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536e825
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"Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want."
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celebrity
hollywood
film
movies
power
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Martha Grimes |
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6bcd822
|
"Seeing the name in a headline last week--a headline about a life that had involved real achievement--I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995--the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'--Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually . Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.'
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lies
politics
1995
2006
asia
edmund-hillary
first-lady
first-lady-of-the-united-states
jennifer-hanley
mount-everest
nepal
tenzing-norgay
united-states-senate
foreign-policy
2008
hillary-clinton
united-states-elections-2008
bill-clinton
1953
united-states
celebrity
new-york
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6c006fe
|
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
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celebrity
celebrity-culture
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P.J. O'Rourke |
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37b4864
|
There is no such thing as notoriety in the United States these days, let alone infamy. Celebrity is all.
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andy-warhol
notoriety
united-states
celebrity
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Christopher Hitchens |
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0e7120b
|
I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year.. However, I do know that it's not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it. Every day, random people use Britney's existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy. She -- alone with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and all those androids from The Hills -- are the unifying entities within this meta era. In a splintered society, they are the means through which people devoid of creativity communicate with each other. THey allow Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; they allow Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider. A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn't earn a fraction of what she warrants in free-trade economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would out earn Warren Buffet in three months. This is why entertainers (and athletes) make so much revenue but are still wildly underpaid: We use them for things that are worth more than money. It's a new kind of dehumanizing slavery -- not as awful as the literal variety, but dehumanizing nonetheless.
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celebrity
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Chuck Klosterman |