The Celebrity Cult post #3

This weekend I was fortunate enough to overhear a conversation that could have surprised Richard Dyer himself. I sat somewhere on La Brea at a restaurant on Saturday night. My friend and I were outside at a table next to what appeared to be two couples and a single woman. They caught my attention discussing how one of the women had worked at Kanye West’s previous album release party, apparently one of about fifteen naked models in afros to adorn the room. What struck me were not her elaborate descriptions of the party, but her absolute familiarity when talking about Kanye West. “Well I was surprised he wasn’t taller,” she said, “but he just had this presence.” Then one of the men chimed in with, “ It’s all in the ego. He’s just selfish, just too proud, but great music.”

To my surprise, the celebrity gossip didn’t end here, but instead wandered from one star to another, some comments and analyses based on personal insight, others pure speculation based on whatever the latest photos by the newsstand were or who saw what on E!, but the most surprising aspect of the conversation was the conviction that each person spoke with, as if these celebrities were family members or close friends. Up until this night, the only other time I’d experienced this kind of celebrity hunger was when I ran into Lindsay Lohan outside of a movie theater. Though I had seen celebrities before in New York, never had I witnessed the true insanity of the press, unleashing their full force on an overly skinny, but wholly boring Lohan. And movie-goers paused all around to gawk at the absolutely pointless spectacle.

It seems that celebrity culture no longer consists of a public lusting after an unreachable class of celebrity, but instead, at least in L.A., we have come to thrive on the proximity of celebrity and the joy of witnessing celebrities in their most humble and normal states as well as the glamorous. It is this voyeuristic quality that drives celebrity discussion all over, but nowhere is this discussion of such great importance as in Los Angeles.