From Coolspotters, a new site that tracks celebrity use of brands and fashion, here's a list of celebs that use an iPhone, including Heidi Klum, Karl Rove, Paris Hilton, and, er, Steve Jobs. (via mike davidson)
In the late '90s, pop-culture historian Bill Geerhart had a little too much time on his hands and a surfeit of stamps. So, for his own entertainment, the then-unemployed thirtysomething launched a letter-writing campaign to some of the most powerful and infamous figures in the country, posing as a curious 10-year-old named Billy.
He wrote to Charles Manson, Ted Kacynzski, and Dick Cheney, among others...and they wrote back. Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, wrote back on his own personalized letterhead. (thx, andrew)
Some advice from Michael J. Fox.
No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me -- that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.
And a bunch of other stuff that's surprisingly candid and good.
The last episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras has a message concerning celebrity and television:
"The Victorian freak show never went away," Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the "Extras" final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. "Now it's called 'Big Brother' or 'American Idol,' where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires."
To the networks, he says: "You can't wash your hands of this. You can't keep going, 'Oh, it's exploitation, but it's what the public wants.' No."
To the audience watching at home, he says: "Shame on you. And shame on me. I'm the worst of all. Cause I'm one of these people that goes, 'I'm an entertainer, it's in my blood.' Yeah, it's in my blood because a real job's too hard."
These half-n-half celebrity face mashups are unsettling. "The right half of a face has to be from one celebrity and the left half from another." The Bill/Hillary and the Cruise/Holmes ones are especially good.
Paris Hilton released from jail
Early this morning, Paris Hilton was released from jail after serving a 23-day sentence for violating her probation on a prior conviction for reckless driving. Here's a photo taken soon after her release:
We see photos of celebrities smiling in public all the time, at movie openings, at awards shows, on stage, on TV, on red carpets...anywhere there's a camera waiting to capture a public image. Hilton in particular is known for smiling in public, chin down and looking up to the right. But the above photo is the first time she's ever looked genuinely happy, an authentic smile. Never have all those smiling celebrity photos -- and the purposes behind them -- looked so phony.
Interesting hypothesis: young Hollywood starlets are dieting to retain exaggerated child-like features that, evolutionarily speaking, are more attractive to adults. The technical term for this is neoteny.
Cockney rhyming slang meets celebrity namedropping. "I left my Clare Rayners down the Fatboy Slim so I was late for the Basil Fawlty. The Andy McNab cost me an Ayrton Senna but it didn't stop me getting the Britney Spears in. Next thing you know it turned into a Gary Player and I was off my Chevy Chase."
Paul Schmelzer's project to collect autographs of his (Paul's) name from famous people. So far, he's got scrawls from David Sedaris, Yoko Ono, Frank Gehry, and Pat Buchanan, but has been turned down by Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Death in the celebrity age
Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers? Because I sure am. Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there's more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc. A year's worth of guests on Hollywood Squares...there's 2300 people right there that probably wouldn't have been famous in 1953, and that's just one show.
Frankly, I don't know how we're all going to handle this. Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day...and probably even more than one a day. And that's just you...many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day? As members of the human species, we're used to dealing with the death of people we "know" in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?
Adam Greenfield sights a celebrity hero in New York. "We finished up our meal, we retrieved our bikes, and we rode away, into the ongoing rush and joy of a life given to me in large measure by the unhappy-looking man at the table behind us."
Man supposedly caught cheating with Cameron Diaz responds to the press coverage on his weblog. "I told my wife, 'One of the reasons this is so stupid is because you know that if I was hooking up with [Cameron Diaz] you'd have been the first one I high-fived.'"
