Like everyone else on the planet, my addiction to celebrity addictions has reached a crescendo. It’s all consuming. Picture a group of four civilized thirtysomethings gathered in the big city for a night of gourmet Thai food and a good catch-up. Two girls, two guys: could be unused Will and Grace footage. Except the hairdresser is leaning intently over a tabloid that features a close up of Michael Jackson’s latest facial bandages. The restaurant manager reaches for Ebony- it’s got the MJ makeover pics, and we decide that’s probably as good as Mikey’s ever gonna look. The actress is circling all the known addicts in Life and Style with a purple Sharpie. The writer muses out loud that even squeaky-clean Nicole K’s husband is an addict. None of that, of course, is anywhere near as important as the story of the century- the public downward spiral of Brit-Brit Spears. This week’s latest chapter has on the edge of our seats: did Brit’s mom really sleep with K-Fed and the new sinister-looking Arab hottie? Cause if it’s true, it would explain just about every damn thing that’s wrong with that poor girl.
Sure, I’ve been worried about my escalating compulsion to watch the latest breaking stories of Hollywood’s filthy fallouts on late night TV. Worse is the guilty knowledge that even the cheapest glossy rag is a waste of my hard-earned money. But I’ve already given up drugs and sugar, so I cut myself some slack- so long as I am still stopping by Book City for fresh Canadian poetry volumes, Discover Magazine, and cookbooks, so long as I am completing my non-celeb writing assignments, so long as I am eating and sleeping and taking regular baths and changing the kitty litter…
I’ve railed against a machine that drove Diana into the long tunnel from which she never emerged. I’ve lambasted a world that thinks it’s okay to take zoom shots of Britney’s panties, which prove, evidently, that the girl is not, today at least, pregnant with Adnan’s baby. But I’ve also defended the insatiable public appetite for destruction, for who wore what when and where, who took what drug at which party, and who is zooming whom. I agree with Camille Paglia, though I am not nearly so articulate as she, that the stars are the stars: humans always have a pantheon of gods and goddesses, from antiquity into the modern world, who reach unknown heights and plunge to sordid deaths. Greco-Roman mythology reads like the rags read today: Hercules was insane and murdered his wife and children. Arachne hanged herself. Zeus kills Semele while Dionysus is still in her womb. Murder, suicide, madness, incest, torture, revenge, drugs, secrets, prostitution: it’s all there, and it’s there in every mythology of the world, not just the much-studied classics. It is no mistake that Diana is another name for Artemis, Goddess of the moon, the hunter and the hunted one. Celebrity is our modern day mythology. It isn’t going to go away.
Camille said, “Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.” Whether or not it’s reprehensible, it is absolutely human. The gods are half human, and half celestial. With one foot on earth, and the other in heaven or hell, we look to them to play out the psychodramas in our own life, not, as many assume, to revel in their lives because we do not have one of our own. And perhaps this familiar tendency is not unique to humans, but to other animals. I’ve long believed my cats talk about my peeps and me when I’m not home. Surely I’m mad, but scientists have discovered that dolphins gossip- no joke. See, I told you I’m still reading some science here and there!
Perhaps at this point in history, post-Diana, where paparazzi is a household word and a lucrative career choice, where we are practically standing in gas-station bathrooms with a woman named Britney that we don’t even know, it would be a good time to stop berating ourselves for our very human hunger and see if we can create a future direction for our celebrity addiction. Can awareness of our need for this kind of theatre help us create a better world?
We feel guilty for our rabid obsessions with the mad, the mental, and the maxed-out. We shake our heads and say, ‘Why can’t they leave that poor little girl alone?” The nastier among us may think, “Crazy rich bitch, who cares.” I’m not down with that- though I might trade in my humble rental for a couple of million, I’m sure that a few good friends and a few peaceful hours to read a novel might be everything in the world that Britney Spears wants tonight. Still, if her world changed tonight, if she left her house and there was nobody outside, no cameras flashing, no headlines, the shock would kill her. We malign her for seeking out that attention, but we are all victims of our environment. The Amish children who leave go back home for the most part. People commit suicide when they lose a shitty dead-end job they’ve been grumbling about for years. We know what we know. Britney knows nothing else. It is not her fault that she has fed on the flash and the adrenaline for so long.
Regardless, the media vulture is not going to go away. If it did, Britney Spears would drop dead. It seems we are waiting with bated breath for that to happen- there is more than one contest up and running where whoever guesses the date and time of that event wins. Humans are a corrupt and bloodthirsty lot. We love a car crash; we love a bullfight, boxing, wrestling, and movies like Hostel. We love war. We are greedy and fat and neurotic and we beat our wives and children. We keep slaves and we sell our daughters. This bloodthirstiness is nothing new. It’s a given. I find it horrible and disgusting and sick and sad, but it has been true from the very beginning. While I applaud every single action anyone makes toward peace, goodwill, equality, generosity, and compassion, none of these noble gestures erase the fact that we are rotten to the core. We can’t afford to be sentimentalists: realism gives us a better foothold for change. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And even that glory, if you learn about Him in the Bible, is a vicious, savage glory, warmongering and smiting left and right.
Perhaps there is the other side to the story. The side that has to follow every anguished cry of Our Lady of Madness because her cry is ours. Perhaps we are hoping for her to ‘get help’ because it illustrates our own struggle, the fumble to find ecstasy, or just peace of mind for crying out loud. In the midst of success, we may feel isolated. In the midst of marriage, we may be terrified we made a poor choice. We may fear our parenting skills. We may be scared of our drug use. All these stories do is play out on a large screen scale the same trials and woes we all have. From what to wear to dinner, to whether or not this week’s shrink appointment is going to make a rat’s ass of difference to the astonishing emptiness we feel. Britney was crying in the chapel, and so are we.
While the narrow philosophies I was raised with would tediously refer to Hollywood as ‘glorifying sin’, perhaps instead it illuminates the best and worst of our obsessions. We sneer this week about how ‘everyone’s going to rehab since Heath jumped ship.” Did you ever think that the public travails of Anna Nicole Smith and Lindsay Lohan made it amazingly easy for the rest of the world to start tossing up the word ‘addiction’? I think it’s amazing that in the fall out of this particular tempest- the unexpected death of a very talented actor, and our fear that brilliant new songstress Amy Winehouse is at the edge of that abyss, people are looking at their own issues and saying “no more bullshit. I’m going into rehab.” We can only try. Trying is everything. Maybe rehab won’t work out for Winehouse, or for Eva Mendes, or for Delta Burke. But maybe it will. Maybe Winehouse hopes to make an even better album instead of dying. I sure hope it works out for her because I’d love to hear it.
The thing is, there is no specific solution. It’s romantic and naïve to think humans have ever had one. We are incredibly contradictory, and though solutions have been thrown around since the beginning of time, (some of these bright ideas have included exterminating the race of enemies, bringing slaves to build our countries, torturing mental patients, castrating women…) we don’t have any fucking solutions. We only have our tricky history of violence and obsession, mixed with our amazing contributions and discoveries. We will never evolve to our full potential, because, just as technology has made us into magicians who can chat over breakfast with friends across the world, our natural greed has scourged the earth. On the smaller scale, we must have witnessed in our own life that sometimes finding Jesus worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes therapy or rehab worked, but sometimes we lost the fight and buried a loved one. Sometimes a new medical breakthrough saved the life of our child or gave us back mobility. Sometimes it didn’t, and helpless, we watched cancer or AIDS or diabetes take someone from us.
We can’t know how things will work out. It isn’t personal- when a hurricane sweeps through a city and demolishes it, it isn’t personal. I wasn’t a better person just because the hurricanes have not so far struck Toronto. You aren’t a better person than Britney just because you take your Prozac like a good little girl. Don’t be so sure that nobody at your church knows about your secrets. They do: if only because they share them.
It all takes us back to square one. We are going to do what we are going to do. Good and evil will always rival inside of us, a tug of war that never finds resolution. So that means we keep on striving to become better, but don’t fall off an imaginary pedestal when things- big surprise- don’t necessarily work out. We can’t stop war, but we keep trying because it’s the right thing to do. We can’t stop every violence or poverty in the world, every disease or despairing heart, but we can help one child, we can give one homeless man a banana and a coffee. We can’t win over all of our bad habits, but we can probably change a few of them. We can’t eradicate all of the darkness inside of us, but we can strive for light. After all, as Oprah said, to do less than your best is a sin.
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Lorette C. Luzajic
I hope you will visit my site above and explore my writing. If you think your friend will like me, please pass me on! You can order my poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos online through indigo or amazon.
Myths of the World: a Thematic Encyclopedia by Michael Jordan
January 13, 2008
Myths of the World by Michael Jordan was disarming, if only because it made me recall a nerdy youth, when I took to bed ill for the sheer luxury of reading encyclopedias. I like books I don’t necessarily have to read back to back, start to finish. Here, I could crawl under the blanket and learn more about the Ganesh statue a friend blessed me with, or read the important highlights of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Myths of the World: a Thematic Encyclopedia groups global stories, as the title states, in themes. It makes for fascinating reading in clusters, comparing lore of different cultures, on the big questions of humanity like love, apocalypse, childhood, morality, and creation.
While it certainly is not exhaustive, this nifty collection of stories does span diverse continent, and does not get stuck in that proverbial pit where the fascinating Greco-Roman mythology is the only interesting kind, so we do actually encounter a whole world. Spanning Japan, Polynesia, early America, Nordic, Celtic, African, Siberian, and more.
Blessedly, the writing never gets that cheesy new-agey lilt to it, and sounds pragmatically and curiously anthropological, without sternly erasing any enchanted beliefs we do have. And amazingly we find humour in all eras and places on earth. There’s even a myth from Siberia about The Diarrhea Man.
Myths of the World: A Thematic Encyclopedia by Michael Jordan,
Kyle Cathie Ltd, London, England, 1993
Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
Visit my other blog: thegirlcanwrite.wordpress.com
Feud of the Gods
December 18, 2007
I missed what is now old news: Moby’s declaration of love to Eminem, after years of feuding between them over whether or not Moby’s music should be called “techno.” Seems the yappy rapper impressed the lily-livered sage with his anti-Bush rhetoric. I’ve been a fan of Moby’s music for a long time, but spent 2007 hopping around to Eminem and dreaming up ways that we could get together. Eminem used to offend me, too, and now I just can’t get enough of his dynamite. I think Moby is catching on, too, as he ages. Some gods are more theatrical, some more solemn. Each has his place. Britney and Kevin? Elton and Diana? Madonna and the rest? It’s just the feud of the gods.
Now Moby is more famous for his one minute on last week’s Daily Ten than he is for his baldness, unorthodox ethical life, and 20 years of innovative, exquisite music. “I love Eminem, and I decided if I’m gonna have feuds in the future they’re not gonna be with the most successful musician on the planet, who travels with people who have guns.”
Moby was not, of course, the only queer or woman to take offense at Eminem’s fag and bitch jabbery. Whole armies of human rights advocates were up in arms. So was Boy George.
Then again, Boy George and Elton John both made public their distaste for their own mother, The Madonna. Weird. It was just plain bizarre for Elton to poopoo Madonna’s live shows for lip-synching. Consider that if I am naked, dancing aerobically on the roof with acrobats and drummers, flying through the air, I may have to lip-synch here and there. But everyone knows Madonna does all the work that is humanly possible, all the time.
You would also expect a skinny white boy like Eminem to very realistically diss fags the way many cultural groups do- most certainly his demographic. It was refreshing to see Elton John get it right for once and join with Em at those infamous Grammy awards of yesteryear as if to say, “can’t we all just get along?”
I’m the quintessential fruit fly, born that way in my own way, and the view from here is this: Elton John performing with Eminem is building a bridge the way nothing else could be. Props to both parties for showing the truth: that showbiz is just showbiz. You gotta read behind the scenes. Music makes a world where Eminem and Elton can merge audiences in peace. In the Madonna era, we are the champions.
Hilarious that some of these same girls have got too big for their britches. That they dared to lash out publicly at Madonna! Oh, keep it to yourself. I mean, come on, Madonna made a world where I can spend my life in clubs with the fiercest and the finest. I can go to gay church on Sunday and watch Will and Grace with my best friends and their shih tzu Lola. I can drink frosted crantinis and still pick up men, because everyone mingles now like one big happy family. And those crantini girls? They’re a really married couple, because I live in an awesome country that affords my friends to make the same marital complications that I’m allowed. Elton was still in the closet until Madonna let him out. I mean, wow, ELTON JOHN tried to pass himself off as straight- kind of like Jodi Foster. Imagine.
So what was what’s his name? Yes, war is stupid, my silly bear. That’s why Eminem and Madonna put out powerhouse songs like Square Dance and American Life. So what was your sketch, honey? Oh, right- Madonna doesn’t do her own accounts and she should have dissed Eminem for saying ‘fag’ instead of giving torch to free speech.
Since when do we only hear what we want to hear? How little can we then know about human nature and behaviour? Besides, Georgia you’re a big girl now. You’re allowed to walk on the streets with those eyebrows without getting killed.
Here’s the deal: whatever our special subgroup, whatever our unique identity markers, we’re going to have to endure some blatantly irritating stories and insinuations, but we also get to tell ours. We MUST fight to keep free speech, not fight to censor the speech of someone we don’t like. It riles me up how much we take for granted: it wasn’t too long ago that I could not vote because of my pretty little head. I don’t have to be married or live as a man in order to paint. I might hear “bitch!” as I walk down the street. Bring it on. But don’t send me to a country where I would go to jail for showing my ankles. Come on, George, you should be going up to the guy and asking if he wants to talk about it, for crying out loud. Do you think there are ghetto kids home in from the streets, crying because Tupac said nigger?
The thing is, ladies, we need Madonna to remind us, like the great Mother that she is to all, that though gay music is indeed among her inspirations, the rest of the world is still breeder. And in that world is also eroticism, and oppression, and sorrow, and beauty, and those worlds must also tell their stories. I’m very happy to be among the shiniest gems in this city, but at some point I am also one of those fine breeder specimens (with a twist, of course!) with unique needs and stories of my own.
The point is, Georgie Girl, Eminem and Madonna are both a zillion trillion kabatetrillion times more spectacular, creative, talented, smart, and more adept at perceiving the world around them than you will ever be. Yeah, it was a blow to me as well, and I just had to accept that I will never be as celebrated as Madonna! And as soon as I understood that we have to have teachers, the easier it got for me to be humble. What could we learn if we were at the top of our game? Even Madonna learns, gleans, muses over and mulls. She knows she is not the only player in showbiz, even if she is the Lady Messiah.
Besides, if I were relegated to a life of nothing but the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, I’d shoot myself in the eye. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the Pet Shop Boys are underrated and love their glossy, detached sardonicism. And Erasure is so happy and angelic, a true flame of positive energy making. But once in a while I’m going to have to mate. And when that happens, it’s either smoldering with Nina Simone’s blues, or Led Zeppelin maxed up on volume, or, well, Madonna’s Bedtime Stories.
I knew Moby was smart enough to come around, and that he’d come to agree to disagree and offer his respect. I’m not saying you have to love Eminem just because I suddenly do. I was very much of that mindset that I couldn’t tolerate the word ‘bitch’ and hence, I missed out on a lot. Then I figured it out. I do not have to endorse a certain headset toward any group just because I am capable of listening to elements of those groups through their cultural markers like music, film, art. But I sure as hell have to give props where props are due, and allow you space and audience to say your piece, so that I can also have mine.
Sigh- the last man I seriously considered running away with, the rippling army brat slash firefighter- expressed some surprise that someone of my awesome intellectual fortitude would give a flying flick about what Paris was wearing and whether Eminem’s 20 year relationship with his foster sister/wife was going to last.
Well, I wasn’t going to go anywhere if I wasn’t allowed to read my magazines! Most people are a little embarrassed about their celebrity fixations, perhaps guilty because they cannot name a dozen Nobel or Pulitzer winners. But I’m not ashamed. Guerrilla scholar and intelligence of the world, Camille Paglia, is also very candid about her worship of various icons, including Madonna.
By following the triumphs and tragedies of our stage and screen, we are merely re-enacting the great loves and the great feuds of the gods. Like Dionysus and Isis and Ganesh and Pan, like Medusa and Imanja and Thor- our pantheon is rife with vanities, insanities, jealousies, scandals, affairs, murders, adventures, broken hearts. Human beings have a profound need to deduce their world through the scandalous sagas of the gods and goddesses.
Ancient or modern, we do now and always will weave our stories within theirs. Moby and Eminem are just classical archetypes, finding their places after a dramatic rift. The escapades and sagas of the immortals are exactly the theatres we’re re-enacting. Academics can snivel at me, and turn into their soulless diagrams of the epoch of Horus or Tristan and Isolde.
But we live our life in archetypes, and today’s paparazzi zeitgeist is no exception.
November 2007
Lorette C. Luzajic
www.thegirlcanwrite.net
www.literaryaddict.wordpress.com
www.thegirlcanwrite.wordpress.com
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