Live Nude Celebrities!

The traffic counter on this (recently somnolent) blog began spinning this week like Clark W. Griswold's electric meter at Yuletide What gives? No Kos, no Wolcott of late. No Gandelman, no Gilliard. Hmmm. The big blogger water cannons of the left and center haven't been pointed this way for awhile. Let's check this out. Google and Yahoo searches for...ANNA+BENSON+NUDE. ANNA+BENSON+PICS. And let's just say it goes downhill from there - in terms of, er, specific tastes, portions of human anatomy, and keywords.

See, Anna Benson - now exiled from New York by the Mets Omar Minaya - promptly dumped hubby Kris (a middlin' right-hander) and is leaving the lights of Baltimore behind her, for what we can only guess is Vegas, the offices of the laddie mags here in Gotham, and certain sections of Tampa. Kris got hit hard this spring, and although the crab cakes are scrumptious, Baltimore doesn't hold the ample job opportunities for young Anna. Maybe she'll be back blogging and we can share the heartache of her break-up - I remember how moving it was when she defended American freedoms by wishing aloud for the decapitation of Michael Moore. Now that's the heartland.

Now, Anna Benson is a nude celebrity. That is, having posed unclothed and barely clad, she will live on in skin-washed digital glory for all of her days and well beyond. There are whole sites -indeed, Web 2.0 empires - devoted to te alluring combination of fame and nudity And when a nude celebrity makes news? Well, it's just one click away to a Google search for nipples. For thousands and thousands of my wonderful visitors. [Welcome fellas - both hands on the keyboard, please].

Lance Mannion knows all about this phenomenon, of course. He's the author of the now-famed Scarlett Johansson Gambit. Sure, sure it appeared Lance only put the words "naked" and "Scarlett Johansson" in the same post accidentally as he discussed movies and a relationship in the distant past. But he's still getting traffic, I'll wager. Blue Girl was, as usual, more direct in her clickstream magnet creation.

Why then are the nipples and nethers of the well-known - or modestly known, in the case of Mrs. Benson - more desirable than those of the unknowns? I asked this again reading the vicious reviews of Basic Instinct 2, the new nudie slasher flick featuring 48-year-old Sharon Stone, whose fame was well established by an act of crossing and uncrossing her legs sans culottes for Michael Douglas and the lads a generation ago. Like almost every review of a Rolling Stones show these days, the critics focus on age and appearance - and Stone appears comfortable with the body-oriented questions. "This will probably be my final nude hurrah," she told Newsweek. "Christ, to say I'm middle-aged would be hopeful. But I'm not terribly self-conscious about being nude. There's a scene in the finale that is quite brazen."

What's shocking about Basic Instinct 2 is that, these days, it's not shocking at all - the digital distribution of nudity, body parts, and sex acts has been transformed since Stone wielded her ice pick back in '92. A 48-year-old actress displaying her souped-up sexuality in an R-rated film is less than a blip in a world where even a legit acress like Chloe Sevigny can perform graphic oral sex onscreen and suffer virtually no career drag - and a wastrel like Paris Hilton can discover a career because of an explicit sex tape. We just don't care very much anymore. Celebrity sex and nudity really has been reduced to a quick clickthrough via Google and Yahoo.

Indeed, Times reviewer Manohla Dargis cleverly focused on Stone's face and the demands on the skin (facial only) of American actresses:

...Nothing compares to the fate that awaited Ms. Stone simply by growing older — older at least in Hollywood years. Now 48, the actress retains the same lucid gaze and whippet-thin body, but in this film her face looks strangely inert, and she seems deeply ill at ease. Ms. Stone has famously denied having plastic surgery, and maybe that's true, but, man, does she look weird here.

It's part of an actor's job to change appearances, of course, to put on whiskers and wigs and funny noses, to turn back the clock with hair dye and face tape. And it has long been part of the star's job to undergo a little surgical correction, a nip here, a tuck there. That said, and Ms. Stone notwithstanding, the mania for increasingly youthful-looking faces — these bizarrely unfurrowed landscapes that are absent the normal filigree, absent even a laugh line — seems fundamentally different from the old-fashioned ruse in which the Broadway actress temporarily pulls her loose skin back with some tape. For one thing, the tape comes off. For another, unlike the film actor, the stage performer doesn't have to navigate the close-ups that inevitably betray every secret, no matter how artfully hidden.

The thing is, the power of celebrity is waning - at least in my view. There are simply too many of them. And these days, they are us; everyone has an RSS feed of their innermost thoughts. Everyone has a portfolio of personal photos on Flickr, the results of their daily red carpet walk through life. They're not the celebrities. We are the celebrities. This is about us. Such is the cultural zeitgeist in this first decade of the millenium. Amateur sex is where it's at, a vast reality show that's on 24/7 - your Pam Andersons and Paris Hiltons understand the need to go downscale in production value to seem "real" these days.

Above it all, the power of instant search bequeaths a lack of shock value to this wired generation - including millions of male officer workers looking for a few seconds' distraction from the spreadsheeets. In this digital age - which will never end - Sharon Stone's nudity will continue to be catalogued and linked in perpetuity. Anna Benson moves from B-level actress to D-level nude celeb, one of many thousands not many dozen.

It's strange that the power of search technology, which drills ever closer to a finite set of results from billions of possibilities, can allow for such specificity in image and video prurience. "Gay" and "straight" as sexual search terms don't cut it these days. Unfurrowed landscapes indeed. Along with undifferentiated traffic - lots of it.

Comments

[pebird]

Yes, the power of the individual celebrity is waning - but celebrity itself? I wonder.

Also, I would reword: "and a wastrel like Paris Hilton can discover a career because of an explicit sex tape" to "and a wastrel like Paris Hilton can create a career by releasing an explicit sex tape"

[andy05]

http://www.ohne-tabus.com

[deep7up]

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