The Private Life of Fame

The storm of media attention surrounding the same-day deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett has probably already hit saturation point. Some will read more than coincidence into this, others will conclude that it was another spectacular publicity stunt by Michael Jackson to go out in style with the former vixen queen of the 70’s. Whatever the case, the inundation of media gossip and tabloid-style overkill has already started raging forth and one can only duck to avoid the sheer breadth and speed of the coverage. Death’s ever-present shadow poses a merciful boon to ratings in the dumbed-down, hyped-up pop-culture “Neverland" we are living in. A place where we can find permission in Michael Jackson's Peter Pan syndrome, to linger in our own juvenile fantasies. Yet "Death" still comes knocking at the gilded gates of stars' estates and pushes through the undigestible clutter of mass media with its bleak finality.
Michael Jackson was arguably a “captive persona” of stardom. A product of this continuous production line of celebrity idols yet never able to fade away quite as forgettably as most and determined to let his freakish persona rival and then eclipse his talent as an entertainer. Is it possible Michael Jackson was a casualty of his own forever-morphing and cartoonish image? He was undivisible from his own celebrity, and in a sad sense, it was all he had, and it devoured him. In these waning moments of the Hollywood-American empire the obsessive effort to mass-merchandise youth and beauty has doubled in recent years - as if to show to the world that America is still the young land of hope, prosperity and remade has-beens. And as the ouverture of the final movement swells in its cacophonous soundbite babble and desperation presses itself up against the glass outside, the grimace of used-up fame and shattered myths are locked up securely in steely celebrity vaults. We are taken by the pitiless storm, the synthetic replaces the organic, and the juvenile and the profane are held onto as safe illusions masking a vitiated and self-indulgent culture in rapid decline. There is a compelling resonance here between the stretched-over grin of greedy success and Michael Jackson’s disappearing nose. A scalpel wielded by a quack plastic surgeon is no different than a pen wielded by a fraudulent real estate broker. It’s the illusion that sells.

All of this dead celebrity spectacle of course is compelling because it tugs at our elbow and catches the corner of our eye with a stark sense of unease. It serves as a wider ontological frame of reference for our own fleeting time. These public display of mass mourning for dead celebrities are completely mired in some atavistic need to congregate and observe ritual. Indeed, occasions like this that are inflated to such magnitude (Princess Di’s death is a fitting example,) approximates the ersatz sacred or ceremonial in a cultural landscape of pre-fab subdivisions and Twitter. It is a phenomenon that can’t be easily dismissed or avoided for that matter. This type of public hysteria and outpouring of grief over the deaths of strangers save for their pop-icon status, reveals a confused and childlike public craving for Godhead wherever it can be found. More importantly, there is a proprietary aspect to all of this. Michael Jackson, Princess Di, Elvis, Marilyn were not merely symbols -- they were trademarks – the property of millions and destroyed by the pressure of the spotlight. Could it not be argued that the adoring public holding these mass "orgies" of grief, are registering their sense of betrayal? Of having their beloved icon torn from their grip only to reaffirm the shocking truth that mortality is the great equalizer? More on this in the next blog.

Is that a Feeling or a Sensation?

I just came across a quote from Oswald Spengler, in "The Decline of the West," in which he writes that one of the key features of the end of a culture is when one can't tell "sensation from feeling." It's hard to dispute this claim as one looks around at our hyper-stupefied age where the general level of discourse is of a teen gossip magazine variety. It seems as if we distrust deeper and more "authentic" human emotions and prefer to hide behind the safe dishonesty of the "cool" surface. The culture of "cool" permeates our conscious environment. Cool means noncommittal and disaffected. The whole cool "facade" is about "trying too hard" to detach and steer clear of vulnerability. Our collective consciousness is blunted by the flood unfiltered trivia that permits undue influence to the insipid or the tasteless or even the the likes of bloggers without lives (personal references aside.) How have we arrived at this juncture in our evolution where a shrugging detachment has become a necessary survival method? We've even come to misunderstand "feeling" as opposed to "feelings." To have or discover "feelings" has an Oprah connotation - usually associated with something touchy-feely, sentimental and easily sold to a self-absorbed and gullible public looking for the next quick fix from the latest self-help guru. Then there's "feeling" - that "all-too human" condition in which one responds to stimuli by genuine engagement. Any of us who are products of this cynical branding culture are jaded in the knowledge that sensation sells. It keeps the presses warm and the heads of our media and entertainment industries well-remunerated. I don't want to accept that humanity is now reducible to sets of predictable shopping behaviour and that all the rest is history, but it's obvious that our failure to access a sense of the profound, of the transcendent is diminishing amid our unrelenting need to satisfy our shrinking attention spans. There are rare moments when I am transported by a piece of music, for example, and am touched with either a "feeling" of joy or gravity depending on what it conveys and I will be surprised by the genuine emotions that are stirred up from within. Music is particularly effective at doing this but so is art and literature -- albeit with more effort. A great work of art is able to connect the viewer to the universal -- to immortality. It has the power to access the higher senses and is not quickly digested and forgotten upon the viewer's exit. A great work of art doesn't merely take you by surprise and shake you out of your routine, it infiltrates your consciousness and quietly alters your perception and experience. Indeed, it ought to subvert and leave you a bit confused. We have not merely lost our ability to "feel" -- we have more importantly lost our ability to understand why we're feeling it. If you listen to the "Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart for example, there are arias that are soft and healing -- that literally take the weight of the world and liberate the listener with a "feeling" of heavenly levitation. This is not a mere sensation -- it's a humanizing experience that has a purgative effect on us. A great piece of jazz or even a well-crafted, melodic and intelligent pop song also have the same effects but we're now living in the age of the deejay and it seems that the technological advances that allow for deafening crystalline volume with earth-shaking bass are commensurate with a decline in quality or substance of the music being played. The twin trends of idiocy and mediocrity seem inescapable and the brash noise of a world impoverished by excess overwhelms higher and more reflective states of being.

Viciou$ Cycle

It was only a matter of time but it now looks like the recession has finally caught up with my life. I've been facing a tight market in the line of work that I've been attempting to establish myself in which is E.S.L. teaching to be precise. I live in an overrated city that is paradise for those who can afford it and just another landlord-enriching, hand-to-mouth exercise in futility for most. Lately the embers of anger have been rekindled inside me. I'm 43 years old and fall far short of the "upwardly mobile" criteria. I have no real assets to speak of, no career, no investments, forget RRSPS. I have a long-distance relationship going on two years with a woman who I want to marry and yet the paralyzing weight of financial reality threatens this possibility. To add insult to injury, a former friend of mine is pursuing a small claims case against me. His aims are dubious and based on an informal understanding that we had about my living there for a time. The circumstances I was in when I was living at his house were as such that I wasn't able to pay him rent but now he remembers it differently and adamantly insists that we had a verbal contract from the very beginning. It's a convoluted story in which he is seeking maximum damages because he is under financial pressure from his mortgage creditors. He decided that rather than wait for me to set my life up and return the favour when I was in a position to, he opted to push ahead with a claim. He did this by editing his memory and trumping up his version of events on legal documents. This is the abyss that I'm staring into right now. Conniving former friends who will stop at nothing and are willing to believe their own lies and spin facts, to get what they want. This former "friend" won't rest until I suffer as much as he claims he has. This is what the world is becoming now. A snakepit where at any moment someone who you thought you could trust might turn on you. Where the enormous economic pressures just to survive are quickly eroding our humanity and where moral lapse, deceit and where many interpersonal relationships are based on some form of transactional pragmatism. I can't help but want to point my finger at the greedmeisters - the untouchable corporate elite who foster these mechanisms and then stand back and unleash them on an unwitting public. Yet I am not so naive as to actually submit to some Marxist or Anarchist solution as I've come to believe that ideology itself is far too limiting. In fact, ideology itself doesn't seem sufficient anymore as the problems we face on a global and planetary scale don't demand one set of solutions. I may not have a sophisticated or detailed knowledge of the international monetary system, but I do believe that if there is a culprit, it's the persistent notion that is propagandized to us by media and governments that market-based capitalism is the indisputable measurement of our success as a civilization. My own life is a microscopic statistic with its own unique history of personal mistakes and poor choices but thrown against the backdrop of a much larger composite I see how the reality of my "statistic" reflects a demographic trend. Should I take comfort in this? Or should I recognize the cold isolation of my circumstances - that my own incompetence and neglect from an earlier age should dictate the present crisis of my life? Is my life a microcosm of the world that has been created in the last 30 years? Booms and busts, sudden bumps and turns and an increasingly rootless and humiliating life of poverty and debt? Perhaps this is why I have chosen to write this in my blog, it's the closest way that I can scream back at the world from my rooftop without being arrested or institutionalized. How can one continue to deny that these pressures arrayed around us are not largely and fundamentally systemic? This blogging exercise might help me to get some things off my chest and I can only hope that it will be a modest contribution to a greater dialogue but I think we're all compassion-weary in the developed world and have become almost de-sensitized to the pain of others, we have adapted this Darwinian reflex that shuns the weak and the dispossessed for fear of becoming so ourselves. Hence this denial is reflected in exaggerated displays of wealth and power in our culture. The usual status-conferring objects like expensive cars or accessories take on even more value in these times. The individual who displays his toys is effectively declaring his "fitness" - that he's risen above the muck of hard economic times and has passed the evolutionary test. And as the times come to reward the crassest modes of behaviour like ruthless opportunism rather than the community ethos of mutual support without a contractual due-date, it seems the collapse of everything we've known and bothered to fight for becomes more and more imminent.
Money has always pervaded our conscious waking-lives and will continue to do so, but now it seems that as we become more fragmented and left to fend for ourselves in this economy, many of us who have simply slipped through the cracks will find ourselves getting too familiar and even comfortable in their surrounding.

Help Wanted

Below is a piece I came across that I wrote in 2002, recently I've experienced similarly frustrating setbacks in my life and I'm trying to examine how much personal choice overlaps larger economic forces beyond our control. I argued from more of a political framework of analysis then, but now I would see the political as symptomatic of a broader social and cultural underpinning. Here goes:

At the time I write this I am unemployed.
In the age of public confessions, this is a mild one, but it still invites negative stereotypes.
I can already hear that dismissive refrain of - “get a job” .
It infuriates me everytime I hear it, and I am forced to defend my integrity by having to reassure the smug, sadistic fool who utters this line that I am leaving no stone unturned looking for work.
At my age, 36 to be exact, I know that I am not the prime candidate for most labouring jobs, though I continue to apply, and equally, I lack the skills for specialized work. I’m caught in the crevasse of the new economy. I am aware that I made earlier decisions that landed me here. I am aware that I need more training and I intend to go back to school. I refuse to be helpless in this situation.
Being a student of larger events, I have come to the conclusion, however,that we are shaped by global forces as much as we are by personal choices and circumstances.
The developed world has undergone a“ paradigm shift” in recent years. This catchphrase means that the traditional structure of our economy has become outmoded and we’re in a whole new game with a whole new set of rules - somebody else’s rules, I might add.
Governments have responded by shrinking, deregulating and privatizing at a frantic pace in order to seem relevant in a technology based economy. For the shortsighted this is a welcome development, but for others who believe that government plays a balancing role in society, this threatens human and planetary progress.
I grew up in the eighties with the belief that all you needed to do was graduate from post-secondary school and you could simply take your place in the world. Faced with the new reality, this notion seems quite romantic now. Still the old belief system that fosters this kind of hyper-individualism is still very potent in out society.
The Calvinist tradition in our country presumes an individual’s worth is defined by productive labour. This doesn’t have the same resonance nowadays. However, as a member of the jobless “statistic” it s not easy to overcome the sense of shame that to be unemployed reflects moral failure. I have experienced feelings of self-loathing, to resignation ,to disgust at my situation. I sense that I am not alone, that I am among a permanent, growing underclass .
To view it in context, Gordon Campbell like George W. Bush is an employee of big business more so than a servant of the public trust. The Campbell Liberals argue that their attacks are aimed at financing the debt, they convince us with distorted math, but it is a front to cater to the business elite.
In the current economy, getting a decent job feels like winning a lottery draw and holding onto it means working with the ever present fear that you are replaceable.
In the shadow of NAFTA, September 11, and the recent softwood lumber tariff, we are confronted with the fact that we are at the mercy, more than ever, of international forces in B.C.
Campbell’s stubborn,cost-cutting might create a business friendly environment in B.C. but it will mean very little if the services that allow for a decent quality of life aren’t there anymore and therefore as
Unemployed persons, we must resist these feelings of shame and burden. To fall into this mindset absolves the powers-that-be so they can continue their assault on the most needy.
I think it’s important to become aware of the larger context in which we’re all living even though when you’re out of work it’s hard to get beyond the momentary and immediate. For the next few years the unemployed in this province will have to get used to being out in the cold unless we become informed and organized and defend our rights to live and work in a civil society.