Tina Brown tells the Mail that she was drawn to the US because of its "classlessness". I wonder what she thinks she means by that bullshit word?
She has dedicated her entire journalistic career to the celebration and reinvention of privilege - in both its hereditary/old money and celebrity/new money modes. Her Tatler was not egalitarian but simply fresher; the faces got younger. Like a Blair early prototype, she excelled in re-spinning old forms - largely through the practice of ageism and unfair dismissal.
At Vanity Fair her obeisance to Hollywood and the summer residents on Martha's Vineyard was a thing of religion, worthy of an additional gospel to the New Testament itself. Now she has written The Diana Chronicles in which her proximity to the princess is made a selling point: why, she even lunched with her (and Anna Wintour) at "the Four Seasons on Park Avenue" (a crucial locational prestige meme) three weeks before the princess' death. So utterly absorbed is Tina in the biology of luminary personality she imagines that celebrity has the power to transform physical appearance - "I have to think that being looked at obsessively by people you don't know actually changes the way your face and body are assembled," she writes in her Diana book ... "The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to change."
It's all in the eyes of the beholder, Tina - your hallucination, a projection of mindless, unquestioning worship of fame, is up there with seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a baked spud, one modern example of a condition known as pareidolia and defined as a "neurological/psychological phenomenon by which the brain interprets vague images as specific ones."
It's hard to know quite what Tina means by classless. I suspect that in her mind classless is anything or anyone that admits her person, subsequent to her advertising her desire to be admitted first.
4 comments:
This is a very satisfying post in its own way, Mme A - but I'm not sure if anyone ever, aside from Tina B herself, thought she was "classless." I think that love affair with status has shone so bright it has been visible from space.
It is Arcati's way to point up the hitherto unsaid obvious. I am also intrigued at the persistent fantasies of celebs - particularly intelligent ones like Brown - who say the very opposite to the truth in a state of delusion or medicated laziness.
In the scheme of things, Brown is a blonde trifle and doesn't really warrant much attention. One despairs a little, however, at all that talent and energy wasted on the promulgation of trivia.
Never did ANYONE court fame and the famous, aspire to the top of the social ladder both here and in that amazingly classless USA more assiduously than la Brown. She was at it in school.
I don't see why Tatler needs to be egalitarian . Tina Brown took and old musty society magazine and gave it a spring clean. As it seems to be the only true society magazine still being published I hope it stays an upper class aristocratic society magazine
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