Theme: Celebrity
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From its very first issue in 1986, Spy Magazine was a radical project. It was not the product of celebrities and their PR teams, nor did it aim to please those in the public sphere. Voicing the frustrations of intelligent journalists in a sardonic way, it acquired a thinking following that hungered for the esoteric references that abounded in its pages.Read more
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The cultural practice of the "perp walk" is a form of social performativity. The perp walk itself is not a performance, singular. Rather, it is a myriad of happenings, spectacles that are historically and ontologically specified, a genre of modern pop ritual recognized and claimed as an informal aspect of the judicial system, most specifically within the United States of America. Read more
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I remember when I was a pre-teen and they moved into a loft across the street from me in Tribeca, where I lived. And an older neighbor friend told me they were living in her building, on the top floor. I saw him at my corner deli, and on the street smoking, but never her. At night, I sometimes looked up at their windows and saw their lights on. He was not very impressive in person. Cute, but no big deal. Read more
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Who is Daphne Guinness and what does she do professionally? Why does Ms. Guinness merit to be profiled by The New Yorker, a staple of intellectually respected literary journalism?Read more
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In a deleted take from The Wizard of Oz posted on YouTube, Judy/Dorothy breaks down during her iconic song. She doesn't sing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," she weeps it. Did they want her to cry like this? Did they push her too hard, for too long, for too many years? Or did her crying overtake her and "ruin" the take?Read more
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Last year’s short-lived reality show, succinctly entitled H8R (if you can’t decipher that idiom, you are too old to be watching the program), followed celebrities like Snooki and Kim Kardashian as they confronted people who’d said mean things about them on the internet. Read more
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In a ceremony on June 10, Mike Tyson’s Hall of Fame photo and plaque were unveiled. The lead-up to this event—along with a new reality show about Tyson’s intriguing passion for pigeon fancying—has brought him back into the media spotlight. Read more
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Earlier this week, Lainey Gossip posted a particularly critical reading of Reese Witherspoon’s current publicity attempts, with specific attention to the contradiction between Witherspoon complaining about her lack of privacy and the recent sale of her wedding photos to People and OK! Read more
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It was in 1923 that the original sign, HOLLYWOODLAND, a gimmick and a brazen caption, was put up near the top of that hill, in letters fifty feet high and thirty feet wide. Read more
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She started as a pin-up, that medium of titillation most popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Marilyn spent hundreds of hours in front of the still cameraRead more
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Intricate and subtle technologies for attaching fame to persons both mortal and divine now serve commodities and their personification in brands.Read more
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On August 19, 2009, Tommy Davis, the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International, received a letter from the film director and screenwriter Paul Haggis.Read more
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Several years ago, at an after party for an art opening, a mutual friend introduced me to one of the editors of this publication. Hearing that I was a writer, he asked whether I’d like to pitch something to his magazine, which at that point was still in its early planning stages. The field was pretty open, he said, as long as the piece would be about art, or even contemporary culture, more broadly conceived. What have you been thinking about lately? Read more
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Literature’s undeniable resemblance to gossip illuminates what is most useful about it, what causes literary works to endure. In her 1982 essay “In Praise of Gossip” in The Hudson Review, Patricia Meyer Spacks claims that gossip can function as “healing talk,” treating “the sickness repeatedly described as characteristic of society —anomie, impersonality, rootlessness.” Gossip can heal by personalizing us to one another, de-anonymizing, making us known. Nabokov once described good writing as “a person-to-person call.” Such literature is an intimate act, one person speaking specifically to another and making them feel recognized. Read more
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