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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
Why are we so obsessed with two meteors of human attention colliding in prurient orgasm? Plus: Will Prince William become a photo slave or will he be as the wisteria tree?
Jul 13, 2000 | We vicariously live our pathetic lives fawning over celebrities; one minor evening in a star's life is worth the prom nights of a million office temps. That is why celebrity dating habits are so desperately important to the world. When a celebrity relationship crashes and burns, it is an opportunity for us, the lowly peons, to chew our nails and speculate, to worry, to analyze. We probe and dissect public relationships with a vigor, ruthless clarity and wisdom we are wholly unable to apply to our own lives or personal dating situations.
Why do we love to hear that a star is fucking another star, or has stopped fucking one star to fuck another star? I will tell you: It is celebrity sexual eugenics, the circulating provenance of famous effluvia. It is never about the fat and screwed-up children two stars could potentially produce. It is about the Celebrated Glaring Body rubbing up against the other Celebrated Glaring Body: two meteors of human attention ultracolliding in a supermagnified, prurient orgasm in a fabulous hotel, all the comforts and privileges of the world fanning out around them in a gilded mandala. Frantic applause fills the streets below! A beehive of spontaneous information spreads the news to the hungry world. The ripples are felt by all.
Even if you never watch TV or listen to the radio or read the New York Post, you will know who in celebrityland is fucking who. The information is more all-pervasive than a wondrously prolific mutation of the flu.
The lower human realms of the world assume that all celebrity coitus is superlative -- there can be no bad sex among the famous. Puffy Combs and Jennifer Lopez couldn't possibly have one of those limp, dry, half-drunken, stressed-out fumble sessions that result in shrugs and apologies. They are so publicly hypersexy, always bursting out of their $1,000 tank tops; they must always explode like tigers into each other's wetly electric flesh, scorching the silken couch cushions, jettisoning platinum gobs of celebrity power into each other's faces! Harrrragh! Klong! Muscles from the sky! Rocket-launch columns of shivering white fire! Hosanna! Peace descends. Silvery doughnuts pass blithely behind their dewy, exhausted eyelids. The aliens watch them -- to learn, to approve, to bless. The planets hum with pleasure; a warm eddy twirls through a frozen wasteland and spring begins in the core of a glacier.
Which brings me to the topic of Russell Crowe. Nothing in the New York Post recently has made my spleen curl and burn more than the revealing of the snog 'n' tickle "relationship" between Crowe and "actress" Meg Ryan. Crowe is a beer-swilling Aussie cocksmith, a Real Man, a thinking woman's bastard, manly as beef is meat. Somehow, the thought of all that wonderful manliness paying all that manly attention to a sniveling, cynical, cabbage-headed, smirking, inflatable, pseudo-childlike, store-bought half-woman like the underwhelming Ryan is biblically depressing.
Crowe should be using his powers for good, not evil, and picking on some woman who invokes awe and fear. Naomi Wolfe, for example. Some gorgeous Oxford biochemist. Michelle Yeoh. Somebody who kicks ass. Janeane Garofalo. Anybody but Meg Fucking Ryan. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad. The hubris of Crowe has somehow led to his tragically finding Ryan comestible, indicating the trail of corrosion left by some kind of advanced brain worm. Perhaps next year he will quit acting and, like Caligula, wage war against Poseidon, God of the Sea, shouting on the beach in a vein-popping frenzy.
Apropos of advanced brain worms, Poseidon and a heady analysis of celebrity dating tragedies, one of the foremost topics of late is the saddest, as it carries with it a vile upset of cultural mythology. The Greatest Surfer the World Has Ever Known, Kelly Slater, has debased himself utterly, down, down, down into the blackened pit of shame by first allowing Pamela "His Tragic Flaw" Anderson into his life at all, then allowing her back into his life after a horrifically unceremonious dumping and then -- the ultimate indignity -- being dumped again, so that Anderson could run off and hog-snog with male model Marcus Schenkenberg.
What corruption of fate allows a glorious Ubermensch like Slater to end up as the personal whipping poodle of a badly used, Jayne Mansfield retread such as Anderson? The fans have been beating their heads, keening, rending their garments. How can we live meaningful lives in accordance with ideas of our grander destiny when our heroes are hopelessly pussy-whipped by disingenuous slags?
Perhaps he didn't burn her forearms with the ends of his cigarettes enough. Perhaps he didn't slap her in front of her friends. Perhaps it was as simple as hair; Slater, in a drastic countermeasure toward his receding hairline, shaved his head. Perhaps La Anderson couldn't be seen with a man without a full head of hair and brilliantine and little rubber bands and such. It was a bad ending to a bad tale -- our finest, purest waterman dashed into the rocks, lured by the wanton shrieking of the vile rock 'n' roll siren, whom we've all seen naked and penetrated in at least two orifices. The succubus sucked him under. We are all the losers, the untouchable children of war.
There is only one hope. God, let Ben Affleck find true love. Let her be wise and strong. Let her be sufficiently terrible to avenge the whole Gwyneth Paltrow thing, somehow. Then, balance shall perhaps be restored.
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