A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

Cintra Wilson

Description

Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascination with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes on every sacred cow, toppling icons as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, and-for obvious reasons-Bruce Willis. She exposes events like the Oscars and even athletic jamborees as having grown a "tumescent aura of Otherness." Wilson's scathing and irresistible dissections of Las Vegas as "the Death Star of Entertainment," and Los Angeles as "a giant peach of a dream crawling with centipedes" pulse with her enlightened rejection of all things false and vain and egotistical. Written with her trademark zeal and intelligence, A Massive Swelling is the antidote for the fame virus that infects us all.

Sujets

• Criticism
• Theory
• Art

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 24 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780990574323
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A
MASSIVE SWELLING
 
CELEBRITY RE-EXAMINED AS
A GROTESQUE, CRIPPLING DISEASE
AND OTHER CULTURAL REVELATIONS
 
BY
 
Cintra Wilson

Copyright 2016 Cintra Wilson,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by Wilberforce Codex
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9905-7432-3
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Praise for A Massive Swelling
“In writing about fame in these United States, Cintra Wilson is incisive, inflammatory, offensive, astute, vulgar, mean, wildly funny, compassionate, and sweeping. Her dull moments are few.” – The Boston Globe
 
“A Massive Swelling is a you-tell-it-girl delight, one of those books that ought to be read by a lot of people, and not just those who appreciate informed rant, crackling prose and hilarious, adjective-rippling commentary… a proactive, Pop-Rocks-for-the-brain book.” – The San Diego Union-Tribune
 
“You don’t have to be a particularly deep thinker to come to the conclusion that fame is a big con. Fortunately, Salon.com columnist Wilson also happens to a brilliant writer with a deliciously warped and blistering wiseass take.” – Entertainment Weekly
 
“Wilson should watch out. If she keeps being so funny and brutal, she’ll end up famous herself.” – USA Today
 
“A flamboyantly profane lambasting of the ‘perverse deformity’ of fame…. Rhinestone-studded prose…. With a backbone of rectitude that gives it substance.” – Kirkus Reviews
 
“These sixteen rabid, breakneck essays that take no prisoners, producing both gasps and laughter… Startling, witty and unerring. Wilson both entertains and deserves attention.” – Publishers Weekly
 
“Warning” do not read this book at a wake, on a precipice, or with a full bladder… Wilson’s turbo, heat-seeking essays about fam, the bane of our commodified culture, will induce bent-double, breathless laughter.” – Booklist
 
“Today, fame–not a good job or a first home–is the American Dream. It’s another psychological epidemic in need of a cure; A Massive Swelling might be an effective vaccination for the as of yet unafflicted.” – Gambit Weekly
 
“”[Cintra Wilson] wields one of the sharpest pens in the business… Her essays storm the cheesy walls of popular culture like a band of punk-chick Visigoths, ravage the sequin-clad icons within and leave Celine Dion on her ass in a puddle.” – Time Out New York
 
“By A Massive Swelling’s end, Wilson has built a formidable case for the toxicity of fame. She has us convinced.” – Playboy
 
“[Cintra Wilson’s] relentless, justifiably sarcastic gaze is unwavering… refreshingly gutsy and scorchingly accurate.” – Seattle Weekly
 
Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up to then, he had found very unsatisfactory In so far as it recognized him as important, the order of things was good. But, reconciled by his success, he yet refused to forgo the privilege of criticizing this order. For the act of criticizing heightened his sense of importance, made him feel larger. Moreover, he did genuinely believe there were things to criticize. (At the same time, he genuinely liked being a success and having all the girls he wanted.) – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
 
Of course, what made the whole thing smell was that many of the rich and famous were dumb cunts and bastards. They had simply fallen into a big pay-off somewhere. Or they were enriched by the stupidity of the general public. They were usually talentless, eyeless, soulless, they were walking pieces of dung, but to the public they were god-like, beautiful, and revered. Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. It finally boiled down to the matter of who got the most votes. In the land of the moles, a mole was king. So, who deserved anything? Nobody deserved anything . . . – Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY CINTRA WILSON:
 
Caligula For President:
Better American Living Through Tyranny
 
Colors Insulting to Nature
 
Fear and Clothing:
Unbuckling American Style
 
 
www. CintraWilson .com
 
Twitter: @ xintra
 
#AMassiveSwelling

 
 
 
A New Introduction for The 2016 e-Edition, by THE AUTHOR
A Massive Swelling was first published by Viking/Penguin in 2000.
 
The internet was just beginning to lose its baby teeth. There was no Gawker, no TMZ, no Perez Hilton, no Kardashians. The American Dream of home ownership was still intact; as was the dream of being suddenly discovered in your local 7-Eleven or live bait shop , and whisked off to an ecstatic new world of Hollywood superstardom.
 
In the context of today’s media climate, this sounds impossible — but when “A Massive Swelling” came out in 2000, it was actually considered to be controversial — or at least unforgivably rude. In some LA and New York circles it was tantamount to blasphemy; I was regarded with roughly the same distaste as someone who had just thrown up in the open coffin of a decorated war hero.
 
I am quite surprised that my shrill purple hyperbole on the subject of celebrity would more or less pass for reasonable entertainment industry reportage less than twenty years later.
 
Hollywood, as the propaganda arm of the American republic, has always (by accident or design) been a lopsided reflection of the larger political/economic context -- which, for the last 3 decades, has been a wholesale race to hit rock bottom financially, ethically, spiritually, and intellectually (on the brighter side, the unbearable tensions of this Fall of Rome-esque climate have produced a new Golden Age of television!).
 
There have been many notable ruptures in the culture of celebrity since 2000, and a particular few that I feel deserve mentioning.
 
I believe a seismic shift occurred in the landscape of fame-perception following the attacks of 9/11/2001. For some reason, the execution-style murder of the World Trade Center created the need for an abrupt democratization of Fame. Americans became suddenly aware of death ; this created a kind of collective ego panic, loosely articulated as “I don’t care if I am not a Barrymore, Baldwin, Sheen or Paltrow — I deserve my shot at the big time, and I must sing on television right fucking now .”
 
Enter: American Idol, a show that answered this cri-de-coeur by providing an avenue via which any mammal with a power-vibrato and a dream had a chance to yodel their way into overnight celebrity.
 
Like the roller-coaster elasticity that replaced the regulations preventing the economy from crashing like it did during the Great Depression, and the predatory mortgage opportunities created by this heedlessness, the perceived value of this newly attainable fame also started to hurtle downhill at breakneck speed at its moment of inception. American Idol created new “stars,” but it did so by diluting the currency of stardom. Overnight fame, like the real-estate bubble, was engineered with planned obsolescence in mind: it blew up hugely and quickly, for the purpose of producing a sensational wet pop. It was a disposable flash-Fame that coincided perfectly with the fad of disposable flash-cameras.
 
Reality TV was a whole other radical cultural Quantitative Easing which borrowed negatively against human attention units, and made the value of Fame plummet even deeper into the abyss.
 
When we got bored merely humiliating hopeful yokels on “American Idol.”
The public got restless, cruel and itchy for the spectacle of real tragedy.
Audiences wanted to taste blood on their teeth (perhaps because we were now at war, but denied the type of hardcore, Vietnam-style televised war coverage that might inspire a peace movement.)
 
This is when Paris Hilton dropped like bright phosphorus onto an already tinder-dry media.
 
Paris — like the city of love — was expensive and filthy…and this was her secret weapon. Nobody ever said anything nice about Paris Hilton, and this only made her stronger.
 
Paris was much too formidable an heiress to give a shit about public disgrace, or need anyone’s approval. Everything Paris touched was so frankly commercial and perfectly liteweight as to be fashionably anorexic, and therefore attractively loathable, in spirit.
She even put out a pop album to celebrate her own celebrated lack of talent: a heady combination of electronic drum-beats and candy-sick whimpers; a perfect soundtrack for a Hentai anime featuring a bunch of schoolgirls in knee-socks getting raped by a cartoon octopus.
 
Paris Hilton correctly assessed that p leasant artistic accomplishments were no longer capable of controlling the attention span of a world fizzling with ADHD (particularly at a time when pornography abruptly evolved from the relative unavailability of pricey magazine three-packs sold in back of the Arco station to free super-abundance on every personal computer) — but that there was enormous money to be made in disgrace and humiliation. To really capture a news cycle, you needed scandals, disasters, public tantrums, guns in airports, murders, shark-attacks, and frothing fits of atavistic, old-school racism (a la Mel Gibson). Fame has always been made of quantities of attention, not qualities. For any fame-seeking narcissist, more attention (positive or negative) means …you WIN (cue ominous Donald Trump-rally kettle-drums).
 
Public Outrage became the new Fame, and Paris was crowned its favorite whipping-blonde.
 
Proximity to Ms. Hilton was a proven health hazard: She blew all the clothing, morals, inhibitions and self-control of her victims sideways, leaving them emaciated, dehydrated, broke, disoriented and often in jail.
 
Under-stimulated American audiences suddenly delighted in