The Spice Girls are officially back on tour, thereby implementing Phase 3 of succubus Victoria Beckham’s plan for wall-to-wall saturation of all major (sorry, may-juh!) forms of media. And the amount of attention this reunion has received - to say nothing of substantial ticket sales - leads me to revisit the old Warhol saw about everyone having 15 minutes of fame.
I don’t think it’s true. I think, if anything, we’ve passed the point where everyone had 15 minutes. That paradigm worked for the Darva Congers and Omarosas and Kristin Cavallaris. No, I believe that in today’s brave new world, the howlingly mediocre get famous and stay famous.
That’s how a ferret-faced cockney slag like Posh can have a higher Q rating with America’s schoolchildren than 9 out of 10 Presidential candidates (okay, I made up that statistic, but it sounds true, right?).
I think one of the reasons I’ve been posting on this blog less frequently is that I’m starting to feel more and more alienated from pop culture. I can’t even find my satirical entry point into a world where people buy tickets to Spice Girls reunion concerts.
The tipping point, for me, was last month’s death of the Osmond paterfamilias. I was still confused as to how Dancing With the Stars had fostered a weird Marie Osmond renaissance, when the next thing I knew, Entertainment Tonight was on at my gym and there was her brother Donny, crying about his dead daddy (who had just expired that day) to Mary Hart in an “ET exclusive.” Then the Dead Osmond press tour continued on Oprah and Larry King, which led to the “Marie’s son is in rehab!” heartbreaker. Then Marie got kicked off Dancing and somehow Donny popped up in the trailer for the next shitty Martin Lawrence movie.
How had these incesto-creepy ’70s throwback Mormon-bots catapulted from obscurity to omnipresence in just a few weeks? If someone had told you, in 1978 (four years before I was born), that Marie Osmond would be receiving widespread media attention in 2007, how would you have handled it? I probably would have headed straight to Jonestown.
At least there the Kool-Aid didn’t come with Spice.
I hope you do keep blogging; you’re basically the only thing on the Internet I find intelligent and fun. (Also, your grammar and spelling are impeccable, which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that most postings on the Web look as though Courtney Love were the copyeditor.) I hope you keep at it–for my sake anyway.
Random, but there it is.
But I luuuuurve Posh! Say what you will about her bolted-on boobs, I find her amazing. She carries her kids around in stilettos!
i blames the gays…”beats self mercilessly”
you could find another point of social reference if your getting tired of this one
One small correction: today’s schoolchildren don’t have a clue who Posh Spice is, really, anymore than schoolchildren in the mid- to late-90s had a clue who the members of Bananarama were.
Victoria Beckham reminds me of a mannequin one might see on display while digging through the bins at a cheap outlet-mall-store, along side a busy highway in middle America. Am I right? So, as long as she insists on continuing to wear Brenda Dickson’s 1980’s hand-me-downs and posing instead of walking, I will forever think of her as the walking mannequin who sings karaoke.
Nay, Tim- Mitt Romney is surely afoot here.
I myself have some trouble mustering the outrage to write on my blog in these times. I have no realistic perspective anymore, its all a series of outlandish opinions about quasi-important matters.
That said, keep up the good work chaps. We love ya!