Elucidation of Popular Culture

In accordance with federal legislation prohibiting discrimination, after a lengthy & expensive legal battle to prevent me from contributing a monthly column presenting views contrary to all antiMusic represents, I am pleased to announce the launch of your new favorite feature on antiMusic: a lone voice of sanity in the insanity that's antiMusic, the place where you can come for reliable advice on what to think, the Veridical Polemic a.k.a. "I'm Always Right" column with Dolly Doppelganger! Read my words and obey them if you want to be right all the time, just like me!

A recent science newsletter I subscribe to by email promises to tell me if Shakespeare had syphilis or not. I don't know about you, but I am just dying to know! I no longer care about events personally relevant to me, celebrity watching is the best hobby in the universe. It is a well known fact that famous people fear & shun privacy. It's an equally well known fact, that a sad side effect of earning too much money is Rabid Eccentricity, RE, which presently affects a growing portion of the population of the state of California.

This degenerative ailment is the most ignored in all of medicine, due to the extreme shyness it also paradoxically causes. As bizarre as Michael Jackson is, for instance, ironically he is one of the more 'normal' ones in Hollyweird. It's only because of his fondness for kids that we even learned about his strange lifestyle. You don't ever hear about the bizarre lives of the rich & famous garden variety celebrities, because that never get arrested. They are into stuff far weirder than MJ, but their ability to keep police investigations and lawsuits quashed means they can be major freaks in secret. For instance, some of them I won't name like to lick their kitchen floors clean while dressed like robots after they entertain guests, in months that have an 'r' in them. Others who wish to remain anonymous have 'stalker rooms' devoted to themselves, filled with pictures of themselves in various poses with the eyeballs all painstakingly cut out, mounted on lighted mirrors. One time the Bev Hills cops raided the wrong house, found one such "stalker room", and after the temporarily blinding glare wore off from 20,000 (celebrity name)'s faces leveling a freakishly refulgent gaze at the cops, damaging their corneas, they promptly arrested the maid, who spoke very little English, and deported her. After many private photo ops with the reclusive star, many generous trips for the arresting officers & the department heads on the star's private jets & yachts, to some of the many countries the star owned, and after many autographed items exchanging hands, including paper of the folding green kind, the officers conveniently 'lost' the paperwork blaming the star for being a pathological nut case, setting up his own stalker shrine. The official statement released by the BHPD enabled the star's heart rate to slow down to a much less dangerous level. It simply stated that the cops raided the wrong house, and found that a stalker had taken up residence in the star's manse, assumed the identity of the maid, unbeknownst to any of the people who occupied the house.

Whew! Such a close one!! With a stroke of the pen, bumbling cops transformed themselves into heroes & protected the normal (wink) star! (And that's the REAL reason stars wear shades. It's not so they look cool, they already are cool. It's because their eyes hurt from admiring their shrines to themselves.)

So when you are rooting around for delicious tidbits of information like a truffle pig snuffling along on the muddy trail of delicacies, you are only giving the celebs the treatment they agreed to when they signed their Screen Actor's Guild card, whether they knew it or not. You are also helping them live with dignity in spite of their raging RE. Don't you dare start minding your own business, or you might get them all sued for breach of contract, or they may even have a major RE-lapse!!. Every famous person has to agree to be in a major tabloid at least once in their career. Tara Reid has been a devoted soldier, and an example many new stars look up to. She now runs a training camp. Courtney Love was one of her first interns, and she is now is hot on her heels for the secret award SAG gives out after the Oscars every year. Who knows, she may even have gained the lead in the tab wars! To ignore gossip about celebs put them at great risk.

Could you live with preventing stars from fulfilling their contractual obligation to be very public? Knowing that the mortgage on their $500 million dollar second island goes into default because lawyers and court costs gobbled up their wealth that they spent most of their long lives working so hard to amass? I just can't bear to think about that, it makes me cry without fail. And this isn't even about money! Since it was originally a court case that brought Mike J's weirdness floating to the surface like the scum on a pond, stars DON'T want to be sued!! They fear that more than they fear being ignored by the public! So buy, peruse, watch & support tabloid tales, entertainment TV shows & internet forum fictions!!! In doing so, you'll be protecting the REAL privacy of the stars. Believe me, they want you to know most things about them. They'd go door to door introducing themselves if only they had the time, they love public adulation so much. So go ahead & wallow in their private lives, the mundane aspects of it, that is: the contents of their garbage cans, their tawdry affairs, their family situations, whatever you can find. Just leave their truly freaky secrets alone! Or it will be all your fault when everyone learns of the major pop star that goes into gas station restrooms in their bare feet.

Anyway, real news involving important items from around the world aren't for you, and I'm always right! I relish puff & fluffery, and you do too, or it wouldn't be it's own industry, the business of divulging the life's secrets of the rich & famous. I'm so glad that real news channels & outlets recognize our legitimate need to know stuff about the personal lives of people that we're curious about. 'Feed us more information about the private lives of big stars, before we riot', should be on the letterhead of all our stationery we send to any media outlets, and our signature on every email. What would we do if Brad & Jen somehow managed to keep their divorce a secret? I don't even want to contemplate such a miserable existence! What if they had just quietly gotten an internet divorce, "Just sign here, mail it with a check or money order to your local clerk of courts & you're free!!" instead of this major publicity generating stunt that we are being received with. What would life be like if we didn't know what was going on in Ben Affleck's dating life? What would we talk about at work if not whether J. Lo was preggo or not? So wait, watch & see!

You know what would be a perfect way to turn the present high profile divorce into the ultimate publicity stunt, at the same time it satiated our curiosity? If MTV hosted a special show on this modern American tragedy, Jessica & Mr. Jessica from "The Newlyweds" could double date with them in a Pay Per View show, and maybe the frisky young 'uns could get B&J reminiscing about the fun days back when they were first dating, when media speculation & publicity was a lot more pleasant & a lot easier to come by. Where could MTV send them on a double date? How about some museum, and Jessica could stupidly stumble them around from exhibit to exhibit as a guide, struggling to explain the intricacies of telegraphs, black and white film, and phones with cords on them. Next, they could all pop into the Adult Reading Academy that's 'helping' Jessie. (Shhh! You didn't hear that from me!!) And after that, swing by the 'Ye Olde Electrolysis Shoppe' for a quick defuzzing of everyone's backs, & the girls' upper lips & arm pits.

While the girls are bonding over their hair electrocution session, the guys can make a quick trip to the children's department at the library, to pick up some homework assignments for Jessie, and a "Dummy's Guide to High Profile Marriage Dissolutions and Lawyer Selection" for you know who, before a tender moment where Brad bursts into tears and reveals his deep, dark secret lust to see a thick layer of oiled croutons spread all over the grass in their back yard, and how his mean, witch wife would never let him indulge that fantasy. Meanwhile, Jen & Jes are chatting away, and suddenly right on cue they start weeping too, over their lost innocence, the interest rates in the currency exchange rates in the foreign island nation they control, their cook not finding suitable prawns for dinner, or whatever it is that brings rich famous people to tears besides the public forgetting about them. Then they all could burst out laughing, as only the mentally ill or really good actors can do (Brad, Jen, Mr. & Mrs. Jessie will just have to try their best for this part.) and they all shout "APRIL FOOL!" This show can run any day of any month, given the presence of Jessie on it.

This is a brutal prescription! To become obsessed with someone else's life even though it has nothing to do with your own. It might help you if you think of the media as kind of like a mama robin for the masses, poking prechewed worm bits as far down the throats of her trusting little robinlets as her beak can cram them. As unpalatable as that sounds, Mama R. is only trying to nourish her cherished beebees so they won't be so little and weak. She knows best! So does the media, everyone on the planet is well aware of that. They care about us enough to chew up our news for us, and even partially digest it before they thoughtfully eliminate it into our eager, outstretched hands, as lovingly as they can. This way, we can gobble up the choice bits as fast as our hands fill up with them, rather than the boring, fat & gristly stories about orphans & bombs.

As soon as I know about Shakespeare's STD, I'll let you know! Try to contain your excitement till then!!

Words of week.

Ebullient: 1) Zestfully enthusiastic. 2) joyously unrestrained

Calumniation: To make maliciously or knowingly false statements about.

Quidnunc: A nosy person; a busybody

Prurient: Inordinately interested in matters of sex; lascivious; Scott Slapp