The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

I go on a rampage when nothing else will free me

I watched a talk show yesterday, and one of the guests was a television actress with shiny white teeth, zero body fat and big, stunned blue eyes. She was promoting a book. She supposedly wrote a book, and she's promoting it. I 'gahhh'ed' and flipped the channel. I need to stop watching television once and for all.

It galls me, that celebrities are not only the people responsible for dressing us, making us smell good, telling us what to eat and what to paint our faces with, but now they're even writing our books. I don't want to hear a familiar voice talking about why I should buy a domestic car. I don't want to wear a dress that a coke head bulimic allegedly designed and is selling through a corporate chain. I have trouble understanding how any of them achieved their level of fame as it is, and then their publicists, managers and accountants get together and strike up deals with CEO's of fledgling companies so that these no-talent hacks can dip their toes into other pools, becoming perfumers, cooks, writers, designers and musicians. When will the manipulations stop? When will someone stand up and say that designer running shoes that cost $800 are completely stupid? Why should I buy a book which I know was written by someone other than whose name is on the cover? What could that face, which has been primped and polished by legions of professionals, have to say about anything that would somehow relate to my life?

There are many, many people out there who are spending their midnights and sunrises writing in quiet, dark rooms so as not to disturb their sleeping spouses and children. There are people who have years of student loans to pay off, who got their degree in English, who know how to write without someone feeding them the next word, and we'll never know them, never see their names in print. How many people on this site spend every bit of their spare time attempting to turn out a piece of writing worthy of being published in an unknown magazine or journal? Then, you go to the book store and see a familiar face grinning back at you from a glossy, airbrushed cover, and you are supposed to believe that they worked at it, that they actually sat down and churned it out, and even though they can't seem to spell words correctly in their blogs they have managed to complete two hundred pages of genius within about four weeks.

Please.

Obviously, people are buying it, which needs to change. I don't know that I could respect someone who would buy a book 'penned' by a celebrity, actually. I think it would change my perception of them in one quick minute. Come to think of it, I stopped talking to a woman I used to work with when she told me that she worshipped Britney Spears. This may have been judgmental of me, but I still think I did the right thing. Back to celebrity books, I'm all for the tell-alls, the books written by biographers who let all the secrets out, but that's where their area of expertise ends for me. Leave the writing to the ones who know how to do it, is what I say.

If I were a celebrity and I really thought I could write a book, I'd insist on total anonymity, using only a pen name. Same goes for a recording contract. I'd hide behind the words and the instruments and wait for the honest reaction of the public. It embarrasses me to see an actor try to sing, or for a singer to try to act. Madonna, anyone? There are exceptions, obviously, but mostly, we are being forced to accept these people, we are manipulated by the media into believing in their genius when it's never been there. You might say that Courtney Love did all right in 'The People vs. Larry Flynt', but to this I say, that 1) she never could sing and whether or not she wrote her own songs is still up for debate, and 2) she basically played herself in the movie. She was an accidental celebrity, a rock star by association, and now she's just a washed up drug addict, which is sort of what she was in the beginning, anyway. Now, Johnny Depp is a fairly fine actor, and he is also a musician, but the difference here is that he was the musician first and stumbled into acting by accident. Also, he has never tried to force his music on the public and is not endorsed by a major record label. The two mediums do not mix. You hardly ever see him, actually, and this is one of the reasons why I like him. I don't want to wear Gwyneth's perfume, Jessica's shoes or Victoria's overpriced jeans. I will not drink celebrity vodka, use a celebrity cookbook or wear celebrity cubic zirconia. I'm over the age of celebrity. I'm finished with being told I need to look like them. Screw them and anyone who stands to make a buck off their name. None of them are real. None of them deserve to live a more glamourous life than you or me. I'm done with false idols. I'm done being ambushed with illusion.

I'm not the only one, surely.