Remora

The celebrity interview, the celebrity face, the celebrity breath, the celebrity hair, eyes, nails, teeth, spunk, navel, birthmark -- we drink it and drink it, to quote Todesfuge in a blasphemous context. But is there a point, some magical critical point, when the sheer idiocy of it becomes too much? When the magazine reader, that slackmouthed denizen of the grocery story line, spews it from his mouth? When the factoid isn't enough, when the best fed bodies lugubriously placed in expensive toy palaces, which they systematically and noisily destroy (we call this film, we call this the block-buster) no longer support the backstory? That possibility looms in this NYT article that anatomizes the non-event of Tom Cruise errected, cruise missile like, on four major magazine covers in the last couple of weeks. Time went for him, Premiere went for him, Esquire went for him, Entertainment Weekly went for him, and they discovered, like melancholy druggies, that the high wasn't high enough.

LI's favorite comment from this sampling of mediocre America is this one, from Premiere mag:

"It may have been the most egregious example of magazine overexposure I have seen," said Peter Herbst, the editor in chief of Premiere. "And I'm not sure it was good for Tom Cruise. He may have to redevelop some mystique."



Ah, Redeveloping mystique!!! And so the key to the law and the prophets falls from the mouths of babes and editors in chief. David Carr's article is a long ponder of the obvious, which pokes a bit at the economics of the magazine distribution biz --

"But moving magazines off a newsstand has become a Sisyphean task, even for a megastar. Because of an epic consolidation, only four major magazine wholesalers remain, and they have raised the pressure on publishers to make sure their magazines sell. Overall newsstand sales have dropped 20 percent in the last four years, according to Harrington Associates, a circulation consulting business, and better than half of all magazines, many anchored by glamorous faces, go unsold and end up as pulp."

End up? No, darling, pulp was pre-figured in the very brains and fingers of the syncophantic scribes, in the very cracks and crevasses of the barely animated action figures up which editors in chief have their busy little tongues; pulp, the pulverized essence of dead trees, hangs over the entire scene, as Nature itself looks on, appalled.

The problem for LI is to develop a language apocalyptic enough to describe the sickness unto death of this trivia, this continual eroding acid rain upon American civilization. Imagine the suicide note of a cockroach... Imagine the pornographic memoirs of a housefly.