living someone else’s dream, one flash bulb at a time.

It seems the gossip pages these days are slimmer than a Wall Street broker’s wallet, and the usual go-to sites for the scoop on NYC celebrity finally had to address the gossip column content crisis of 2009. Gawker outlined a pretty detailed list of reasons there has been a scant amount of attention paid to celebs or their scandal. One proposal made is that because no one has any money, no one wants to read about or watch the fabulous lives of celebs and socialites since there isn’t a hope in hell anyone could ever afford to party or shop like their favourite E! characters. Ummm…..I didn’t have two nickels to rub together last year just like this year, but you bet your ass I was watching Britney assault SUV’s with an umbrella, and I loved every minute of it.  Furthermore, if I did have even a fraction of the money it took to live the life of a beloved and famous Housewife, I’d be too busy swiping my black card at Barney’s to read Page Six (may it rest in peace).

Celebrity obsession has and always will be about escapism.  Sure people have problems right now. The majority of Americans had problems last year and two years before that and ten years before that. We read about the disasters of the rich and famous because we want to forget about the fact there isn’t enough money in the bank to cover this month’s rent or that there is another round of lay offs going down at the office next week.  We laugh at the blunders of our favourite blonde socialite to keep from crying at the pathetic state of affairs we find ourselves living in.

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around and around we go

The popular network and home of The Real Housewives of New York City, Bravo, is set to start filming a documentary-style reality show based on the lives of Manhattan’s private school teens.  Bravo has seen the success of shows like Gossip Girl and The Hills and has found their own way of capitalizing on this nerve-grating rich kid obsession.  Little detail has been released on who the stars of the show will be and the names of the schools will remain anonymous:

Speculations from….. Internet speculators reflect concerns about how realistic this show could possibly be, and how wealthy the stars of the show will actually be. Obviously as shallow as the premise of this show is, they can’t exactly show these teens blowing lines in clubs they aren’t even close to being of age to enter, and I doubt cameras will be granted access to their friends homes when they go to raid their parent’s medicine cabinets of all the Valium, painkillers, and Xanax they can get their hands on. Without that kind of controversial material, all you’re left with is a glorified, serial version of My Super Sweet 16, and I doubt even Hills fans could stomach that. (more…)

Coming this summer, Ashley Dupre stars in the inuendo laden new reality show: “Behind Bars”

Fashion week has ended here in NYC and with Oscars and London Fashion Week right on it’s heels, I wonder how anyone in the media sleeps during February.  Although there is never any shortage of gossip during fashion week (runway tents are virtual celeb pressure cookers), the usual reports on frivolous cat fights over seating arrangements was overshadowed by the biggest celebrity of 2009 – The Depression. YAY.  But honestly, what can be said about the recession and fashion that isn’t self explanatory? Looks are cheaper. Styles are less over the top.  Some fashion houses have folded. Designers had to cut back costs associated with the show etc. I scoured the pages searching for something I didn’t already know. The only other topics the media seemed interested in was the cast of Gossip Girl showing up to just about every runway show.  Snore.  Tori Spelling got a little huffy at the Christian Syriano show for no apparent reason. Sigh.  Ashley Dupre gets a front row seat at Yigal Azrouël’s runway show. BINGO.

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real fame seekers know that wearing at least three necklaces guarantees photo and news coverage. duh.

Trans-Atlantic  famegamer, Peaches Geldof is back in the gossip pages this week as a result of her impending divorce from musician Max Drummer. The dissolution of the 19-year-old mouthy Britt’s marriage with her barely famous husband is just another disaster in a long line of bad press Peaches has accrued since immigrating to Brooklyn. After she was ridiculed for her short-lived column in Nylon, her reality show on MTV was canned, and the plug was pulled on her magazine, Disappear Here, one would think she would have disappeared into flannel shirt anonymity with the rest of her hipster pals.

But not this little British tart. Although Peaches would like you to believe her split from Drummer was amicable, “After much soul-searching we have made a mutual decision to end our marriage and have agreed to go our separate ways. Our parting is amicable and both of us still respect and care about each other immensely. There were no other people involved in this decision and we both look forward to a future as good friends” (Sunday Times), rumors swirling around the gossip pages about her getting cozy with another lady at a loft party in Bushwick and her new love affair with Donald Cumming lead me to believe otherwise.

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little fame ballers, just itching to get photographed!

This week was a bit more sedate than usual here in New York. Everyone’s been so obsessed with Super Bowl ads or Michael Phelp’s extracurricular activities to write about something interesting. Fortunately, Page Six Magazine identified a disturbing new “trend” among New York’s elite power mommies – multiples, and no, I’m not talking about the kind of multiples that elude just about every woman I know. Close though.

According to the piece, New Yorkers have taken a hint from Angelina Jolie and realized birthing kids the old fashioned way (one at a time) isn’t enough anymore:

“But the multiples explosion isn’t just a result of an uptick of in vitro fertilization—it’s also a symptom of New York do-it-all power mommies looking to multitask and keep up with the Joneses (or, at least, Brangelina).”

Let’s face it – babies are a status symbol, but who has the time for all those long, drawn out pregnancies?  And not to mention the time it takes to work off all that excess baby weight.  Instead, these multi-tasking mommas are begging their fertility docs (sex, apparently, is passé too) to try to make two or more of those little eggies stick.

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when confronted with a potential mate, DABA girls will circle twice and then sniff his wallet.

Dawn,

So, damn, you’ve been getting some ridicule and I’m pretty sure it’s not what you thought you were signing up for when you sat down with Ravi Somaiya for that little piece in the Times. But actually, wait, maybe I’m wrong about that. Did you really (really?!) not know what you were getting into (I mean, feasible enough since you overlooked the bumps in the road associated with that whole marrying a banker thing). I don’t know how on top of your Gawker you are, but it doesn’t take an RSS feed to figure out your story is their meat or better yet, you are. And yes, they’ll make you a webelebelibrity if that was your goal. Book deals don’t just fall out of the sky–except when they do, whatever.

But hey, maybe you could have gotten one on your own? The dreamy girl jobs, the promotions, the long shiny hair? I guess you just get tired of waiting for it especially when a short-cut was so there and, well, seize-able. So, Carpe Diem? Girl leaves Maine, gets big city job, meets big city people, marries them, sells-out, gets laughed at, writes book.

Love,

Ryan

Where Fame Comes From?

Most systems have some sort of currency. Market economies have money. Cells have ATP. The fame game has attention. The currencies are often taken for granted; I don’t think why I can exchange a sweaty handful of bills for a sweaty handful of Bud Light–I just do it, and all is well.

In fact, it’s sort of unseemly to talk openly about currency in itself.  Talking about jobs among friends, we pass off money as a tangential factor: “The money’s better, sure, but I’m really excited about . . .”

So it is with attention.  We don’t say, “Gosh I enjoy staring at hot babes (dudes, cars, gadgets, whatever)”–in fact, in those cases, we don’t even say anything.  The reaction is internal and, often, unnoticed.

The name for a big pile of money is wealth; a big pile of attention is fame.  The difference is that people have spent a lot of time studying how money works.  One can, for example, get a PhD in economics.  When it comes to attention and fame, though, we act as if there’s some sort of alchemy that happens.

Really, though, fame comes from attention, and attention comes from individual people–from you and from me.  It’s time we start analyzing how people accumulate our valuable attention.

jamie lynn spears and penis enlargement pills are very similar

Celebrities are wealthy, generally speaking.  I got to thinking, though: how do they get that way?  The answer is obvious for certain classes, for example, socialites.  They inherit money.

Some other celebrities are well-paid for their work: think movie stars and Damien Hirst and certain other well-compensated artists.  This makes sense.  If Will Smith is an actor that America wants to pay to see, then the studios will pay him well.

Then there are the celebrities that initially stumped me, namely, recording artists.  The music industry is famed for taking a huge bite out of record sales, so it seems unlikely that someone like Ashlee Simpson could accumulate wealth through that route alone.  In fact, it seems clear that in many cases it is endorsements, magazine cover deals, and things like that that generate income.  In other words, for certain celebrities their marketable skill is getting attention. (see image)

My provocative theory on this is that these people, whether through attractiveness, salacious appeal, or representation of a potent cultural myth, operate on people like attention grabbing headlines or spam email subjects–they turn heads.

Ms. Pac-Man

Our crack research team (i.e., myself) has been crunching numbers and tracking down interesting data points (i.e., what genders are Kristian Laliberte, Jamee Gregory) and we have discovered something pretty weird, actually.

Recall my last post, wherein we learned that 17 of the 25 People Magazine Hottest Celebs were women.  That is 68% of the list.

Of the top 50 Fame Game profiles as of November 20th, 2008, 34 were women.  This is 69.39% of the total.

The numbers are almost the same, which raises a few observations:

First, a banal one: it may not be as surprising as it seems at first, since the lists come from the same time period (roughly) and purport to measure similar things.  Note, however, that the actual individual celebrities in both lists are different, so it would seem we are seeing some sort of wide effect, and not simply repeated analyses of the same data.

Second, it’s interesting to think about the industries the two lists draw from.  People is overwhelmingly movie and tv stars, while Fame Game looks more at socialites, fashion moguls, and politicians.  It is a little counterintuitive that the proportion would be so similar between two different areas.

Third, of course, none of this is statistically solid–yet.  I plan to get into the larger Fame Game database and perhaps find out some more solid trends.

And of course, look forward to some work on race and celebrity.

ladies in red.

I sought a theme (for a blog post), and sought for it in vain.  Until, that is, I discovered People Magazine’s list of the 25 hottest celebs.  One thing leaps off the page as something many of these people have in common: most of them are ladies.

Fully 17 out of the 25 are women–that’s almost 70 percent.  Two divergent responses occurred to me:

1) It’s good that there is an area of society where women are comfortably in the lead.  These women are wealthy and successful.

2) It’s troubling that women dominate the celeb arena, an arena that is driven by interest in sex, glitz, and scandal.

To be honest, it is not immediately clear what to make of this.

Some other interesting factors include the power of celebrity couples (tomkat are sitting at #1 and #2) and the whiteness of the faces.  Perhaps there is something to be analyzed about the race of celebs in a future post.

Look for a follow up soon wherein I study the recent famegame 2008 wrapup with an eye towards race and gender.