Article on CNN about the rumors of celebrity deaths that followed the recent cluster of three such deaths (Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson). What is it about celebrity that brings out the craziest behavior? Why would anyone want to fabricate a fake celebrity death and deliberately spread it as true?
Celebrity death rumors spread online
* Story Highlights
* Online news stories falsely claimed some celebrities had died
* The rash of fake celebrity news followed Michael Jackson’s death last week
* Some say social media fanned the flames of the rumors
* Founder of a fakeawish.com claims indirect responsibility for several rumors
By John D. Sutter
CNN
(CNN) — After a string of real celebrity deaths last week, the Internet and online social networks killed a few more stars.
Despite what you may have read, Jeff Goldblum, Natalie Portman, George Clooney, Britney Spears, Harrison Ford and Rick Astley are alive.
Fake news of their deaths flew across the Internet — particularly on online social networks like Twitter and Facebook — after Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon were reported dead.
The situation is calling attention to the changing state of the news media: As information online moves faster and comes from more sources, it’s more difficult to verify what’s true and what may be shockingly false.
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by Terry on June 29, 2009
Article on CNN entitled “Michael Jackson and the extreme price of fame.”
Michael Jackson and the ‘extreme’ price of fame
By Doug Gross
CNN
(CNN) — The celebrity flameout is a Hollywood cliché — a mantel worn tragically by the likes of Lenny Bruce and John Belushi and handed down through the years to tabloid-populating stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.
But Michael Jackson, dead at 50 after a life marked by unrivaled heights of pop brilliance and bizarre behavior that threatened to overshadow it, stood at the pinnacle of celebrity and embodied all the turmoil it can entail.
It’s a perch experts say played a major role in his troubles in life and, perhaps, his untimely death.
“He sums up every aspect of it, having the ultimate fame, the ultimate power, the ultimate influence,” said Patrick Wanis, a therapist and counselor who counts celebrities among his clients. “He also sums it up in every extreme aspect of the word.”
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by Terry on June 25, 2009
What are the odds that within just a couple hours of my posting about “predatory fans” mentioned in a British newspaper article about Michael Jackson’s approaching comeback attempt that we would receive news that he has died from a heart attack?
It’s a shame. He was a very, very, very talented man who lived a very troubled life. His “Dangerous” album is one of my top five favorite albums of all times. Was I a “fan”? No, not really. But I was hoping to get to see him perform in Las Vegas soon. He was actually instrumental in my choice of topic for my master’s thesis in information sciences.
I just hope people will treat his passing with respect.
[Edited after confirmation.]
by Terry on June 25, 2009
I’m reading this article in the UK newspaper, The Guardian, and I run across this phrase regarding Michael Jackson:
Estranged from his venal, feuding family, in reclusive retreat from his predatory fans,…
and the phrase “predatory fans” just pops out at me in great big, bright letters. Not, “a predatory fan,” but “predatory fans,” as though the entire fandom is predatory. And it makes me wonder.
Is that possible? Are there celebrities or media whose entire fandoms can be classified “predatory”? To be sure I understand, I look up the word in the Oxford American Dictionary.
Predatory; 1. (of animals) preying upon others. 2. plundering or exploiting others.
What strikes me is the notion whether a fandom as a whole can be predatory. Are all fandoms predatory? If not, if only some fandoms are predatory, are there common characteristics of the celebrities or media in question that cause their fandoms to be predatory? Or is it mere random chance?
I think back to my days as a fan. Was writing X-Files and Hawaii Five-0 fan fiction exploitative? Was the original Blogilow exploitative? (It started out merely to document my trips to Vegas to see Barry Manilow, but later, due to popular demand, it expanded to be just a general blog about the man and his performances.) I certainly didn’t mean it to be exploitative.
According to my dictionary, the most relevant part of the definition of “exploit” is “to take full advantage of, to use…for one’s own advantage, and without regard for theirs.”
Put in that light, I’m not sure I gained any advantage at all from the original Blogilow, unless you count the abundant hate mail I got from crazy fans if I said anything the slightest bit negative, such as “he needs a haircut,” and god forbid if I didn’t think a particular show was especially good. So, no, I don’t think I got any advantage out of it except for a handful of good friends made. I certainly had regard for my subject as I made a point of not revealing addresses and house locations and anything personal that wasn’t already on the web somewhere or otherwise a matter of public record. And when asked to remove something by Garry Kief, I did, though I might not have had I known of his underhanded, backstabbing conduct at closing my MMN account while pretending to be friendly about the blog content. I had a “ManiLAW” section planned where I was going to post all sorts of public legal records, but I shut Blogilow down before I got there. I can only imagine how he would have reacted to that!
I did win some fan awards for my fan fiction and I made friends in the fandoms, so that would be to my advantage, but it would hardly be “without regard” for the advantage of the shows.
In any event, I don’t think I was exploitative, which would mean, I was not predatory.
Enough about me.
What about fandoms in general? Do some celebrities have fandoms that are more predatory than others? I can think of a couple that might qualify, but is it common?
by Terry on June 16, 2009
Ran across this on one of the financial blogs I follow:
Numerous music industry agents and lawyers have told me that the recession has really hurt concert sales — In 2007, they could tell that people were under economic duress by the weaker sales, before the recession officially began.
The most recent example: Tickets are now available for AC/DC concert at the Meadowlands Giants Stadium at $29.50!
We are on the Highway to Hell reduced discretionary spending for entertainment for a long time . . .
Fan loyalty is being tested. Why spend $100-$200 or more buying a ticket when they can sit at home and listen to a CD or MP3 over and over for no additional charge. Ticket prices will have to suffer significant price deflation in order to fill seats. Lower ticket prices mean lower paydays for performers.
This is clearly happening in Las Vegas as it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a show to go to. That’s why I don’t go very often anymore. I’m not into gambling so unless there’s someone performing who I want to drop some money on, why bother going?
Ironically, it was posting about AC/DC that got me kicked off the Barrynet board several years ago.
Fan fiction has always seemed to be the domain of science fiction and pop culture fans. It doesn’t take long to build a library of fan fiction on the web. Everything from Star Trek to Harry Potter to Hawaii Five-0 to X-Files to Buffy and Xena can be found with just a few clicks.
So this was a bit of a surprise. A college professor publishing a book that essentially is a work of Shakespeare/Queen Elizabeth fan fiction! Here’s the story from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i38/38b01601.htm
From the issue dated May 29, 2009
NOTA BENE
Fan Fiction? Will and Bess; Screen Queens
By NINA C. AYOUB
There is no conclusive evidence they ever met, says Helen Hackett, at least not face to face. But for centuries now, Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare have been joined together by artists, dramatists, novelists, biographers, filmmakers, and other wishful thinkers in an “imagined golden moment” or many such moments.
Some Will-and-Bess imaginers have been content to envision the two in flirtation or antagonism, or as reserved artist and patron. A few go vastly further, portraying Elizabeth as Shakespeare’s lover, mother, or even his secret identity, writes Hackett, a reader in English literature at University College London and author of Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton University Press). [click to continue…]
This seems like really odd fan behavior. I mean, after going to all the trouble of leaping onto the court and evading security, this nut job’s fannish desire was to put a red hat on his icon’s head and then wave a Barcelona soccer team flag in front of him?
Man runs onto court in French Open final
PARIS (AP)—A man stunned Roger Federer and the crowd at the French Open when he leapt onto the court and tried to place a red hat on Federer’s head during the men’s final on Sunday.
Federer pushed the intruder aside, and the man then danced in front of him waving a Barcelona soccer team flag.
Security guards ran onto the court to subdue the man, but he jumped over the net. A security guard from Robin Soderling’s side of the court then ran out and tackled him. He was carried off the court by three security guards.
Police later said he was jailed for questioning and could be charged with illegally entering a sports stadium. Police said the man claimed to be a fan of Federer.
Intruders have interrupted Grand Slam finals before, at Roland Garros and elsewhere, but what made this episode scarier was the man went right up to Federer and touched him.
After the man was taken away, a security guard approached Federer to check if he was OK. The Swiss player smiled and nodded. A moment later, Federer turned to look up at his wife in the stands and then adjusted his headband.
Federer won the first set 6-1 and was leading 2-1 in the second set when the man got through a row of photographers and jumped onto the court. Federer lost that game at love, but then won the next.
Interesting article over on Salon.com about one of the darker aspects of fame: when bad things happen.
Join the shame parade
From Kate Gosselin to Elizabeth Edwards to Facebook users, the scorned are flaunting humiliation like never before.
By Carina Chocano
May. 28, 2009 |
If there remained any doubt as to the magical moneymaking properties of humiliating self-exposure, it evaporated Monday night as almost 10 million viewers tuned in to watch the wheels come off the bus of TV’s most lovable octo-family, the Gosselins. The new season of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ attracted twice the viewers of last season’s finale, more than any other show on TV on Memorial Day, and it’s probably safe to say it wasn’t the promise of birthday party fun that drew them. For weeks, star Kate Gosselin had been trolling for sympathy in the pages of People magazine and Us Weekly as soon as it came to light that her husband had not only been unfaithful, but creepily unfaithful. The shame parade paid off, if not in her marriage then in her ancillary career: TLC has booked them for 40 more episodes.
Until recently, standard protocol for handling a humiliating personal betrayal in public was to tough it out. This rule applied mainly to public figures who had no choice but to handle such challenges with all eyes on them, like political wives, who were required to stand by their men in purse-lipped silence, hands folded, eyes cast hellward, or celebrities, who were obliged to pretend to work through their painful feelings in public while carefully drawing the line at revealing anything that might jeopardize future career prospects. In both cases, the same general rule held true: The more painful the humiliation, the greater the need to maintain dignity by refusing to stoop to the humiliator’s level.
But those days are over. Thanks to the increasingly public nature of our lives, the ranks of people who might find themselves having to deal with private humiliations in public have now expanded to include basically everybody. And a surprising number of people recently have trumpeted their private grievances against the bastards who done them wrong, using whatever means are readily available to them. Ailing wife of the former presidential candidate Elizabeth Edwards, most prominently, used “Oprah,” the “Today” show and “The Daily Show” to get back at the tramp who seduced her husband. In January, Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend broke up with him on Facebook. Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Facebook-divorced her husband after a fight. A couple of weeks ago, former New Yorker staffer Dan Baum breached the Kremlinesque secrecy of his erstwhile employer when, in the name of transparency, he tweeted the details of his firing while painting a less-than-flattering portrait. And Veronica Lario, the long-suffering wife of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, let her priapic husband have it (predictably with a lot more panache than Edwards) when she publicly accused him of consorting with an 18-year-old and supporting the political ambitions of models and starlets. “The impudence and shamelessness of power offends the credibility of all (women), damages women in general and especially those who have always struggled to defend their rights,” Lario said to the Italian news agency ANSA. Sisterhood is powerful, but revenge is pretty sweet, too.
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From Walrus Magazine:
http://www.walrusmagazine.ca/articles/2009.06-frontier-consumed-britney-spears/
Every week, Gwyneth Paltrow sends out an email to subscribers of her newsletter, GOOP. It offers advice on lifestyle subjects ranging from fashion to detox diets, gleaned from the globe-trotting actress’s own experiences and those of her A-list friends. There are cooking tips from chef Mario Batali, DVD recommendations from Steven Spielberg, and book club picks from Paltrow’s “most literary-minded girlfriends,” one of whom is Madonna.
Almost immediately, the venture has garnered as many obsessed critics as fans. Who is Paltrow to advise normal people on how to live? “Celebrities have had their day,” sighs a reader of the Huffington Post website, which has followed the newsletter’s progress in articles like “The Real Problem with Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP.”
It is tempting to see GOOP, like the rise of tabloids that publish photos of every detail of the stars’ lives, as a uniquely modern phenomenon — something that could only happen in the age of the Internet, celebrity obsession, and Oprah-style over-sharing. However, a new book, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture, suggests we’ve actually come full circle to a mindset that last held sway a century ago.
Written by Toronto historian Marlis Schweitzer, the book focuses on the years from 1893 to 1919, when the fledgling American fashion and theatre industries were professionalizing themselves, and when the modern consumer era was born, normalizing the concepts of advertising and shopping for pleasure.
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Interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about a college sociology professor who is a big Star Trek fan and who is a “collectibles editor” at trekmovie.com where he writes reviews of Star Trek collectibles and toys and is the resident “Shatnerologist.”
He has this to say about fans:
[T]here is no standard Star Trek fan profile: “They’re not the media stereotype – for example, the geeky guys on television in The Big Bang Theory. In reality, they’re married and they have kids. Star Trek fans don’t live in their parents’ basements – they own their own.”
In a study researching Star Trek and other popular franchises, he proved that not all fans are guys: “Especially for Star Trek and Star Wars, the female fans go to conventions more, they costume more, they write more fan fiction. Men are a little more passive – playing the video games, watching the movies – but women are into the creative side of being a fan.”
Female fans are more active and male fans are more passive. Interesting thought. My observation of other fandoms would certainly be consistent with his findings.
