Star phenomena? People aren’t looking up at the sky – they’re tracking celebrities
T
here’s a great jpeg floating around the Internet that shows the star systems within range of Earth’s radio and television broadcasts. Aldebaran, a red giant, located about 65 light years away, is in the range of President Roosevelt’s first televised speech. Mu Arae, a main sequence G-type star like our Sun, is about 50 light years away and would now be getting The Twilight Zone, Bonanza and Leave it to Beaver. Beta Aquilae is within broadcast distance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. The fab four are already old news to Zeta Reticuli, which recently got the Apollo moon landing. Chi Draconis would be getting The Dukes of Hazzard. Altair would have Entertainment Tonight, Cops and – unfortunately for any intelligent life – The Arsenio Hall Show. Wolf 359 just picked up Janet Jackson’s 2004 Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction.” Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth, would have the full media menu, starting backwards with the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. If there is any intelligent life around this binary star system, the ETs may soon come to the conclusion that a slinky creature called “Kim Kardashian” rules our planet along with her sisters. Because right now, it sure seems that way. On Earth, we have full-spectrum saturation by the Kardashians. It seems you cannot surf the web or turn on the tube without encountering something about the talent-free socialite and her equally unremarkable siblings. I’ve set my homepage to Yahoo.com because that’s where my email account resides, and bodacious Kim is always there in some lifestyle update. I channelsurf and there she is with a sister, on their own reality TV show. I go to the supermarket and there she is again
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common ground
May 2 012
at the checkout stand magazine rack. I go to the local recreation centre for a workout and citrus-tanned Kim is there too, on the cover of one of the magazines left for gym patrons. And now here she is in Common Ground magazine – and I’m responsible. The horror.
T
he daughter of celebrity lawyer Robert Kardashian, big-breasted Kim first hit public consciousness in 2007 through a sex video co-starring her friend-with-benefits, the rapper Ray J. She leveraged this Internet notoriety into tabloid sovereignty, dragging her sisters behind her like Louis Vuitton bags to the top of the Twitterverse. The pneumatic 31-year-old is like a William Gibson science fiction short story gone viral, although she undoubtedly prefers the Wikipedia entry, “American socialite, television personality, model, actress and businesswoman.” Kim’s career-lite arc was foreshadowed in the rise of Paris Hilton, who also leapt from sex video amateur to international celebrity without ever bumping into a script, teleprompter or catwalk along the way. Wikipedia informs me it was Paris herself who introduced Kim to the global socialite scene. If the Hilton daughter was H1N1, a pandemic that was more likely to make people giggle than sniffle, then the daughter of O.J. Simpson’s defence lawyer is weaponized Ebola: a level 4 biohazard that has zombified great swaths of media, both online and off. The 24/7 “Kimformation” feeds on itself, in a perpetual motion machine of glossy pics, jpegs and witless gossip. No one, online or off, can seem to get a fix on how real or fake Kim is, beyond her admission of Botox use. Bloggers parse recent and past photos to determine how much reconstruction has been done. The question of
fake/real can get a bit Byzantine. How much is a genetic factor and how much is Max Factor? Or even the surgeon’s scalpel? At some point, the gossip about Kim’s face and body shades into straight-on epistemology. In June 2010, The Guardian noted Kim’s ability to attract payments of up to $10,000 USD from sponsors for each tweet that she broadcasts. What I want to know is this: if Kim tweets and no one reads it, has she still communicated nothing of substance? There is no need for me to describe further this woman’s victories across media platforms, including the current reality television show, Kourtney & Kim Take New York. Until science succeeds in squeezing the “God Particle” from a complete vacuum, the Kardashians are the best example of creating headlines out of absolutely nothing. Kim herself could be any old celeb and some other vapid beauty will take her place in time. But for now she reigns supreme on the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum.
T
hat ringlet-haired interpreter of pop culture, “Weird Al” Yankovic, has given us a new word with the “Kardash:” a period of 72 days, the length of time Kim was married to some Transformersized athlete whose name I can’t be bothered to Google (she reportedly got a $2 million-dollar ring out of this quickie arrangement, which she intends to keep). It occurred to me that Kardashian could serve as a perfectly good adjective, as well. I define it this way: Kardashian | Kardashiy’n | adjective 1 Cosmetically beautified, but without the substance to back up the mass attention. 2. A state of slickly produced artifice, masquerading as the real thing. w w w.commonground.ca
image by www.perubluesky.ca
Constellation Kardashian