20 April 2009: "Monitoring Emerging Trends: Socks with Sandals [via Chloe Sevigny]" and "Is Asher Roth the next Eminem?"

These posts are about deracination. Parasitic worm infestations are typically regarded as a third-world phenomenon, something Carles acknowledges in his analysis of a photo of celebrity Alicia Silverstone walking barefoot at a California culture-industry confab.

Yall I feel Clueless
walking around coachy
barefoot
hope I don’t get a disease
I think that’s actually how
kids in Africa transmit a lot of diseases

By projecting responsibility for the parasites' spread on the African children who are typically the victims, Carles captures the attitude celebrities telegraph in their high-profile efforts to adopt a few similarly situated children from the continent. Hardship and economic necessity makes such children seem a disease vector to ordinary Westerners, cozy in their hygienic insulation from Nature, whereas celebrities can transcend the cocoon of health paranoia and appear to make common cause with such children, whether by emulating them or co-opting them in their entirety by literally appropriating their physical person. The guinea worms figure a separate sphere of being for those above and below the typical middle-class burgher.

But this fusion or paralleling of rich and poor provokes confusion in the class it circumscribes: "Does n e 1 else miss when images of consumerism and rich white people were ’simple,’" Carles half asks, half declares. The result is a populist anger that rechannels contempt for the poor toward a contempt for that strata of celebrities who have become the poor's advocate and avatar: "Miss when we didn’t have to ‘resent white ppl’ s0 hard," Carles concludes. In other words, he is underscoring the nostalgia that recurs to the resentful when they are positioned into a contempt for that to which they also aspire.

"White ppl" is no longer simply a racial designation; thanks to the introjection of celebrity concern for Africans, one can have white skin and seem to fail to qualify as white. As Carles notes in his post about aspiring hip-hop artist Asher Roth, "most white people haven’t gone through an authentic struggle" -- namely they haven't qualified for the aid of celebrities or become famous enough to have their charity regaled in the mainstream media. They fail to become white, in the sense of being a "white knight" who rides to the rescue, and sink to the level of a post-racial underclass in the new attentional economy: If such people "did ’struggle’ it was probably in a gross white trash kind of way that we could probably ‘make fun of’ very easily," Carles explains.

The problem is exacerbated by celebrity attempts to play a peekaboo game with their admirers, making efforts to be at once seen and not seen.

It must be interesting and fun to be a celebrity. U kinda just wanna chill out in public and have people look @u and recognize u and want 2 be u but u also ‘want people 2 leave u alone’ so that u can experience the same stuff that ‘normal people’ do, like music festivals and wearing ur chillest sun wardrobe.

Celebrities, it would seem, are afflicted with an unreasonable nostalgia of their own, to return to a state of noncelebrity, to recur to an ontological awareness of being as opposed to an epistemological self-conception -- to simply be rather than to be known of. Their dilemma makes their followers into parasitic guinea worms, penetrating through unseen orifices to steal their identities -- "2 be u." No wonder the fading celebrity discussed wears both sandals and socks -- in dealing with a leeching mass of uninterpellated subjects hovering and orbiting like detached ions of a decaying radioactive isotope, no layer of protection can be considered superfluous. Next time, she may want to consider a HAZMAT suit.