“Is this the portal to idol worship or merely the doors of perception?”
In this week’s LA CityBeat I have a riff on fame, delusion, precocity, Facebook, and death. Also how one must never, ever confuse Anna Nicole Smith with Marilyn Monroe, and nothing always ammounts to nothing no matter how heavily it may be promoted.
(The Harold Lloyd photo was lifted from Tom Sutpen)
The secret word is Nembutal
.JPG)
3 comments:
ammounts? is that some kind of ordnance?
Okay, so I make fucking typos. What do you want? A refund?
About your article on Anna Nicole Smith: File this one under shooting fish in a barrel. (Credit due for a well written piece; it’s the assessment I disagree with.)
Anna Nicole Smith should come as no surprise: She is the inevitable result of a media-fueled, fame-worshiping culture. This also made her—pardon the expression—a big, and much too easy, target. You claim her unworthy fame, I disagree. I’d argue her fame was the result of considerable genius. If her fame was based (almost) entirely on her bounteously proportioned, blondenized, and mythic good looks, so what? Her personality was certainly worthy to the task. The wages of fame make a majority of us lesser souls poorly suited to serve, not so with ANS. Her talent was fame itself and it’d be hard to argue she every leering eyeful of it. Lack of grace and elegance is no barrier to the public eye, is it? If her fame was based on insubstantiality, so what? As if that hardly matters. She completely sacrificed herself on its altar. The train wreck spectacle she made of herself only gave her more buoyancy and shelf life. If that ain't dues, what is?
She was a troubled soul who found a glorious reward in the glow of public attention. Maybe in the end her troubles finally overwhelmed her. She struggled, and even embarrassed herself, but did as well as could be expected given the resources at her disposal.
Of course, she was no Marilyn Monroe; Time will sort that out soon enough.
Post a Comment