Saturday, December 23, 2006

Fifteen Nanoseconds of Fame



Over break, I happened to catch a press conference staged by Donald Trump on behalf of Miss USA. All the stations ran it live. Tara Connor had been crowned in 2006, but since, the story goes, got involved in cocaine, kissing Miss Teen USA in public, and other improprieties unbecoming the title of Miss USA. So Donald Trump staged a press conference to announce whether Ms. Connor would continue in that role. The bait for the networks was irresistible. Everyone waiting for Trump to say "You're fired!" and call it good. After Tara's tearful explanation, Trump explained that she was a young girl who got caught up in the Babylon that is New York City and that he would give her "a second chance."

My acute distaste for such tabloid nonsense was somehow overcome by the cleverness of the entire spectacle. Let me get theoretical about celebrity for a second...

Perhaps the democratization of the camera began with Andy Warhol, his "fifteen minutes" quip and general preference for using non-celebrities in his amateur films. The miniaturization and multiplication of the camera continued on its way to flower into what we call "reality TV," and a new cult of celebrity. Celebrities are now famous for no other reason than the fact that they are famous. Fame has been ostensibly "flattened," democratized. This has coincided with the "long tail" phenomenon in marketing (the flattening of the cultural mainstream) and the "authorship society" of Web 2.0. Of course all of these democratizing forces have been well tempered with the consolidation of authorship, celebrity, and attention, all of which sell themselves to mass audiences with an ever-intensifying rhetoric of democratic celebrity. We all can be famous. See the TIME magazine Person of the Year 2006.

This process has naturally involved the destruction of celebrity. Celebrities nowadays seemingly exist for the mere purpose of scandal and schadenfreude. From "Behind the Music" to "Biography," the daily fare of entertainment news has been the metanarrative of "the fall." This narrative far eclipses any kind of apotheosis or hero worship. We can view this as a function of capitalism having to contend with the "attention economy" where the main problem is cutting through the clutter and noise of media saturation. Just as rhetorics of fear have colonized every facet of politics, the pleasures of "the fall" have a slight advantage in an attention economy characterized by sound bites and short-term affect. (The eventual resting point for this kind of entertainment is not only the destruction of celebrity, but the destruction of the everyman as depicted in the quasi-snuff films of "America's Wildest Police Chases" and the ilk.)

A problem develops in this kind of economy. The precious commodity is fame itself, which is becoming scarce. That is, fame cannot keep up with all the idol-smashing. The problem is that fame cannot reproduce itself fast enough before it is plundered by the all-searching eye, the swarms of paparazzi, or even what they have called the "celebrity blood sport" that mainstream blogging has become (see, for example, Wonkette, who only differs in medium from, say, Mark David Chapman). When everyone has a camera, it seems we are crayfish in a bucket, an eager metaphor for the self-policing function of a surveillance society.

What Trump did was masterful because it took advantage of the new politics of fame. Connor was by no means famous before this event. No one cared about Miss USA, much less saw it as representative of anyone's "values." Very likely more people witnessed the press conference than the pageant. The brilliance of the press conference was that it created a de facto celebrity by virtue of her "fall" - all in the same instant. The total package in fifteen nanoseconds. For Trump, the benefits will likely last, having given the Miss USA organization some credibility by virtue of its success in assembling so many cameras. (As PT Barnum said, "Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.") The irony is that to do this, Trump relied implicitly on a Girls Gone Wild narrative - a narrative already at work in the politics between the camera and celebrity.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Solar Tech

At our house, we've been experimenting with passive solar heat with great success. On a sunny day, we can heat our entire upstairs for free using a small 2x4 sun collecting panel. Normally, these would come in 4x8 size, but Clear Dome Solar has come out with an ultra efficient model. In my own test, 70 degree air goes in, and 106 degree air blows out. I'm just amazed that eight square feet of sunlight can produce that much heat. But the company says that the black collector material has a 95% efficiency. Anyway, in our two week trial, the house heater goes entirely quiet from 10am to about 7pm. And we have high ceilings.

These panels come in at a cost of about $450 each, and they can be hooked together in series. I just made a window panel with one intake and one outake hole to circulate indoor air out through the panel and back into the house (my soon-to-be-famous soup can duct design). Right now, the panel is just standing upright on the porch in front of the window - not affixed to anything. So it's portable and lightweight. The black collector has a thermostat switch that turns the circulating fan on when it exceeds 70 degrees and off when it dips below. Why not one of these on every house?

Sunday, December 03, 2006

The N Word

Jim Aune of* the Blogora linked this very nice Slate editorial regarding the cultural prohibition against comparing anything to Nazi Germany. I predict when they finally pass a law against making such a reference, the bill will include a rider that dissolves congress.

*Notice I didn't say "over at" the Blogora. I'm on strike against insipid little spatial metaphors. I hope you will join me.