Thursday, March 09, 2006

The colour lobsters come with

One of the things they needed, desperately by now, were three cooked lobsters, and the guys on The Apprentice were aerosolising a fishmonger with testosterone charm. “They need to be red,” said Syed, “not green, or the original colour they come with.”
If the onrush of humanity is powered by a symbiosis of the human brain and a lifelike evolutionary form called, rather vaguely, culture, which lives out there in the world and in here in our heads, but can only replicate and mutate deep in the human cranium; then celebrity is the boiling, seething wave front of human culture. Hollywood, Footballers’ Wives (I know there’s a theory that Footballers’ Wives is fiction, but it can’t be, it’s too good for fiction), even The Apprentice, are places where the new stuff is reproducing and mutating (and often dying) at a massive rate. That’s why, so powerful is the cultural current running through these celebrities, so familiar and yet verging on the alien and incomprehensible, that the actual human beings that are the attraction points on the celebrity grid hardly seem to exist as individuals. They seem like beautiful zombies possessed by a trillion electron volt gabble of neo-stuff.
The colour that lobsters come with. A new world, where properties; hue, health, labial hysteresis; can be cut and pasted, rotated, solarised, textured, pixellated, diffused. Not the old one, where lobsters were blue.

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