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forché. Total freedom, privacy, choice." At street level he is a brand: on the 11-Nov night walk Randy Lenz finds it "myriadly ironic" how the Famous Crooner's promise to Clean Up Our Urban Cities has come to be kept, and a Boston prosthesis-vendor hawks "A.D.A.-Approved Xero-Lube Saliva Substitute with a confabulated celeb-endorsement from J. Gentle F. Crooner on it" (the pitch that, in Lenz's telling, ends with the vendor's map eliminated); Don Gately's basement Staff bedroom wall carries a cut-out celebrity photo of "U.S. Head of State Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, on stage, wearing velour, twirling a mike," from the pre-toupee Vegas days — the image a dying wraith picks up and brandishes. Even the E.T.A. dining hall's annual ritual is him: much "cracking wise and baritone mimicry of a President roundly disliked for over two terms now."