The Racket #34 : CELEBRITY w/ Leland Cheuk
They are just like us.
I was recently looking at the cover of a People magazine while waiting in line at a grocery store. I have waited in lines at grocery stores since I was a child and I have always been drawn to the glossy smear of blinding teeth and sun-baked skin that is the cover of a People magazine. It is no different now, but it is different, because from the age of nine or ten or fifteen to the age of thirty or thirty five or thirty seven (what a blur it has become), I would look at the covers of a People magazine and they would mean something. Not because the glossy rags of my youth featured anything but drivel painted large, but because the faces staring off of them were people I recognized, people I'd see on television or on the movie screen or on the front page of a newspaper.
Cut to now, cut to my dead-eyed and staring at a People magazine in the check-out line for at a Safeway and I do not recognize a single face staring off it. And it isn't just that the faces that are peering out from their well-manicured gardens perfectly captured in the dappled sunlight are unrecognizable but whatever they are a part of means nothing to me now as well. Their television show or their film ensemble or the famous person they slept with, these are just words, blank, empty words glowingly spattered against a photo collage. Staring at a People (or an Us or a Star) is like looking into a void.
It makes sense to me, our ability to make a human being (or a cat or a monkey or an inanimate object) has become so splintered. We are no longer at the whim of a studio or a record label or an art gallery, because we are at the whim of the internet, of social media, of the vast, heavy hand of public opinion. We now exist in a world without content boundaries outside of what you, personally, can stomach, and without boundaries, without guidance, without curation, anything and everything is always on display. And that which is on display can and will become a focal point for a large group of people. A focal point becomes a trend and a trend becomes an arrow and an arrow points to whatever will, briefly, be the next thing we deem to be famous.
Where in the past, celebrity brought with it an assumption of a skill or an ability (even if that ability was deftly holding a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other) today, celebrity simply means whatever it is you've done (good, bad, fucking disgusting) has reached enough eyes, garnered enough comments and likes and thumbs and smiles and hand claps and prayer hands and hearts, that it has acquired a cyber-weight and with weight, credibility and with credibility some modicum of fame. And thus a magazine in a grocery store and a confused 40 year old staring into a shiny void, trying to figure out whatever happened to Brad Pitt.
This isn't good or bad or anything between, it just is like so many other things the outcome of a world suddenly given the freedom to anonymously critique from the sidelines, a social order flattened into non-existence, a society halfway off the tracks gleefully hurtling towards the great unknown. The blinders of content have been ripped from our faces and we are all just trying to catch a breath as it all surges around us. We've pulled down the gatekeepers and now anyone and everyone and anything can get their fifteen-seconds of fame.
But if everyone can be a celebrity, then is anyone really a celebrity? Are our days of idolization on a mass scale long dead? Is the concept of fame already scattering in the wind? Yes, probably, who cares? The internet churns and we idly grab at the shiniest object that bobs to the surface.
And this is what I think as a cashier who may not exist in five years takes the card from my hand that replaced the money I once used and I take my groceries from a store that is slowly being subverted by websites and delivery drivers who will one day be drones piloted by robots in a building designed by a computer.
