This article was too mean for the HuffPo! Guess you can't piss off those celebs too much...
Mariah Carey shuffles uneasily up to the podium with the confidence of someone who knows that given the chance, we would snap the sinews off her bones and consume them. We might spend a considerable amount of time rooting through layers of fat to get to said sinews, but we would persevere. Her piggy little body is encased in black glittery couture that hinders her movements, giving her the air of a constipated mermaid. But Carey is sublime, radiant -- seemingly ignorant that she walks like someone who has been brutally sodomized by a kebab.
Footage of
Casey Johnson is unearthed, talking to an interviewer about the impending adoption (of her now motherless) three year-old Kazakhstani daughter. Her face is petrified, frozen by juvederm and botox, two sluglike, injected life-preservers-that-used-to-be-lips mumbling inanities about the "billions of orphans out there who need
homes".
As celebs take to twitter to bestow upon their minions heartfelt pearls of wisdom dredged up from the fog of their pharmaceutically-fucked brains, the pantomime of celebrity is played out elsewhere, in
Thailand with those who don't-give-a-flying, in artfully-posed
shots of horror and despair upon yachts in St Barts, in pressing questions about
hair extensions and other issues of
vital importance.
Samantha Ronson writes (on twitter, of course, celebs don't write anyplace else), that she is "so sick of those 3 letters [RIP], so tired of losing friends to something as senseless as a drug overdose". The problem is not, as Samantha Ronson implies, that drugs are the problem, are the addiction, are the downfall of the Hollywood elite. It's simply that celebrity is the new drug, and the public are their dealers.
Casey Johnson, case in point. For someone as bonkers, as talentless and as fucked-up as Casey Johnson, an unexpected and tragically squalid death has led to the kind of fame and exposure Casey yearned for most of her life. It must suck
just to be a heiress when all your friends have their own reality show. The front page articles and reams of twitter eulogies provoked by her death are a publicist's dream. Her fiance, Tila Tequila, seems to be selflessly riding the death train on her behalf, constantly asking for 'privacy' on her twitter account, before twittering yet again (about her grief and need for privacy), and then giving interviews to TMZ (during this same period of privacy and mourning) about her deep and profound grief. She follows this up with a very public twitter catfight with the reptilian Perez Hilton about her 'personal loss' and his lack of respect for this.
Reality shows and TMZ and twitter and trashy weeklies have reduced celebrity to whichever car crash looks the most brutal, has the most victims. Rarely do we pick up a magazine or trawl through the internet to look for a well-balanced, successful person in the entertainment industry who has a happy marriage, lives in a modest, subdued mansion, has respectable accolades, a stable career, loving friends, a loathing for plastic surgery and an enjoyment of the simple pleasures in life, like walking through the garden or shopping at Trader Joe's. Fuck these people. They can have their Oscars and we'll clap them on the back, but their stability is boring. These people survive the Hollywood cesspit because they have the talent and the contentment to ride through it. They are probably happy, relatively at peace with the world, and rarely feel the need to reassure us of this fact in print. They are, let us say, the normal enjoying the privilege of stardom without succumbing to the small print of celebrity. These people exist to star in great movies, direct and produce amazing films, write superb books - they are Julianne Moore, Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Scott Rudin, Scorsese, Aronofsky, Toni Morrison to name but a few - and then fade away into their private lives, leading the path of exposure clear for the hungry and the talentless.
The hunger of celebrity is astounding. If celebrities were people (they are not) they would have a spiritual eating disorder, constantly chowing down on attention to feed their starving souls. The ego is bulimic. It swallows attention, it vomits it right back up again, leaving a foul taste in the mouth. It allows Mariah Carey to stand on a podium looking like a fool spouting inane crap in the bizarre conviction that anyone is interested. We are. It leads to public tantrums and breakdowns and self-inflicted tragedies, with a helpful tip-off to the baying pack of paparazzi who are always hanging around waiting for the publicists to call. These same 'celebs' complain bitterly about the price of fame, how they are hounded by the public and the paps, because acting like they didn't pre-arrange that photo opp gives off the impression that they aren't hungry. No one wants to
look hungry. If you look hungry you end up where Casey Johnson is - famous for being dead - or where Tila Tequila is - famous for being nearly married to a rich dead person - and even though that's better than nothing, it's not
ideal. It'd be better to be famous for being famous and talented when you're young, then screwing up, and then reinventing yourself with a critically acclaimed film - a la Mickey Rourke. Or being famous and talented when you're young, screwing up, and then reinventing yourself by adopting third-world children (because America doesn't have any
eligible kids for adoption, right?)
For the talentless, selling one's soul for fame in whatever goddamn way possible is probably the most feasible route. The tools for shameless exposure are numerous: twitter,
Us Weekly,
rehab for drug/sex addiction,
fucking a married celeb, or a
stint on a reality show.
I'm so over being told that, as a young writer in Hollywood, I should do a shitty reality show to 'gain some exposure'. I should hang out with the 'right' people, frequent the Chateau, and never reveal my pitiful finances to the world lest I appear too hungry. I should perhaps, for guaranteed career advancement, develop a crack / oxycontin habit and freeze my face into a permanent expression of 'oops! not that hole!' so that no one knows I am actually
thirty.
I don't buy the shit mags. I don't give a fuck about the crazies. I don't click on the links to watch the videos of these useless people burbling about themselves and wasting my time. I refuse to be an enabler of these idiots who invariably die in bed alone. I resist absolutely the urge to be part of the celebrity addiction.
Does this article count as a relapse?
