Larry Miller, far and away my favorite current stand-up comic and also a gifted writer, really nailed it today in his Anna Nicole Smith piece:
We’re all part of the pop culture world. Whether you think you are or not, whether you want to be or not, no matter how aloof and superior you feel, even if the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs are the only things you keep in your bathroom, you’re as much a part of the celebrity culture as the booker on The View. Deal with it. As Gregory Peck said to David Niven in The Guns of Navarone, “You’re in it now . . . up to your neck.”
The rest of it is here, and if you’re not at all endeared to Anna Nicole, you will be after you read it. So don’t if you don’t want that.
So for those keeping score, this is two Anna Nicole posts following hot on the heels of a bitchfest about how vapid current popular culture is, which itself followed a past post bemoaning the fact that Britney Spears’ hot panties-less photos weren’t even really tepid.
Hypocritical? I suppose. OK, yes, dammit! Get off my ass.
The bottom line is that standing on the sidelines clucking one’s tongue at how pathetic the whole mess is still contributes to the currency of said mess. The rest of the bottom line is that I’m guilty of a little vapidity in my cultural favorites from time to time as well.
Which is not to say I suddenly think fascination with Paris Hilton’s racial slurs and sex tapes is a good thing. I don’t. But I have my own banal little affections too, like thinking Anna Nicole Smith was a neat chick despite everything. I’ll try harder to keep that in mind before going off on the whole of current pop culture again.
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Jim Gaffigan posted this in a MySpace bulletin:
Subject: Why doesn’t the media cover the Anna Nicole story?
I don’t know if you heard but Anna Nicole passed away. I know over a 120,000 American soldiers are risking their lives over in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I can’t seem to find any info on Anna Nicole in newspapers, or on the radio or TV. I’d like to know some important information. Who did she sleep with? In the house she didn’t die in, what did she have in her fridge? What did Anna Nicole think of Kevin Federline? How did she like her eggs?
I’m so tired of the media not covering important things like Anna Nicole.
Bravo to Jim! That’s hilarious.
While I’ll admit that Anna Nicole’s antics were often a little strange, I’ve got to give props to anyone that has the guts to put themselves out there like that. She didn’t care what people thought of her, a rare commodity in today’s superficial society.
It’s like she was silly for a living, and laughed hard even when she knew she was the butt of the joke. (And she did know.) That’s about the best way I can put it.