And I just don't see where Paris is so hott. There are, IMO, lotsa girls right here in Washco if given one-tenth the money Paris spends for makeup, clothes, and a hairdoo who would blow Ms. Hilton away in the hott department. She just ain't all that, IMO.

Yes Yo, there was a sandwich in there.

That is the grossest sandwich. Who puts french fries on the sandwich? Ew.

That is the grossest sandwich. Who puts french fries on the sandwich? Ew.

I don't think they're fries, i think they're fried onion rings...

... I still like them mixed chicks...

Nichole has class? Since when? I know I shouldn't be judging her from the Simple Life show, but she's the one with the nasty mouth who always seemed to be egging Paris on  to disrespect people.

Come on Heather, more juicy gossip! 

Hey Heather, you need to add "Entertainment Weekly" to your cadre of celebrity rags. It's actually quite good.

Yeah, but your latest horoscope is thus:

A friend from the past will make an unusual entrance in the second week of the month, and could damage a small shrubbery in your garden.

Who pinned this topic?

Greedy, you abusing your mod-god privileges again?

yes pin worthy :flipoff:

I hated living in LA with people like that.

Nikki Sixx and Don Dreisdale (sp?) were the nicest people I had to work with. But the wannabes were awful.

Hilton the Huckster

By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
Tuesday, May 31, 2005; A17

Arthur Aufderheide is something relatively new under the sun -- a paleopatholgist. His specialty, a recent issue of the New Yorker tells us, is the dissection of mummies to study ancient diseases. I, too, have an odd specialty. It is the study of contemporary culture by carefully noting the number of citations in the computer database LexisNexis. For instance, I am here to tell you that when I searched in the category of major newspapers, John Bolton, the president's choice for U.N. ambassador, got 110 hits for the past week. In the same category, Paris Hilton got 158. As a LexisNexisologist I can only conclude that America has lost its mind.

Nonetheless, this triumph of the trivial is well worth studying. Anyone who watches any of the morning television shows, for instance, knows that celebrity has pushed out news. I think that even the start of a pretty big war would be the second item on the "Today" show if somehow an interview with Brad Pitt could be arranged. He is, as Ms. Hilton might say, hot, hot.

Of course, no one is hotter than Hilton herself. She has a fetching vapidity that, outside of a goldfish bowl, is unique -- the same wide-eyed stare, that same liquid grace, that same utter indifference to being a spectacle. She is buoyed by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which in itself is just an adjunct of the need to sell. The shows that feature the comings and goings of the famous -- the riveting saga of Brad and Angelina -- are merely trying in their own way to aggregate an audience so that they can sell products through commercials. The creation of celebrities -- of national brands -- is an essential part of that process. Marx would say that they are being exploited. Yes, but the Gulfstream jet takes the edges off it.

Once, I thought Hilton herself had been exploited. This was after the famous video of her having sex with her boyfriend hit the Internet. Before then she was a peripherally famous hotel heiress, a habitue of clubs where the almost-shaved and the almost-dressed look totally bored. She had potential, our Paris did, but her problem was that she utterly lacked talent. Without it, there was no infrastructure from which to hang the gauze of celebrity. You can be famous for being famous for a while, but ultimately you have to be famous for something. It's a rule.

This is where I clearly misjudged Hilton -- and, I might add, my fellow Americans. I felt sorry for her. Her jerk boyfriend had exploited her most personal moments. I even wrote that she had effectively been "burglarized," that she had "lost control of who she is." I could go on with such stupid quotes, but you get the picture. It is of a man expressing the sentiments of his generation, the lost one, the one that would have considered the airing of a private sex tape a fit reason to stay in the fruit cellar long past canning season.

But what I did not realize is that you cannot lose control of who you are if who you are is nothing more than what's in the media. You cannot have your privacy burglarized if you grow up in the age of digital cameras and there is no privacy -- no expectation of it, no need for it. You cannot be exposed. Everyone has sex, after all. So what is revealed? Nothing. Think about it. It's hot.

You could say that there is nothing new about Paris Hilton -- she's just the latest person who's famous for being famous. Not so. She is really the first crossover porn star. The late Linda Lovelace thought she would be the first, but it was not to be. Paris Hilton, though, has pulled it off. It helps that she's rich. It helps that she's well dressed. It helps that her great-grandfather owned the Waldorf-Astoria, among other hotels. It helps that she is sort of classy. Whatever the case, she is just the sort of woman who can pull off the commercial she's done for the Carl's Jr. hamburger chain, which has been denounced as pornography. Actually, it's more camp than porn.

In the future some LexisNexisologist will come across the Paris Hilton phenomenon and try to figure out what it says about America. In doing so, he will -- as I have done -- learn about Carl's Jr. and its scrumptious-looking hamburgers and therefore appreciate Paris Hilton's true talent. Like her ancestor the hotel magnate, she is what America has always valued, a salesman. As with any of them, it's a smile, a shoeshine and, nowadays, anything else it takes -- but the product is always her.