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PAN Discussion Group Wednesday August 31st 2005
Subject: Celebrities, Heroes, and Gilded Turds

Did you know there is a celebrity shortage? Here are some tips on qualifying.

October 11, 2002, 9:00 a.m.

An Undeserved Altar

Our society and its celebrities.

By Paul Hollander

A recent article in The New Yorker chronicled the Paris visit of Puff Daddy (Sean Combs), the renowned rap singer and fashion entrepreneur. It was written by a reporter who accompanied him, providing a detailed account of virtually every moment of the four-day trip. The reader could learn a great deal about Puff Daddy, a bona fide celebrity of our times - his way of life, beliefs, favored forms of entertainment, consumption, and socializing. Combs was introduced as "the 32 year old rap impresario, restaurateur, clothing entrepreneur, bon vivant, actor and Page Six regular." His claim to fame also rests on having been nominated by the Council of Fashion Designers of America as "the menswear designer of the year." He was urgently summoned to fly to Paris (via Concorde) to lend glamour to a Versace fashion show:

With his hip-hop credentials and his love of the spotlight, not to mention a past that includes highly public moments of violence, Combs provided exactly what the fashion crowd craves... He wore fur and leather and draped himself in enough diamonds to rival Princess Caroline of Monaco... Donatella Versace... was counting on Combs's presence to add some adrenaline to her show... [his accessories included] a silver tie, smoke-colored sunglasses, diamond-and-platinum earrings, a bracelet or two, a couple of diamond rings the size of cherry tomatoes, and a watch covered with jewels and worth nearly a million dollars.

The article also noted (without a hint of disapproval) that his "career has been punctuated by violence... In 1999 he and two others were arrested for beating a rival record-company executive... [he] was [also] involved in an incident at a Manhattan night club in which three people were shot."

On his trip to Paris, Combs "was traveling with a trainer, a stylist and at least two personal assistants." In his Paris hotel suite "there were several garment racks in the living room, with more than a dozen suits, scores of shirts, leather jackets... enough shoes to last a lifetime... flown over from New York... Sunglasses had been arranged in three rows on a high table... There were about ten pairs in each row; each pair in its original case, with the top flipped up."

The elevation of Puff Daddy to celebrity status illustrates a phenomenon that will one day be of interest to social historians seeking to understand the sources and manifestations of American cultural decline in the late 20th and early 21st century. It may be argued that the rise and veneration of celebrities has been a characteristic expression of this decline. Almost half century ago Daniel Boorstin, the social historian, wrote:

Our age has produced a new kind of eminence... This new kind of eminence is "celebrity"... He has been fabricated... to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness. He is morally neutral... The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media... The celebrity is always a contemporary. The hero is made by folklore, sacred texts and history books but the celebrity is the creature of gossip... of magazines, newspapers and the ephemeral images of movie and television screen... celebrities are differentiated mainly by trivia of personality... Entertainers are best qualified to become celebrities because they are skilled in the marginal differentiation of their personalities... Anyone can become a celebrity if only he can get into the news and stay there.

As Boorstin suggests, several forces combine to sustain the phenomenon. The existence of the mass media is a fundamental precondition since it creates, disseminates, and dwells on the images of celebrities, ensuring that the celebrity will be known - however superficially - to millions of people. The media (and their own PR people) can create celebrities because there are millions of people interested in such fantasy figures, upon whom they can project transitory admiration and perhaps a spurious identification.

The second precondition for the phenomenon is a moral, cultural, and aesthetic relativism which both permits and encourages the admiration of people of no genuine distinction - moral, artistic, or intellectual. Genuine heroes, people of great accomplishments, are few and far between. And so if fame based on some impressive accomplishment is in short supply, notoriety will do. The populist and egalitarian strains in American history may have provided further support and legitimation for the rise and proliferation of amoral and mediocre celebrities. Anybody can become a celebrity, no special qualifications are required - only adequate publicity, a certain degree of egomania, and some attention-getting trait or activity.

The celebrity phenomenon feeds as well on the enlarged, democratic individualism of our times. A growing number of people feel that they are entitled to fame, attention, wealth, power, and special treatment. People wish to - and can actually become - widely known, for odd, dubious, or absurd reasons, including colorful criminals acts.

Figures of entertainment and fashion fill most of the celebrity ranks, in part because they have at their disposal a well-oiled publicity machine. There is an obvious financial incentive for creating celebrities: Movies, TV programs, popular music all revolve around them; the advertising industry regularly avails itself of their services and endorsements to sell a wide range of products. Most celebrities come from the world of entertainment because the entertainment industries occupy such a prominent place in American life.

As the New Yorker article makes clear, celebrities are handsomely rewarded for the functions they perform. These rewards in turn reinforce their bloated and unrealistic self-conceptions. The New Yorker's treatment of Puff Daddy is but one of countless examples of a totally uncritical and unreflective view of the phenomenon of celebrity worship. Another telling indication of the trend has been the gradual transformation of The New York Times Magazine from a serious publication focusing on major political and social events or problems into one which now, more often than not, devotes over half its space to profiling assorted celebrities from the world of entertainment, sports, and fashion.

Celebrity worship - and the moral-aesthetic-intellectual relativism it enshrines - is a symptom of cultural decline and confusion; time will tell how serious. As the New Yorker article observed of two other celebrities: "Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart are more than brands; they offer visions of the world." With any luck these visions will not become dominant.

- Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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So how do heroes differ from celebrities and what does the shift towards the latter say about our society…

http://www.headlinemuse.com/Culture/cultof.htm

Cult of Celebrity By Linda Foubister

During the selection of the Democratic candidate for president, we were told that Madonna supported Wesley Clark, Jamie Lee Curtis supported John Kerry, and Ashton Kutcher was for John Edwards. Was the implication that if our favorite star supported a candidate, then that candidate was the best? That not only are the stars talented, but they possess innate wisdom about "who should be king?" Well, the fact is that celebrity endorsements do carry weight in our culture.

As humans, we look for role models to emulate. In the past, it was the hero who was held up as the model on which to pattern ourselves. A hero was a person distinguished for exceptional courage, nobility and strength. But more and more, the cult of celebrity is replacing the myth of the hero.

A celebrity is famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton. Celebrity lacks greatness of soul and moral vision. The cult of celebrity became popular during the depression, supported by the rise of mass media. In many ways, celebrity is a creature of the information age.

We can look at the Greek myth about Hero and Leander for some of the concepts about a hero. Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, fell in love with a young man named Leander. They lived across the Hellespont Strait from each other, and every night, Hero would put a light on top of her tower to guide Leander as he swam across the strait. One night, a storm extinguished the light, and Leander drowned in the dark seas. Upon finding his corpse, Hero killed herself. Leander died for love of Hero, and Hero, in turn, sacrificed herself. Their reward was to live a happy life together after death. This myth illustrates the theme of heroic sacrifice for something that is greater than the individual, in this case, love. It shows that the reward of heroic sacrifice is to join the gods at death.

I suggest that there are three key Grail Code questions to distinguish between a hero and a celebrity:

1) Who are they?

A hero is authentic, whereas a celebrity represents derived values. A hero has achieved something; a celebrity is merely well known. A celebrity portrays an image, rather than her true self, with all its flaws and inconsistencies. Celebrities, like Madonna, continually re-invent themselves to stay in the public eye. What becomes important is not who Madonna really is, but what image she is projecting this year. What we see is not a true person, but the product of a brilliant marketing strategy.

Author Daniel J. Boorstin says, "The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name." (1)

A hero is enduring, reflecting what she had done. On the other hand, celebrity status takes on a "flavor of the month" quality. As the media makes a celebrity, a celebrity can be unmade. When they fall, all gloves are off as the media tears their reputation to shreds, like the Bacchic women destroyed King Pentheus. After the celebrity has been destroyed, they are banished to the never-regions of "has-been" town. This contrasts with heroes, who join with the gods.

2) Who do they serve?

Joseph Campbell has pointed out that a celebrity serves only himself, whereas a hero serves to redeem society. As a result of serving themselves only, celebrities reap huge financial rewards, well beyond the value of their contributions to society.

The hero is a reflection of ourselves; we could become the hero. Heroes are accessible; celebrities are not. Celebrity status is only for the chosen few. They stand apart from the masses and we yearn for intimacy with them. In many cases, we believe that we do know them well. We do not want to become celebrities as much as we want to become friends with them. For example, many women would like to be Oprah's best friend, Gayle, rather than Oprah.

3) What have they sacrificed?

The notion of sacrifice is innately entwined with the fate of a hero, and this sacrifice serves to redeem or save others. A celebrity does sacrifice something, and that is privacy. However, the sacrifice of their privacy is of little benefit to society. Basically, celebrities are loved just for being who they are, not for what they do or have done for us.

Unlike a celebrity, a hero often remains nameless, such as the New York City firefighters who sacrificed their own lives on 9/11 to save others. Another example is Dave Sanders. Do you recognize his name as the teacher at Columbine High School who lost his life saving students on April 20, 1999? Or Tom Burnett, the hero of United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11? These are examples of true modern heroes, who made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives to protect others.

This tendency to remain nameless supports the idea that a hero can be any person, and any person can rise to be a hero. A celebrity rises and falls with his name in lights. Often, the celebrity's name is not his actual name, but a stage name, another example of an inauthentic existence.

So, why are celebrities so popular? Celebrities may be manufactured, but they do meet a psychological need. They represent various archetypes, and as such, hold a fascination for us. Celebrity archetypes are replacing the hero archetype, described by Dr. Carl Jung as a person who fights evil, often in the form of monsters, to deliver his people from destruction.

The danger with the cult of celebrity is that the power of personality conquers substance. Inspired by celebrities, fans make decisions based on illusion, rather than reality. They tend to be focused on appearances and what others may think about appearances, rather than finding their own true selves and realizing their true natures.

Celebrity worship has been identified as an actual syndrome, and in a small percentage of cases, it has harmful effects. Researchers report that about one third of people suffer from Celebrity Worship Syndrome (CWS). CWS can have a positive influence, but in 10% of the cases, it can become obsessional, replacing conventional relationships. In 1% of cases, it can be pathological. CWS can deepen at times of crisis or when someone needs direction, such as teens.

As Joseph Campbell conceptualized the hero's journey, it is the journey of every person to undergo the series of challenges that life presents, find her own truth and return with it. It is a meeting with the divine. When a person overly identifies with a celebrity, he subverts his own hero's journey.

We confuse celebrity worship with hero worship. Hero worship urges us to become better people, that is, more authentic people. We are encouraged to make sacrifices for the good of all. Celebrity worship is about valuing the superficial and illusory qualities of the celebrities whom we view as successful. As celebrities rise and fall, these qualities change - hardly a firm basis for making life decisions.

In times of social upheaval, people search for a hero. If what we find, instead, is celebrity, we forfeit authenticity, substituting the rock of truth for the fleeting flame of fame. As Bono said, "When celebrities open their mouths about political causes, I get nervous - and I am one."

And have the fine arts been guilty of succumbing to the needs of a celebrity cult…

An excerpt from Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375706530&view=excerpt

Perhaps the most difficult adjustments to the imperatives of entertainment were those undergone by the arts which had, by definition, been arrayed against entertainment and had denied its sensationalist aesthetic. These had tried to hold the line even as everything else seemed to be succumbing around them, but not even art could finally resist the siren call of show business. The arts were forced either to surrender or to be marginalized to the point where they would cease to matter to any but a handful of devotees.

       In literature the erosion of will began early. Some critics blamed paperback books for driving publishing into the arms of entertainment, seeing them, in effect, as the television of literature; they made books available, but they also cheapened them. One publisher, complaining about sensational paperback covers, opined, "The contents of the book . . . were relatively unimportant. What mattered was that its lurid exterior should ambush the customer." Others traced the decline even further back to the rise of magazine serialization as a major source of book revenue and the need for books to adapt themselves to this method of distribution, which entailed bold characters, strong plots, cliffhangers and other sensationalist appurtenances.

       Still others saw the decline of serious literature in direct proportion to the rise of commerce in publishing. When the Book-of-the-Month Club, itself a commercial institution dedicated to selling books rather than promoting literature, eased out its editor in chief in 1996 and transferred his duties to the head of marketing, a former club juror, Brad Leithauser, dejectedly said they could just as easily be selling kitchen supplies now. It was an increasingly common plaint among writers that books had become another commodity to be marketed, but the blame on commercialism was misplaced. Since no one expected publishing to be an eleemosynary institution, the problem wasn't commercialism per se; it was the kinds of books that commerce demanded. What empowered the forces of marketing was entertainment because quite simply, entertaining books were more likely to sell than nonentertaining ones, or more accurately, books that could become part of an entertainment process were more likely to sell.

       In a way the real entertainment hurdle for literature, even trashy popular literature, was the fact of the word. Words, as Neil Postman has written, demanded much more effort than visuals, and even if one were to expend that effort, there were obvious limitations to the sensation generated by words compared with the seemingly limitless sensation generated by the visuals and sounds of the movies, television and computers. None of this was lost on publishers. Just as newspapers realized their insufficiency versus television news, so publishers realized their insufficiency versus the entertainment competition, and they sought to do something about it.

       What publishers discovered was that given the right circumstances, a book was ultimately incidental to its own sales. It was yet another macguffin for a larger show. What publishing houses were really selling was a phenomenon--something the media would flog the way media flogged any Hollywood blockbuster. The object was to get people talking about a book, get them feeling that they had missed something if they didn't know about it, even though they were responding not to the book itself, which few of then probably had read or would read, but rather to the frenzy whipped up around the book--a controversy or novel feature or eye-catching angle like a seven-figure advance to the author or a big-money sale of the film rights. The frenzy assumed a life of its own even as the alleged object of the frenzy kept receding further and further into the background. The novelist David Foster Wallace, bemused when the media began championing his immense novel Infinite Jest and making Wallace himself a literary star, called this the "excitement about the excitement." It was one of the principal marketing tools for anything in the Republic of Entertainment.

       As far as literature went, most of the initial excitement was stirred not by the book but by its author, whose life movie would promote the book the way Olympic athletes' life movies promoted the Olympics for NBC. The tradition actually stretched back at least as far as Byron, who was canny enough to cultivate a bohemian persona as the Romantic poet and then actively exploit it. As Dwight Macdonald described it, "Byron's reputation was different from that of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope because it was based on the man--on what the public conceived to be the man--rather than on his work. His poems were taken not as artistic objects in themselves but as expressions of their creator's personality."

       Walt Whitman did the same and to the same effect. He wanted to be seen as a character whose personality would advertise his poetry. A friend once described him as a "poseur of truly colossal proportions, one to whom playing a part had long before become so habitual that he ceased to be conscious that he was doing it." In fact, the idea that celebrity could create a best-seller more easily than a best-seller could create celebrity was enough of a commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century that the protagonist of New Grub Street, an 1891 novel, could say, "If I am an unknown man, and publish a wonderful book, it will make its way very slowly, or not at all. If I become a known man, publish that very same book, its praise will echo over both hemispheres "

       However true it was then, it became even truer in the age of mass media. No one, though, seemed to have as ready a grasp of this as Ernest Hemingway, who was actually compared to Byron for his flagrant self-promotion. Just as thoroughly as any fictional character he created in his novels, Hemingway created a persona for himself and authored a life movie in which he could star on the screens of the media. This was Hemingway the artist roughneck, expatriate war hero, bullfight lover, big-game hunter, deep-sea fisherman, world-class drinker, womanizer, brawler--a man so outsized that he dwarfed the writer and his books even though this movie was the main reason anyone but litterateurs was likely to pay his books any heed. Critic Edmund Wilson churlishly called this persona "the Hemingway of the handsome photographs with the sportsman's tan and the outdoor grin, with the ominous resemblance to Clark Gable, who poses with giant marlin which he has just hauled off Key West," as opposed to Hemingway the writer.

       Of course Hemingway knew the value of all this, and though critics continued to lament that he had sacrificed his art on the altar of celebrity or that he was, as Leo Braudy put it, "the prime case of someone fatally caught between his genius and his publicity," he realized that there might have been very little art if it weren't for the celebrity--at least very little art that anyone would buy, much less read. As he metamorphosed into "Papa Hemingway," the grizzled macho icon with his beard stubble and peak cap, he became more popular than ever and even gained a certain immunity from the critics, who now routinely disparaged his work. The public who defended him didn't really care whether he was a good writer. They cared that he was a bold personality--a movie's idea of a good writer.

       In the end, Hemingway would be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, but it was not as the proponent of lean literary modernism; it was as the proponent of literary celebrity. Where he led, virtually every writer trying to make his mark followed. "The way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway's unwritten Notes from Papa on How the Working Novelist Can Get Ahead," Norman Mailer wrote in Advertisements for Myself, thus acknowledging his debt to Hemingway while also granting that he himself had a "changeable personality, a sullen disposition, and a calculating mind" that would seem to disqualify him from celebrity. (Of course, far from being disqualified, Mailer turned these very qualities into his own salable persona.)

       Still, Hemingway and Mailer had talent, and their personas as brawling artists ultimately depended upon it. A more impressive feat was to create a persona so entertaining that there didn't have to be any talent. Editor Michael Korda credited writer Jacqueline Susann with this advance. Having emerged from public relations--Susann's husband, Irving Mansfield, was an old PR man--she hawked her books by hawking herself as a celebrity, though she had done nothing to earn that status. "When we expressed anxiety about the manuscript," Korda wrote in a reminiscence of Susann, "Irving told us that it was Jackie (and the example of 'Valley [of the Dolls],' then approaching ten million copies sold) that he was selling, and not, as he put it indignantly, 'a goddam pile of paper.'" His point was that the book was absolutely irrelevant once the name was on the cover.

       It was a relatively small step from this to designer publishing, in which the author's name, like a fashion designer's label, sold the book even if the author hadn't written the book. This in fact was what technothriller author Tom Clancy achieved. In 1995 Clancy signed to publish a line of paperback thrillers targeted at teenagers, the first of which was to be titled Tom Clancy's Net Force. Despite the possessive case, however, Clancy wasn't necessarily going to write the story. As the New York Times put it in its announcement of the deal, his role would be to "oversee the book's production"--in the event, the byline read "created by Tom Clancy"--which gave the author an entirely new function. He was no longer a writer; he was an imprimatur.

       With all this effort devoted to creating personalities who could sell books, the next logical step was to drop the middlemen--that is, writers--entirely and go directly to celebrities themselves, as publishers increasingly did through the 1980s and 1990s. Actors and actresses, singers, comedians, war heroes, anchormen and protagonists of scandals signed huge publishing contracts clearly not because anyone expected them to produce great books but because they carried ready-made entertainment value from other media which they could vest in this one. They were, in show business parlance, "crossover artists."

       As it turned out, it was no guarantee. The trouble with celebrity as a sales device was that it was volatile, as Random House discovered after giving aging television-soap-opera diva Joan Collins $4 million to write a novel. Collins, however, delivered that the publisher deemed an unacceptable manuscript, and Random House sued to recover $1.2 million of the advance it had paid. Collins's editor, Joni Evans, testified that the novel was "very primitive, very much off base.... it was jumbled and disjointed"--as if she had been expecting Collins to submit a real book and not just put her name on the jacket. Collins told reporters afterwards, "They were begging for me!" and quoted Evans as having told agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar, "I want Joan Collins in my stable so much I can taste it!" But that was when Joan Collins was still a marketable name. By the time she submitted her manuscript, her star had fallen, and from the perspective of some outsiders at least, Random House seemed to be placed in the uncomfortable position of rejecting her for her decline. Or to put it another way, the book itself seemed to become relevant only when Collins wasn't.

       With publishers essentially selling so many books on the backs of their authors' lives because these were the only things that could trigger the conventional media's interest, it almost became a requirement that noncelebrities have great life stories or be condemned to midlist, the Siberia of publishing. Even a dense and difficult literary novel like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses became a best-seller when Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, imposing a death sentence on the author for allegedly having insulted the Muslim faith in the book. The fatwa thrust Rushdie into a terrifying life movie and forced him into hiding, but it also gave him a name recognition that very few literary novelists could possibly hope to match. When he appeared publicly in New York to promote a new novel, the cognoscenti showed up in force as they never would have had Rushdie been just an author rather than the celebrity star of his very own thriller. Columnist Frank Rich called the display "fatwa chic."

       But Rushdie, a serious novelist, was simply the most glaring example of a publishing industry in hostage to entertainment, an industry in which authors' own stories superseded their books. Poet Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters became a best-seller because the poems addressed the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath. A slender volume of verse titled Ants on the Melon by Virginia Hamilton Adair, an eighty-three-year-old blind woman who had gone largely unpublished, made Adair a minor celebrity and won her a New Yorker profile, though the poet J.D. McClatchy, unimpressed by the quality of the poetry, said, "Her story seems to be the story, not the work," which could also have been said about so many of the new literary phenomena. Even Adair herself agreed: "I think part of it is this old nut, a character."

       Or there was Michael Palmer, the doctor who, inspired by the example of medical suspense novelist Robin Cook, decided to try his hand at a medical thriller. When he was about to embark on his book tour, however, he realized he wasn't getting what he called high-profile bookings. So Palmer decided to reveal that he was a recovering alcoholic and Demerol addict and was now helping other, similarly afflicted physicians. His publicists beamed over the disclosure, knowing it would generate press. Palmer's addictions thus became what he himself called a marketing device.

       Slightly more savvy writers decided that if they were going to make their lives their marketing tools, they might as well make the life the book too. In part this may explain the craze for literary confessions in which writers divulge their deepest and occasionally dirtiest secrets--the autobiographical equivalent to the entertainingly lurid biographies dedicated to detailing a subject's pathologies. No matter how high-minded their professed motives, one suspects these memoirists also know the entertainment value of their tales: a poet who is a sex addict and child molester, a mopey young woman who is committed to a mental institution and another who battles anorexia, a young novelist addicted to anxiety inhibitors, another attractive young novelist who had an incestuous relationship with her father. Needless to say, plots like these make every bit as good entertainment as similar stories in the supermarket tabloids--which is to say that while confession may be good for the soul, it is also good for book sales.

       But the final surrender of literature to entertainment may have come with the discovery that a book needn't even be a vehicle for its author's life; it could be a vehicle for the author's photo. Publishers had long preferred writers who were telegenic and glib, able to hawk their books where it counted: on television. By the mid-1990s, however, there was a group of young author pinups--Paul Watkins, Douglas Coupland, Tim Willocks, movie star/novelist Ethan Hawke--whose basic selling point was their appearance. "He had a rock-star type aura that these young women project onto the author," was how a promotions director at the Waterstone bookstore in Boston described Coupland's reading there before a large audience. Playing off his aura, Tim Willocks's publisher enclosed a photo of the writer with an invitation to a promotional lunch. "He's definitely a cute author," a features editor at Mademoiselle enthused. "We're definitely biased toward cute guys."

       Perhaps it was inevitable that with literature drawn into the entertainment vortex, it would also generate ancillary merchandise just as movies generated toys, clothing, books and other products. Robert James Waller, whose The Bridges of Madison County became the very paradigm of a publishing phenomenon, wound up issuing a compact disc of himself singing his own compositions inspired by his own novel. Following his trail, novelist Joyce Maynard released a compact disc of music to accompany her book Where Love Goes, Elizabeth Wurtzel planned to provide a CD soundtrack for the paperback edition of her memoir Prozac Nation, James Redfield's inspirational book The Celestine Prophecy spawned The Celestine Prophecy: A Musical Voyage and Warner Bros. signed self-help writer Deepak Chopra to a recording contract. "Each of Deepak's seven spiritual laws of success could be distilled into a song," explained a record executive. "Then the theme of each law could be distilled into a mantra."

       Viewing these developments with concern, the critic Jack Miles predicted that publishing would eventually find itself divided between a very small audience of readers seeking knowledge and a much larger audience seeking entertainment--in effect, another sacralization of the sort that had divided culture in the late nineteenth century. "What is offered for everybody will be entertainment and entertainment only, and then only at a level that excludes nobody," Miles wrote. "What is offered as knowledge, by contrast, will be offered, usually not for everybody but rather for professionals who will 'consume' it as (and mostly at) work." Extrapolating from Miles's vision, one could even imagine a day when there would be for everyone what had already long existed in Hollywood: designated readers to summarize plots, so that no one would ever have to tax himself by reading more than a few pages, as Hollywood executives were never taxed.

       But even these divisions were not as clean as Miles suggested, because entertainment could not be kept so easily at bay. Books that purported to be informational were increasingly invaded by entertainment, so that one had to make a new distinction between real or traditional information and entertainment in the form of information--what has been called faction. The latter was the sort of thing in which best-selling celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley specialized. When she revealed in her 1997 biography of the Windsors that the queen mother was artificially inseminated, to cite just one example of many, her evidence seemed to be that everyone knew the king's brother Edward was impotent, that impotency ran in the Windsor family and so that therefore the logical conclusion was the one she drew. It was certainly a stretch, bur Kelley could get away with it because she knew accuracy was of little consequence to her readers; entertainment was. The most important thing in the Republic of Entertainment was that the facts be provocative enough to provide a sensational show

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I  wanted to include an excerpt from Nan’s suggestion “A Massive Swelling : Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease Other Cultural Revelations by Cintra Wilson.  The Amazon excerpt isn’t totally relevant here but might prompt you to check it out on your next visit to Borders.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/014100195X/ref=sib_dp_bod_ex/102-7595566-2374533?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00O#reader-page

Here’s a piece she did for Salon:

Star sex: 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?   By Cintra Wilson

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 into his life after a horrifically unceremonious dumping and then -- the ultimate indignity -- being dumped 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.

Don't go with the force, Wills

Nobody is noticing that we've already had a version of the new TV assault on humanity, "Big Brother," for years and years. The British royal family has never been allowed personal boundaries and refuge from the filthy prurient interest of other human beings, and now Prince William will be absorbed into what has to be the most abused civic role in society today: the celebrity-cum-public-figure-by-birth. Prince William turned 18 on June 21, and it is officially Boy Who Will Be King season for the predatory folk who killed his mom.

In today's society, being a member of royalty is worse than a lifetime prison sentence or a career in gymnastics. Nothing is more ludicrous and unkind than the imposition of a supreme ceremonial role as a photo slave in a society that has been trained in the cannibal-like consumption of celebrities.

To be born into celebrity is to be like one of those chickens that spend their whole lives growing up in a tiny box so their corpses will stack better. It may be a large and gilded box, but it is just as cruel, perhaps crueler, because the chicken can perform any perversity it likes from its constraints in order to make its life more tolerable.

Even a few decades ago, when Queen Elizabeth was crowned, nobody would have dreamed of obtaining naked pictures of her and posting them on the Internet, or linking her sexually with Burt Lancaster. But fame is now a vile organism out of control, and royalty are essentially zoo animals -- with the bars there for the animals' protection more than for the viewers'.

If allowed to roam unprotected through fans, William would probably be kidnapped, violated in every orifice and eaten, and his head would be kept as a trophy in someone's freezer until authorities found it and turned it into a holy relic.

It is a testament to William's personal flexibility that he is able to tolerate his life at all, and isn't sneaking off to some Jamaican discothque in Brixton every weekend to smoke heroin and snog with strippers.

This gentle lad will have to conceal himself and his humanizing habits for his entire life, concentration-camp style, from the worst, most penetrating and insidious form of fascism there is: the public opinion of hypocritical morons who believe that public figures should be sexless, saintly and, worst of all, totally

It seems that only the English-speaking countries are fucked up this way; after all, who, besides royalty buffs, knows or cares about handsome young Prince Carl Philip of Sweden or Louis XX of France? Who puts lurid pinup photos of them smiling shyly in tuxedos on their walls, other than heraldry-obsessed French homosexuals, maybe?

These men abide in relative normalcy while poor William has to have his face on tea cozies and ballpoint pens and tank tops, and have every 16-year-old girl in the English-speaking world imagine what sex between him and Britney Spears would be like.

If William is lucky, he'll grow into a nerdish, introspective mind who can find wide open spaces to explore and rejoice in the worlds of electronics or nanotechnology; he'll grow hunched and concave and wear thick glasses in dark rooms, drinking coffee alone, and his outside life won't matter so very much because he'll only be smiling from a limousine and doing math in his head.

I was given hope for Prince William when I was walking by a parking lot in the Bowery the other day and noticed that the wisteria trees around the perimeter of the lot had completely absorbed all of the concertina wire that surrounded the fence -- the razor loops literally went in one side and out the other of the tree trunks, a testament to the adaptive durability of weeds.

Be as the wisteria, young Wills. If you are relentless, you can pull the mortar out of the bricks that hold you; you can grow around and over; you can slowly, patiently, if you're really smart, consume the consumers.

But you'll probably just succumb, and end up as a crowned figure with your face on collector plates and bronze coins in Parade magazine -- a handsome, generic "King" image for all the slavish dolts of the world to superimpose kingly fantasies on, like a painting of a child with oversize, weepy eyes, or an adorable kitten, or a wise, wrinkled Indian chief.

C'est la vie, c'est la goddamn pain-in-le-royal-ass, no?

********************************************************************************

And the advantages of celebrity apart from the money and parties, well you will certainly skip more traffic tickets….

http://www.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/views03/1130-09.htm

Can The Rich And Famous Get Away With Anything? It Certainly Seems That Way

by Greg Morago

We ask because mere mortals (regular folks, Middle America, whatever you want to call the vast majority) seem to never be able to get their hands on one. Average Janes and Joes go to jail when they're caught red-handed; they pay fines when they've transgressed; they suffer when they're publicly humiliated.

Not so the Teflons among us. Their shiny, impenetrable surface makes them invincible. Punishment for crimes and misdemeanors never sticks. Bad press slides right off. Ill will ricochets with alarming ease.

We've seen a lot of Teflons triumphing of late. Arnold Schwarzenegger was easily elected governor of California even when reports surfaced of his groping hands and admiration for Hitler. Jessica Lynch remained an American hero (and Sigma Chi-ish sweetheart) despite semi-nude pictures that surfaced at the time of her made-for-TV movie. Rush Limbaugh victoriously returned to the airwaves after five weeks in a recovery program for his addiction to prescription painkillers (and even before that, Limbaugh weathered cries of racism over a comment he made as an ESPN commentator). Rosie O'Donnell emerged as a winner in her magazine courtroom drama even after a witness said the comedian cruelly joked about the woman's battle with cancer. Ronald Reagan - the person for whom "Teflon president" was coined - prevailed, even in his infirmity, as CBS dumped its "The Reagans" miniseries because it allegedly showed the former president in an unflattering light.

What do all these celebrities have in common? That Teflon armour. And it seems that the Teflon phenomenon grows more flagrant and unbelievable each day. Does anyone really think that Kobe Bryant will be convicted of sexual assault? Or that Paris Hilton's incipient television career will greatly suffer because of a sex video circulating on the Internet? Or that Martha Stewart will lose it all over her securities fraud brouhaha?

No. Why? Because celebrities - whether they're movie stars, politicians, business giants, heiresses or actual royalty - are coated in Teflon.

"The culture loves its celebrities to crash and burn. But then it loves to bring them back," said Anthony Mora, a marketing and public relations expert. "It's a forgiving culture in that it gives celebrities second, third, fourth and fifth chances."

Even for Michael Jackson?

"Sometimes it's just not going to matter," said Mora, an expert on the art of the spin and, not incidentally, author of "Spin To Win." "Our culture is much more obsessed with fame than it is with the issues surrounding it."

Issues, shmissues. That attitude has made it possible for Winona Ryder to continue acting after being caught shoplifting. For Hugh Grant to remain a wildly popular star after that nasty business with a hooker. For Bill Clinton to retain his high approval ratings throughout the Monica Lewinsky scandal. For George W. Bush to get elected president four days after it was revealed he was convicted of drunken driving in 1976. For Lizzie Grubman to return to the art of public relations even after mowing down 16 people with her SUV. For Prince Charles to invoke the non-answer answer when addressing the question of whether he had sexual relations with a royal valet. Even for a wealthy real-estate heir to get away with what seems like murder: Despite admitting that he dismembered his neighbor's corpse, Robert Durst was acquitted of murder by a Texas jury.

In most cases, Teflons are aided by the public relations machine and media feeding frenzy that attends all celebrity scandal.

"PR, marketing and advertising is hand in glove with information now," said Nancy Snow, a professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton and the author of "Information War." "We don't let the facts get in the way of a good narrative."

Snow said that celebrity scandal has become entertainment and that, for a majority of the American public, entertainment is more important than simple things like facts and justice.

"If the image is powerful enough, you can't help being pulled in. Even if you're skeptical, you get pulled in by the whole magic," she said. "But it's a two-way street. PR isn't just doing it to us; we're fully complicit in it."

And that strange complicity - the way the public devours yet gingerly handles celebrity scandal - will only become more pronounced during the unfolding Michael Jackson saga, Snow said. "We can't turn away. We'll keep watching Michael Jackson all day," she said. "We think we're above it, but we're glued to it. We keep going back for more."

Even when we know we shouldn't.

Paris Hilton is a perfect example of that. A celebrity for no other reason than that she's a rich girl who likes to expose herself, Hilton has been the subject of intense media glare since her sex video popped up on the Internet. While Hilton may be legitimately upset about the tacky video, one has to wonder if it's just coincidence that the Hilton headlines come right as her new reality show, "The Simple Life," is set to bow on Fox on Tuesday.

"It won't hurt her," Mora said of Hilton's porn scandal. "She'll come out of it unscathed. If it had been a celebrity with a very different image, like a Nicole Kidman or a Julia Roberts, that would be different. But we're talking about someone who achieved fame strictly as a goal, who goes to parties in outrageous dresses."

So where does that leave Jackson, who is severely testing the strength of his Teflon?

"It's about child molestation - that's the case. But everyone's writing about everything but that. It's getting lost in the carnival," Mora said.

He added that the PR machine - Teflon's magic buffer - is already going into high gear, and that will definitely affect how the public perceives Jackson's latest scandal, if not the outcome of the court case itself.

"PR alters the perspective of what people think or feel about a particular person or topic," he said. "PR realizes that the court of public opinion is going to hold more weight than the court itself, and it's going to precede it."

So F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different.

They can, apparently, afford really good Teflon.

Should we have sympathy for the happy jeweled crowd?

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/15/180757.php

Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America

Joshua Gamson

Book from University of California Press

Michael Jackson makes me think of Elvis and Brando. These are people who reached the top of their professions in the "entertainment" business, but somehow failed in being people.

They strike me as solipsistic in their lives, without true friends and healthy relationships. A solipsism of their own choosing, enabled by the power of their wealth (like Howard Hughes, another success who became a bizarro man). This solipsism starts with body issues; they all ended up looking like freakish, dementoid versions of themselves.

Brando famously despised his profession of acting, even though he was probably the greatest actor who ever lived - or the one who embodied the most charisma, "burning up the screen" like no one else. But he bought himself an island and ate himself into one, and though interested in social issues, squandered his talent. We have only four great film performances from him: Streetcar, Waterfront, Last Tango, Godfather. Perhaps that's all an actor has to do, but wouldn't it have been nice to have a full body of work? Or maybe we should be thankful that those four performances happened in a business that has everything to do with artistry and little to do with art. That he eschewed live theater after getting to Hollywood was both his loss and ours.

Elvis popularized a whole new genre of music, rock 'n roll, and became its most prominent exponent, ruling until the group phenomenon of the Beatles and the Stones came along. Yet what he really wanted to be was a serious actor, for which he had the raw talent. But his manager and Hollywood kept him from it. He stood in his own way, too, because it never occurred to him, obedient Southern boy that he was (and lost without his Mom), that he was in charge of his own destiny, and had the power to organize his life his way. He ended a tragic captive of Vegas and sycophantic hangers-on, and OD'd as a fat freak on the toilet, working on his last pathetic crap.

Now here we have the King of Pop, a man so at loggerheads with himself that he has messed with his looks until he doesn't look human anymore. Why has he stopped mucking about with his appearance? Perhaps because his face would fall apart if it went under the knife again. There ain't no more screws to keep Frankenstein's features in one piece.

How does the public spectacle add to the burden these talents bear? One wonders. The life we see is not the life they live. We don't see their pain, for example. They have it in spades, yet the spectacle of celebrity allows no room in our hearts for it. We never knew how Elvis suffered because he didn't get the chance to fulfill his ambition of being a great actor. We didn't see what drove Brando to despise his own profession. We've never sympathized with the anxiety that has driven MJ to disrupt his very identity. If Michael Jackson actually was "Bad," he'd get at least some street cred. He's good for a joke ("only in America could a poor young black man grow up to be a white woman"), but his phenomenon doesn't appear to beg our understanding. We simply look on in shock, awe and giggles. Wacko Jacko. Our journalists, the mediators of our knowledge, are not novelists; they are concerned with surface and thrills: the spectacle, not the understanding of it.

If we were half human, we might be interested in what our celebs go through. But we're not. That's why Paris Hilton is the perfect celeb. Nothing to understand there, besides enjoying that she's pretty, spoiled, wild and rich: the perfect wish fulfillment for people struggling to pay the rent and keep their heads above water. She's great because she doesn't ask for sympathy. Her life says "fuck you" to us as loudly as we say "you go girl" to her. If we sympathize with a celeb, it has to be something easy and not too deep: going along with Oprah on her up-and-down weight journey.

Like Elvis and Brando, fame has not brought MJ fulfillment. How much of it is his flaw, and how much of it is ours? Our definition of the ideal existence - celebrity (call it the new American Dream) - does not appear to be a satisfactory light at the end of the tunnel of the pursuit of happiness. At the end of the U.S. rainbow lurks a bucket of your own shit. Perhaps the pursuit of happiness is not an ideal path either? If people like MJ are chewed up and spat out by stardom, why do we aspire to it? Maybe we don't really: how many of us would be willing to do the hard work and take their chances? We want the glitter of gain not its pain.

There is something at fault with how we define success in life if those that achieve it publicly, aren't satisfied with what they find there. There is something at fault with how we grow people, if when many of them get to their success, they build themselves shangrilas of solipsism like Neverland and live a life of almost grim self-indulgence.

Perhaps rappers whose lives reach their fulfillment in the flash and flaunt of bling-bling are the only Americans who are really honest, balanced and authentic Americans. Screw any other kind of self-fulfillment: it's all about gold and diamonds and big cars and houses and easy women.

What does it say about us if that's what it's all about? It's the dream of the peasant. Perhaps when we left our peasant existence in Europe and elsewhere, that's all we ever wanted. If you achieve your peasant success and enjoy it, we'll enjoy you enjoying it. And if you don't, don't expect us to sympathize: not when you've got what we want.

What we've lost in all this is any semblance of nobility in public life. Maybe we have it in our private lives, but it does not exist in the circus that our media map out for us -- unless it's in some bathetic report on the sacrifice of our troops in Iraq (where the media and the army demand that the real death of Pat Tillman be ennobled in a lie).

Who today is worth admiring? Dr. King was probably the last public American worthy of admiration, and he bought a bullet for his work. Our politicians stand bent over, anuses athwart and high in the air, ready for special interests and monied lobbies to bang away at their innards. What is there, to take another example, to admire in Bill Gates (except that he got such a bad name for being an unfair competitor that he now, thankfully, tries to earn a good name back with philanthropy)?

Oh, for the advent of a noble American! Maybe Barack Obama will be it. At least he can write his own speeches, unlike most of our public speakers, who are so unadmirable that they need house Cyranos to put words in their mouths, because they don't have any. If Dickens or Austen or Thackeray were alive today, I think they'd be throwing up night and day, and then use their pens to put the boot in on this whole celebrity-driven fuck-up we still have the bluster to call a nation.

*****************************************************************************

So with all these manufactured celebs it’s comforting to know that we are creating our own home grown ones too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/fashion/thursdaystyles/11CRUSH.html?ex=1124856000&en=d8628aa7169a551c&ei=5070&ex=1124510400&en=92359e564d4c5c0c&ei=5070&emc=eta1

She's So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

THE woman's long black hair whipped across her pale face as she danced to punk rock at the bar. She seemed to be the life of the party. Little did she know that she was igniting a girl crush. Susan Buice was watching, and she was smitten.

Ms. Buice, 26, and the dancer (actually a clothing designer) happen to live in the same Brooklyn apartment building, so Ms. Buice, a filmmaker, was later able to soak up many other aspects of her neighbor's gritty yet feminine style: her layered gold necklaces; her fitted jackets; her dark, oversize sunglasses; and her Christian Dior perfume.

"I'm immediately nervous around her," Ms Buice said. "I stammer around her, and it's definitely because I think she's supercool."

Ms. Buice, who lives with her boyfriend, calls her attraction a girl crush, a phrase that many women in their 20's and 30's use in conversation, post on blogs and read in magazines. It refers to that fervent infatuation that one heterosexual woman develops for another woman who may seem impossibly sophisticated, gifted, beautiful or accomplished. And while a girl crush is, by its informal definition, not sexual in nature, the feelings that it triggers - excitement, nervousness, a sense of novelty - are very much like those that accompany a new romance.

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women's nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What's new is the current generation's willingness to express their ardor frankly.

"Historically, talking about these kinds of feelings has gone in and out of fashion," said Paula J. Caplan, a sociologist who this fall will teach a course about the psychology of sex and gender at Harvard. Women have not been this blunt in expressing their crushes for several generations, Dr. Caplan said.

The phenomenon has been little studied, but some social scientists say they are glad that it is being discussed more, because it can be a window into how women mature emotionally.

"It's a little bit like when you're in elementary school and you first fall in love with someone," said Leslie Hunt, 34, who manages an arts internship program in New York and who once had such a potent crush on woman that she became sweaty in her presence.

Still, a crush is a relatively mild form of infatuation. People have killed themselves over true love, said Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on human love. Think of Romeo and Juliet. With a girl crush, Dr. Fisher said, "you won't kill yourself if she doesn't want to jump rope with you." For that reason, girl crushes can give women safe and valuable experience in the emotions of love.

Dr. Fisher, the author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," said girl crushes are as natural as any other kind of love. But they are romantic without being sexual. Love and lust are distinct urges, Dr. Fisher said.

This was one of the findings she and colleagues from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the State University at Stony Brook made when they analyzed brain scans of people 18- to 26-years-old who were experiencing new love. Love and lust, it turned out, could be mapped to several separate parts of the brain.

"The brain system for romantic love is associated with intense energy, focused energy, obsessive things - a host of characteristics that you can feel not just toward a mating sweetheart," Dr. Fisher said, adding that "there's every reason to think that girls can fall in love with other girls without feeling sexual towards them, without the intention to marry them."

Wendy Lim, 26, a student at Harvard Business School, experienced such feelings about a year ago when she met another young woman in a Boston bar. The woman was open and outgoing, and when the evening was over, Ms. Lim very much wanted to talk to her again. "I remember at the end of the night wanting her phone number," Ms. Lim said, who felt awkward about asking. "I wouldn't ask a guy for his number."

As it turned out, the woman asked Ms. Lim for her number. The two saw each other again, and Ms. Lim's crush quickly blossomed into friendship, a friendship the women now cherish.

Crushes are typically fleeting, and infatuation often turns to friendship in this way. Lisa Lerer, a journalist, and Laila Hlass, a law student, both 25 and both of New York, started their friendship several years ago with a mutual crush. "We're still in love," Ms. Lerer said, "but the wooing period is over."

Tammea Tyler, 28, assistant director of child development services at the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York, has a crush that looks as if it soon will make the change. The object of her infatuation is a colleague, Denise Zimmer, senior executive for government operation, who is 48.

Ms. Tyler said she admires Ms. Zimmer's intellect and her inner strength. "She really knows her stuff, and there's something almost sexy about that," Ms. Tyler said. "There's just something really sexy and powerful."

Ms. Zimmer, when a reporter told her about Ms. Tyler's feelings, said: "I was very surprised. Sometimes, when you don't have a direct relationship with someone, you don't really understand how they're observing you."

And while Ms. Zimmer did not say she had a reciprocal crush, she did say that she considers Ms. Tyler talented and grounded and that "it's exciting to work with someone who has shown that kind of interest." She added, "It's a mutual respect."

Once a crush is revealed, it can change the dynamics of a relationship. "I think that I will be more sensitive and more focused on sharing things with her that I think will help her achieve some of the goals that she has," Ms. Zimmer said.

Sometimes, though, a girl crush is so strong it makes the object of affection uneasy, killing the possibility of friendship.

Jane Weeks, 44, a freelance art and creative director in Truckee, Calif., knows what it is like to be the object of another woman's crush. She has encountered a few women who have eagerly adopted her tastes in food and interior design, her favorite colors, even her hairdresser. "At first it's flattering you're inspiring them," she said. "When they parrot back parts of yourself, it's extremely uncomfortable."

Ms. Weeks, an outdoorswoman who has hiked through the Andes from Argentina to Chile, said some women are more enamored with what she represents - "some National Geographic chick" - than with who she is. "When you're on a pedestal, there's no way but down," she said. "And it's lonely up there. You can't share your weaknesses."

Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the relationship expert at PerfectMatch.com, said she also has been a frequent subject of girl crushes - from her students. Some have made it obvious by bringing gifts, including earrings, flowers and even poems. But Dr. Schwartz does not encourage her students to look at her with starry eyes. She would rather they look to her for guidance on developing their careers.

"You're a hero because they think you've done something unimaginably powerful," Dr. Schwartz said. "Your job is to show them that they own something equally special."

Perhaps the last time that young women were as willing as they are now to admit to their attraction to each other was in the 19th century. "Back when Louisa May Alcott was writing, women were writing these letters to each other," Dr. Caplan said. "They wrote: 'I miss you desperately. I long to hug you and talk to you all night.' " Referring to another woman as a girl crush, she said, is not dissimilar to that 19th century behavior.

But such impassioned expressions of affection were uncommon, for instance, in the 1960's and 70's, when homophobia was even more rampant than it is today, Dr. Caplan said. Women were often uncomfortable admitting to strong feelings for other women, fearing that their emotions would seem lesbian, she said. And those same women, older now, can still be shy about expressing their emotions for each other. "Women my age are more likely to say 'I adore' or 'I value' my women friends,' not girl crush," she said.

As for men, to the extent they may feel such emotions for each other, Dr. Caplan said they are less likely than women to express them. They are not reared to show their emotions. "A man talking about emotions about another man? Everybody's homophobic feelings are elicited by that, and that's because men aren't supposed to talk about feelings at all," Dr. Caplan said.

Susan Malsbury, 24, who lives in Brooklyn and is a booking agent for bands, said that because a girl crush has the potential to become an important part of one's life, she cannot help but feel a tinge of excitement whenever she meets a fascinating woman to add to her collection of crushes.

"They're better than boy crushes," Ms. Malsbury said, with more than a hint of mischief in her voice. "You don't have to break up with them after two weeks."

 Finally a piece on those annoyingly untalented news anchors… in PDF at this location

http://learcenter.org/pdf/anzur_notes.pdf

Thats All folks!

Colin