Invisible Celebrity Literature
Author: Simon Sellars • Dec 18th, 2006 •Category: Ballardosphere, Jean Baudrillard, celebrity culture, speed & violence
No Fear of the Future, a new group blog that’s recently come on line, features a jaw-dropping analysis of celebrity culture from the talented Chris Nakashima-Brown.
It begins by outlining the Ballardian aspects of Operation Paget, the inquiry into the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. Chris sets Paget up as the sequel to Ballard’s treasured Warren Commission Report, describing the Diana fest as “eight-hundred-plus pages of pure clinical Ballardian detail remixed with Spectacular Baudrillardian celebrity media fireworks”.
Chris draws a long list of Paget’s ingredients, including:
+ Deadpan evaluations of conspiracy theories involving MI5, MI6, Mossad, CIA, NSA, the Freemasons, the Scientologists and the Royal Mafia.
+ Voyeuristic views from every surveillance camera in Paris.
+ Unintentionally fetishistic dissections of the black Mercedes.
+ Oliver Stone film clip glimpses of the Princess’s contorted post-crash body position and cryptic last words.”
Finally, he bathes in the vectors of speed, violence and celebrity, visiting Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake along the way, before ending with a hypothesis to chill the blood of any 21st-century urban dweller:
Imagine if [the paparazzi] acted with deliberate revolutionary intent, seeking to capture the most hideous possible images of movie stars, the pampered skin of their faces pulled back into horrifying contortions by disused tendons provoked out of their Botox slumber. Surely that would hack the Spectacle, at least for the fifteen minutes before it morphed into the new sexy commoditized cool.
In the meantime, we wait for the secret boxes of evidence collected by Operation Paget to trickle out into the Internet-of-Things via eBay.”
Our Man in Shepperton would indeed be smiling at the remix of neon ghastliness described in this, Chris Nakashima-Brown’s “perfect pathology report on the end of the twentieth century”.
..:: RELATED
+ Chariot of Fire: Preliminary Analysis & Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales
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The vibrations will live on……
George Lochinski writes: Your last post mentions Helen Duncan, and wouldn’t you know it, Helen Duncan is also mentioned in The Fall’s “Psykick Dancehall No. 2″ in a spoken word smample of (probably) MES himself saying: Helen Duncan was……
“Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it’s not my home, it’s their
Home, and I’m welcome no more….”
1986 premonition?
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
Lyrics by Stephen Morrissey
Music by Johnny Marr
Take me out tonight
Where there’s music and there’s people
And they’re young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven’t got one
Anymore
Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don’t drop me home
Because it’s not my home, it’s their
Home, and I’m welcome no more
And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I don’t care
I don’t care, I don’t care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought Oh God, my chance has come at last
(But then a strange fear gripped me and I
Just couldn’t ask)
Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I don’t care
I don’t care, I don’t care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I haven’t got one, da …
Oh, I haven’t got one
And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
Oh, There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out
There Is A Light And It Never Goes Out