 | ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
All Sorts of Famous
There is a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar in my hometown called Charlie-O’s. It sits dead center on Main Street and keeps its door hanging open during business hours on all but the coldest nights, gawping out a nasty whiff of bar-fug at unsuspecting passersby. All kinds of people stop in while passing through town, and every once in a while they’ll attempt to cram a live band in there, but by and large it is quite simply just another small-town dive. So it makes it especially nervy and hilarious that the owners have the balls to have a sign mounted directly over the door proclaiming the place “world famous”. They justify calling their crummy bar world famous by pointing out that their t-shirt design once won a contest in Holland, competing against t-shirt designs from a whole bunch of other, more cosmopolitan bars and franchises. It’s a brassy assertion, but hey, TECHNICALLY it is true, their dragon IS a famous image.
It appears that everybody has decided to tear this page from the Charlie-O’s playbook lately. Between reality TV and the phenomenon of McNews (news stories that aren’t really news but have a sort of character at the center of them; like Natalee Holloway or the Runaway Bride, that keeps them in heavy rotation on FOXNews) Warhol’s flippant 40-year-old prediction that every person in the world will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame is coming to fruition. Every few months seem to bring us a new crop of people and things that are famous for no apparent reason at all – or, to look at it another way, for any reason at all.
Take Brandon Davis, for instance. This bloated, overly groomed grandson of a billionaire movie mogul is enjoying his day in the sun as a sort of male Paris Hilton; vapid, wealthy, incapable of self-sustenance but with a lot of show business friends and a permanent cadre of yes-men surrounding him like the dust cloud that used to surround the Peanuts character Pig Pen. Davis’ fat self-satisfied mug made its first media appearance a couple of years ago when he “bravely” stepped forward to accuse – yes – Paris Hilton of hurling racial slurs at strangers when she didn’t get her own way. “She’s a racist, she’s appalling and I want nothing more to do with her,” he told any reporters who would listen when his “friend’s” name started becoming a known quantity. His resolve to stay away from Hilton didn’t last long when her profile kept growing more pronounced, though, and soon he’d attached himself like a barnacle to a willowy starlet in Hilton’s orbit, Misha Barton. The pair dated for a year, Davis managing to look presentable and relevant while hiding a small sliver of his bulk behind Barton’s sleek form. Eventually Barton tired of the layabout heir, though, and dumped him a couple of months ago. Since then he’s been drowning his sorrows by going on protracted drinking bouts with Hilton, and recently he attained a measure of notoriety all on his own when a reality-TV cameraman caught him insulting and cussing about actress Lindsay Lohan. So now Davis is full-blown famous – even if it is only as “that fat guy trash-talking Lindsey Lohan while Paris Hilton laughs in the background”.
Misha Barton herself is pretty much another person who’s famous mostly for showing up at different places, but at least she has a job and an ostensible purpose for which she is famous. She appears on a nighttime soap opera called “The OC”, on one of those sort-of networks like the WB or UPN. I’m not sure which one because I don’t watch nighttime soap operas, but she appears to be making her mark more by creating completely useless male celebrities simply by being seen out with them. She’s a pseudo-star factory. Not long after jettisoning Davis’ ponderous dead weight Barton began Federlining another unknown male, a “musician” named Cisco Adler. What kind of “music” Adler is supposed to be known for is a bit of a mystery, but that doesn’t really matter – he stands next to Barton in paparazzi photos with no shirt on, providing definitive proof with his washboard abs and trendy tattoos that the starlet isn’t some sort of demented female chubby-chaser.
The current queen of Barton’s ilk – TV stars destined to be forgotten within another five years, but whose images we can’t seem to escape at the moment – is Eva Longoria. The “Desperate Housewives” star isn’t a real strong actress, as any fool can see, but she’s willing to go that extra mile for attention, like presenting awards wearing a bathing suit instead of a gown. As a consequence, no weekly gossip rag, no daily entertainment “news” show, and no Internet celebrity site can let a new issue slip by without at least one picture of her in it. More and more it seems these days one merits fame simply by stepping up and claiming it – just like Charlie-O’s has been doing for the past 25 years.
Maybe the dragon should compete in the next round of American Idol.
