The Peep Diaries

I could link to over 500 media outlets that carried a Reuters wire story about German artists living in an Israeli art museum for 3 weeks with lice in their hair. Here’s an Australian link just for fun. The story itself isn’t that interesting – the Germans will eat, sleep, and generally go about their business in the museum while spectators watch them and presumably contemplate the theme of “hosting”, the premise that brought this piece of art to the museum in the first place.

But I bring it to your attention here, in case you managed to miss it in your local paper, for two reasons: 1) because it’s obviously an example of peep culture in the art world (my favourite quotidian detail: they have to wear shower caps the whole time to keep the lice from spreading to the school groups and security guards). 2) because it’s amazing how the formulaic mass media will pick up a peep story and run it all over the world. It’s like the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair “scandal”, only with lice. Or something. Point being that peep fascinates in all its endless variety, even the story of a group of goofy German artists sitting in the art museum of an obscure Israeli town with lice in their hair.

I love it when so-called respectable newspapers run stories that are little more than celebrity gossip repeated under the guise of critique. It’s like, oh my god, I can’t believe those horrid tabloids…we’re so above this…it’s terrible..blah blah blah.

The piece that set me off was in last Thursday’s Globe and Mail, check it out here. In it Siri Agrell lists a bunch of celeb peep gossip about Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus and others then asks, all pretend worked up, “But since when has it become acceptable to obsess over the sex lives of teenagers?” Wow, like, how about ever since mainstream newspapers starting replacing serious articles on the arts with wire stories about the troubles and tribulations of celebrities?

An article in the newly released edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism notes that in 2002 there were no celebrity stories in the Globe and Mail Weekend Review section. In 2007 the number averaged 2.75, ah, hell, let’s call it 3. Throw in stories like the kind the Globe published on Thursday (which could run in Life or Style or even Focus) and I’m sure we can get that number higher.

I shouldn’t pick on the Globe. I read a very similar story not that long ago that ran in the Toronto Star, pulled off the wire services and originally written for the LA Times. The headline was “Tabloids and bloggers target celebrities’ children.” No! Not the children! Once again, it managed to list all kinds of peep gossip under the guise of being indignant.

So if you’re worried that your celeb content is a little lite but you don’t want to seem light weight, go for the indignant angle, splash a big a pic of a hot celeb immersed in scandal and you’ve got the best of both worlds!

By the way, I can do this too! Here’s a pic of a celebrity and her kid that I came upon while entering celebrity kids in google trying to remember where I first read that article about bloggers targeting celebrity children. Actually I have no idea who this woman is but then I’m not the overseer of the Celebrity Baby blog, am I? Anyway, the blogger provides a caption that tells us this is a pic of “actress Jennie Garth, 35, and her middle daughter Lola Ray, 5” and she’s portrayed here “leaving a Target store in Los Angeles, CA on Monday, March 3rd. Dad is actor Peter Facinelli.” You got all that? Are you filled with revulsion for our society while also kinda curious about who this person is and why we’re looking at her? Hey, let me know what you find out.

The news is all over a bar owner who turned a meat smoker into a remote controlled robot – the Bum-bot – in order to roust the unwanted from his downtown Atlanta neighbourhood. You can watch the bot in action here.

So here’s the peep part of this: the robot, which is equipped with a bright spot light and a hose that sprays water, also comes with a infrared camera that broadcasts its exploits on big screen tvs over at Terrill’s bar. Patrons can sip their beers and watch Terrill soak the poor, addicted, helpless and homeless.

What fun.

Scanning my last bunch of blog posts you might think I have sex on my mind this month…And, truth be told, I did just have an interesting conversation with a swinger who likes to post pics of his wife having sex with other men online…But that’s another story. Right now, I just wanted to throw up a quick link to breaking news out of Detroit. Seems the mayor their has now been indicted for lying under oath about the affair he had with his now former chief of staff.

That’s the story for some but more interesting is the fact that the Detroit newspaper that broke the story got their hands on text messages between th mayor and his chief of staff dating back to 2002. Where did they get those messages from? The whole thing is unraveling a lot like the Spitzer thing did, with allegations that public money is being abused to pursue a private agenda. Then again, if it was public money being used to pursue an obsession with toy trains, we wouldn’t be seeing these headlines everywhere.

Peep culture strikes again, sex sells, and I can’t stop blogging about this stuff. Is there a relationship? Naaaaw….

Ellot Spitzer, now former Governor of New York, didn’t think anybody needed to know about his propensity for high priced call girls. He was wrong because 1) he was violating laws he’d sworn to uphold and 2) he was costing the taxpayers money while sating his desires.

The now sworn-in new Governor of New York, David A. Paterson, apparently feels like people do need to know about his extramarital affairs. On his first day of the job he held a news conference and announced that he’d had several affairs “including one”, as the New York Times reports, “with a state employee.”

The fact that Paterson felt compelled to get up in front of the world and, with his wife at his side, discuss the intimate details of their rocky relationship, indicates the extent to which a culture of Peep has taken hold of our society. Paterson had to get up there and peep himself because he was worrried, as he said at the news conference, that he would be “blackmailed” and that if the stories were to come out New Yorkers would lose faith in him.

But the real issue is that in the age of Peep media would be all over this “story”, eager to turn intimate into entertainment. As the New York Times reports: “Just after the swearing-in, while Mr. Paterson’s supporters were still celebrating, the new administration was plunged into its first crisis, as a Daily News columnist inquired about a past affair and Mr. Paterson and his mostly untested advisers debated how to handle the matter.” The Daily News wanting to know — and inevitably finding out — is what Paterson knew would happen if he didn’t circumvent the process by peeping himself. In this way, Paterson and his wife can control the flow of information and prevent people coming forward claiming to have been the new Governor’s one-time mistress or whatever. Naturally the couple declined to provide a laundry list of the people they’ve slept with and now the story is over. It would be difficult for even the most purient media outlet to justify further digging.

Spitzer can really only blame one person. But any reprecussions that come Governor Paterson’s way because of his remarkable news conference are not so much the result of his past actions but the result of a society that is all too ready to turn the need to know into the want to know.

Spent quite a bit of time today in meeting with the peep movie producers and interactive producer. We talked about the idea of making the peep culture website function entirely as a game. Users would get points based on how much they peep themselves and me. I think it’s a great idea and could end up being pretty addictive. You’d get points, for instance, if you contributed to a section in which you’re invited to peep yourself in 100 words or less. Not only would contributing earn you points but you would then have access to everyone else’s posts and be able to vote on their peep-ness. And of course the more votes your post gets the more points you get. Anyway, I’m pretty excited about this as a concept. It’ll be a way to get people thinking in different ways about the whole phenomenon of peep and it’ll also just be a really cool, interesting site.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.