Dear Log,
«
Run! Set bonfires about the Great Temple! Throw down thy finest
fattened goats and honor the marble halls with their warm blue entrails and
spouts of pulsing arterial blood! Quickly, wretch! Squeeze a hen, polish the
largest fruits; consecrate the bronze and tusklike member of a nearby satyr
with the hymen of your youngest wailing daughter! Understand ye not?!! The
Movie Gods have demanded another fest in honor of their golden heroes!!! Dress
the slaves in ocelot skins and let them club one another to death in mock
jazz-dance battle! Sacrifice and sing with mouth afroth! Like all of the other
filthy, illiterate villagers, I am faint and vomiting from the euphoric strain.
Every year at Oscar time it's the same fever-faced bacchanal: the world stops; wars apparently roll up and vanish, whole oceans rot, whole countries, races, and species are bulldozed into mulch and forgotten while the entire dog-eyed population of mankind whimpers and presses their noses against the palace window at the unregenerate, obscenely grandiose, self-congratulatory orgies of the culturally moribund entertainment world, the various award shows. Our self-loathing society loves to decide that a certain elect group of people are Superuntouchable, Caesaresque Divine Royalty that get to have the most material possessions and unceasing, sycophantic attention and love. And what compels us, the Great Unwashed, to actually scramble over one another to watch awards shows where the same fifty-two reshuffled famous people get to lick each other and pat each other's silky buttocks and squeak out corporate Valentines for the same mind-blowingly mediocre accomplishments, year after year? It's SHOW BIZ!!! We love and hate it desperately and masochistically, the same way that peasants despised and idolized the drunk aristocrats who terrorized their streets and used their heads as impromptu polo balls on medieval Saturday nights.
Here is a guide to everything needed for a complete evening
of celebrity glorification, guaranteed to hypnotize and commercially pimp-slap
the weak-minded and terminally devoid of fabulousness -- i.e., everyone who
isn't famous.
»
-- from A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations by Cintra Wilson.
