Archive for the ‘celebrity culture’ tag
The Downfall of Celebrity Publications #
Thou Ms. Traister is far more fond of celebrity garbage than I think is healthy, she does have a few worthwhile things to say on topic.
How could readers not become desensitized, and more than a little fatigued, especially when the plot twists stopped being fun, or funny, or anything other than scary and sad, even on the harshest of schadenfreude scales.
Add to this the fact that as the market for celebrity gossip grew, so did the number of celebrities. Anyone — chefs and designers and models and weight-loss champions, Gossip Girls and Real Housewives — can be famous, and picking up an US Weekly no longer guarantees a visit with a cast of familiar characters, but a roster of mysterious names: Minka Kelly, Benji Madden, Stacy Keibler — who the hell are these people and what are they doing in my imagined celebrity neighborhood?
“Page Six” Gets Personal #
McSweeney’s walks a fine line between being entertaining and annoying. This one falls firmly on the entertaining side of that line.
Brad Pitt is reportedly getting irritated by a sound Angelina Jolie sometimes makes when she chews food … Cuba Gooding Jr. has stopped following college basketball … Lucy Liu is lukewarm about this season’s Tuesday-night prime-time offerings … My friend Tony isn’t a fan of calamari, it was revealed on Saturday at our local Olive Garden … Tobey Maguire still occasionally thinks about his second-grade tormentor Jason Higgins …
An Undergrad Fiction Workshop #
As you may know, Esquire has created something of a sensation by fictionalizing the last days of Heath Ledger’s life. I haven’t read it, and don’t intend to. But I liked what Vulture did with it:
Professor Betts: Now we have a short story by Ms. Taddeo, called “The Last Days of Heath Ledger.” It’s a fictionalized account of the death of a famous movie star.
Ginger: I didn’t get it?
Professor Betts: What do you mean?
Ginger: Like, the whole thing? He dies, but he keeps talking? Can you do that? Also, I think in a lot of places she was telling, not showing.
Alex: Well, I thought the entire story was a work of genius. All she had to go on was her imagination and an afternoon spent sitting in the Miro Cafe, and she gave us a brilliant look inside the mind of a guy who can pick up any girl he wants but still resents his fans!
On Being a Bad Mother #
Ayelet Waldman recent New York piece about Britney Spears and the “bad mommy brigade” is a good one.
I feel enough of Spears’s pain to find myself wondering where this obsession with archetypal manifestations of maternal evil comes from. From Jocasta to Joan Crawford, we’ve always been both terrified and titillated by the Bad Mother. But I can’t help but feel that there is something especially sharpened and hysterical about contemporary Bad Mother vitriol. […]
By defining for us the kind of mother we’re not, the Bad Mother makes it easier for us to live with what we are. We may be discontented and irritable, we may snap after the 67th knock-knock joke, our kids may watch three hours of television a day, we may have just celebrated the second anniversary of the last time we had sex, we may have forgotten to pack a snack, or, God forbid, bought one replete with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, we may yank on our daughters’ ponytails while we’re combing their hair, but at least we’re not Britney Spears.