Celebreality
I pride myself on not really being impressed by stardom or fame, as many people are. I am not a total curmudgeon, but the celebrity fetish in America annoys me and I purposefully eschew that sort of behavior. And yet I can be starstruck too, but not in the way you might think. It started when I saw my first blog. I had been opinionated for years, and apparently there were people out there who were opinionated before an audience of untold tens of people! I say that cynically now, but back then I was startled and awestruck. They were all articulate, interesting, and had the sort of varied tastes that I'd been trying to cultivate for years. They also all seemed to know each other. Reading their blogs I could see they all lived in the Bay Area, they all worked for tech firms, or were part of enterprises that were riding the cresting wave of the tech boom. They were the clique of smart kids, who were hip but not overly popular, in high school that I'd never been a part of, and I wanted in.
Around the same time I was getting into webcomics, which differed from the paper variety in many ways. They weren't all great, and many were just poorly drawn and sophmoric, but there were some that were just quietly brilliant, somewhat subversive, and cheeky. I got the same feeling reading the webcomics as I did reading the blogs, like I was listening to some charmingly cool kid who was a friend of a friend. That's a seductive thing, to have such a feeling of closeness, and I was caught up a little bit in it, in the same way that housewives think that Oprah is talking to them.
I got to meet a bunch of the webcomics folks in San Diego in 2003, and it was a shock. I was starstruck and said as much in the previous incarnation of this blog. The shock, though, was that they were so ... normal. They were regular folks who were themselves surprised that anyone read their work or liked it, and they were friendly. What was more surprising though, was that no one else thought talked to them. In fact, no one seemed to be paying any attention to them at all. Was I the only person who thought of them as celebrities?
Showing up in the Bay Area I'd fallen out of the habit of reading blogs, especially as some of my favorites have fallen quiet. Whenever I was in SF, though, I was keenly aware that in that grubby town there had walked some expressive and interesting folks. It was like walking through the Alhambra and remembering the poets and artisans who walked through there a thousand years ago. But unlike those dead Andalusians, you're not crazy if you see these bloggers walking around. I am forever seeing vaguely familiar faces, even in the south Bay, who are the bloggers I used to read so avidly. It's an odd feeling to see them, walking through the bar of Pedro's Mexican Grill, or some other nondescript watering hole, on the way to a Friday evening happy hour. I'd go up and ask for an autograph, but you know, that's not my style.