Fame, you’re far too cool to fool, David Bowie and John Lennon sang 35 years ago, a line with an ominous ring to it for Lennon who would get shot for having been bigger than life only a few years after. Still, without fame no name and without name no story, so even if people hide their selves behind a fake identity they face the problem of attracting the necessary attention to be heard – a problem growing in size and implication with the globalisation of the audience’s attention. It made the subterranean traveller wonder how people these days deal with the challenge of needing fame. And when he thought it over, he soon enough ended up electing those who manage best their fame and have earned the right to call themselves Face of the Year 2010. Since men can’t compete with women when it comes to faces and sometimes even lose to animals, the Face of the Year award was always going to be a threesome.
The male face is that of Julian Assange of course. When Assange decided to publish the American embassy cables he had got from soldier Bradley Manning - now safely rotting away in a two by three metre cell until his senses will have failed him - he clearly was aware of the need to generate as much publicity as possible. Releasing the video showing a helicopter crew killing off a crowd in an Iraqi street had merely created a stir, quickly buried under the usual avalanche of gossip and imagery we consume for our daily news. This time Assange would need a lasting effect, especially so because the value of the telegrams lay not in any particular revelation but rather in the sheer magnitude of them. Only continued attention would teach the public the truth behind the quarter million informs - the doctrine of full spectrum dominance requiring constant meddling with the affairs of sovereign states the world all over. And, surprise, no leadership, be it rightwing or leftwing, elected or imposed, dares defy Washington’s control. Here in Spain we learned our government can’t even introduce a law on downloading movies from the web without first consulting their local ambassador. So much for your democracy.
Wikileaks got a handful of respected news outlets to help them report on the material and then Assange went public himself. The first was a clever strategy to fend off inevitable accusations of espionage and even terrorism, the second a necessity. After having quietly built an organisation of anonymous co-workers, the founder chose to let go of his brainchild and become a famous face on everybody’s TV-screen. The story of American imperialism needs another story to be heard. So Julian Assange became a story himself. He gave his name a face. And what luck, with his strikingly white hair it was a face impossible to forget. If he’d needed a wig to enhance his features, he couldn’t have picked a better one.
Another stroke of decisive luck was the concerted Swedish-American decision to paint him black, neglecting the golden rule that bad press is always better than no press. While the ongoing saga of the cables is already fading from the public mind after the most exciting gossip has been exposed and forgotten again, the accusation of sexual harassment provides our media hero with the chance of fighting his extradition to Sweden. It’s the perfect excuse for fame, at least until it all becomes tedious once more and actually going there might be the better choice - the dangers of a show trial perhaps matched by growing popularity.
Because that’s the problem with fame, it needs to be continuously fed. Fame is an insatiable monster, always looking for prey. Julian Assange, who no longer is the person with that name but a vehicle for attention, will have to do whatever it takes to stay in the limelight. In America, where being murdered is essential to true heroism, some of his wackier supporters are already dreaming of a CIA staged lone madman killing to raise him to MLK status. As long as he is around, he will be the traveller’s Male Face of the Year 2010. Check him out in his own words: Julian Assange
Out of the US of A comes our Female Face of the Year, a young woman catapulted to fame at new levels of height and speed. In her at times somewhat inconsistent but always exciting gay gothic disco glam vaudeville show Lady Gaga turns the medium into the message by introducing the fame monster as a real life being, ready to devour not only the actress but her public as well. Gaga assures us there isn’t really much to be scared about since “we all are the spiritual hologram of how we perceive ourselves to be“ – but her staying message is the invitation to crime.
From the onset on La Gaga very cleverly has incriminated her fans in her fame. In Gaga’s world the fans are almost as famous as she is, they all belong to the same experience of ridiculous success. Her little monsters feed on her, that’s true, but they can’t watch her show without being prey themselves, without the realisation their money and presence are essential to the fame that is created wherever the heroine goes. A smooth way of dealing with the problems of self loss and worthy of the title Female Face 2010. If we all lose ourselves simultaneously, then perhaps there is nothing and nobody lost at all. The clips are from her 7 December Barcelona gig.
The Fame Monster
Gaga por 1 Chileno
Finally the animale face, and the honour should go to Dead Bird, the oil soaked brown pelican from the Gulf of Mexico who most likely died only hours after her picture was taken. For the looks of it she’s mad as hell about what happened to her, and not just to her but to her circumstances as well. To find her whole known world draped in a slimy brown mixture of liquid fossils and highly toxic chemical dispersants is the deepest of insults. In fact, her indignation goes way back to her oddly surfacing alligator ancestry. Not only everything that is but also everything that ever was is retroactively destroyed. Dead Bird knows it and she shows it. I add here her image for convenience.
It was perhaps the last act of a dying artist and it‘s quite possible she couldn‘t care less a camera was aimed at her, but the lucky fact her anger was caught on film leaves her face with the chance to become famous. With her dramatic wing gesture Dead Bird beckons us to turn her into an icon of the fight for environmental justice. And although it all happened eight long months ago, a time in which many small and big stories have passed the TV-eye, there still seem ample window and reason to raise her to fame.
