Why You Cried When George Michael Died. Or Maybe You Didn't.

[mallorys_camera]

It isn’t as though more celebrities died in 2016.

It’s that there are more celebrities. And hey! they gotta die sometime.

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In 2013, Wired Magazine actually attempted to quantify the number of famous people on the planet. They somehow came up with the figure 0.000086, but of course, that’s 0.000086 of seven billion, which works out to approximately 600,000.

Six hundred thousand celebrities!

That number is probably higher today.

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What is a celebrity?

The word was originally a synonym for fame

And then it became an anthropomorphization for someone who possesses fame.

Thus a “celebrity,” in the most essential sense, is someone who exerts influence by being famous. He or she may have become famous through various accomplishments – movie roles, political offices, polio cures – but that accomplishment is not what determines celebrity status and increasingly, is actually irrelevant to celebrity status.

So what does determine celebrity status?

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In 1994, I wrote an article titled "Elvis sighted in ancient Rome!" This piece, published in the relatively obscure Whole Earth Review, generated a fair amount of traction. For several weeks after its publication, national radio shows clamored to get interviews with me. This was considerably post-Liz-and-Dick – which we enlightened anthropologists from the planet Mars now recognize as the first manifestation of unadulterated “celebrity” in modern times – but before the Internet had become a state-of-the-art celebrity stamping machine. The National Enquirer was still held in contempt by most intellectuals, and my cheerful admission that not only did I study it scrupulously every week but that I also studied The Globe and Star immediately made me a suspicious character to the eggheads who were interviewing me.

“Do you read People?” one interviewer asked me.

“Never!” I said. “They just take National Enquirer stories and spruce up the adjectives. They don’t even pay for their stories!”

Of course, a couple of months later, I was working for People.

My thesis was very simple: Celebrities have psychological power because they key into collective archetypes. These archetypes represent niches that are embedded into some deep substrate of ontological thought. Liz Taylor is only the most recent embodiment of Helen of Troy. Elvis is a just another reboot of those beautiful Greek boys who died staring at themselves in reflecting surfaces and who, oddly, inevitably, were transformed into flowers.

You wanna template for contemporary culture? Read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Of course, this thesis wasn’t necessarily original to me: Sexual Personae had already been published. I was and remain a big Camille Paglia fan: Even when she’s pigheaded, which she is a significant portion of the time, Paglia is always interesting. Even enlightening.

But it was something I’d been musing on my entire life, long before I encountered Paglia.

Four things got me through my exceedingly painful childhood and adolescence: LSD, Victorian and neo-Victorian British literature, movie magazines, and my obsession with and encyclopedic knowledge of Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology.

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Browsing the Internet feels intimate. There you sit in some kind of reverie, engaging in one-on-one communion with your computer/iPad/smartphone/whatever. It’s hard to shake the subconscious belief that what you’re reading, watching, hearing on that little LED screen isn’t your own mind talking back to you. Your own weird little accretion of interests and obsessions made manifest.

When all is said and done, the Internet isn’t a channel for the dissemination of information or a facilitator of human communication. No. It’s a tremendously efficient niche-marketing engine.

And celebrity, is the ultimate niche market.

So, of course, celebrity is gonna multiply in the age of the Internet.

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All of which is a very longwinded way of saying that while George Michael’s demise left me completely unmoved, Carrie Fisher’s death made me sad.

The George Michael niche: Male, British, gay, cheesy, drugs, 1980s, hips, thrust, lewd encounters in public lavatories, confusion with Boy George –

The Carrie Fisher niche: Liz and Eddie, Liz and Dick, female, Star Wars, writer, wit, drugs, When Harry Met Sally, romantic disappointments, gallantry, service animal –

Well. I think you can see which side of the fence I'd come down on.

###

In other news, snowcapalypse forecast for tomorrow, starting perhaps as early as this very afternoon.

Yesterday, it was 60 degrees out! I went for a longish hike since I’m still feeling too bloated from Christmas sweets to actively participate in raising my heart rate much over 100 beats per minute.

It was very pretty out. Springlike, you might say. I felt like a little battery, storing up as much radiant solar energy as possible. This time of year is very hard for me, so-o-o dark.

I was supposed to meet up with ____ tomorrow, so he could tell me all about his latest romantic misadventures, but snowstorm? I ain’t leaving the casa! Not even to be taken out to dinner at the incredibly expensive Bistro restaurant in Rhinebeck.

Comments

[chochiyo-sama.livejournal.com]

I cried for Leonard Cohen.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Leonard Cohen got me, too.

[therobertpaul.livejournal.com]

Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time. - Carrie Fisher.

I think, in regard to celebrity deaths, the next 20 years are going to be like 2016. There are a lot of famous people born during the baby boom. These are the people many of us "grew up with."

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Much as I like Carrie, her quotes are generally pithy without being spot on.

Celebrity in the age of the Internet is never obscurity because the Internet is a Wayback machine and there's always some retro revival meme going on, you know?

These are the people many of us "grew up with."

The people who grew up after us have celebrities they grew up with, too; celebrities whose names I don't recognize (I'm happy to say), and those celebrities are gonna die, so it's all gonna be one big charnal house from this point on.

[petrona.livejournal.com]

I feel little connection to celebrities. Some passsings make me sad momentarily but these people aren't part of my everyday life so I don't mourn and wail. Just a bit of sadness. The only exception being Whitney Houston. Even now, my heart aches at the sound of her voice.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Of course, she had an amazing voice; in terms of purity, power, and range, I don't think I've ever heard a better singer. But is it her voice that moves you or her story?

[petrona.livejournal.com]

Her voice for sure. Her history is enthralling. Then there is also my little anecdote of people mistaking me for her over the years. "You're not Whitney? Then you must be her sister!" I think that made her loss a little more personal. Funny enough, I also have the story of being mistaken for Salt of "Salt and Pepa" but I don't feel any connection to her.

[angiereedgarner.livejournal.com]

Good points all.

Seems like the weirdest thing about celebrity deaths is that they die like the rest of us. They were just people, all along.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yes. And when they die on the toilet -- as Elvis did -- it's particularly disturbing.