My Paparazzo

Julia Roberts and Jason Patric in the back of a taxi © Ron Galella

I just read this Wired article wherein the author hires her own paparazzo at $500/hr to stalk her throughout the day. The goal is to take "artful images that look unstaged and off-the-cuff."

First, the images do not look like paparazzi images so much as the photos they find taped all over the bedroom walls of the quiet neighbor who just stalked you for three years before murdering you in the elevator.

Second, this is further evidence that our cultural engine is running on fumes. I have not put the numbers into the computer yet, but I have a theory that our culture is about to become so self-referential that it collapses under it's own weight of ironic self-awareness and forms a giant black hole of metaness.