In a recent GQ interview, Kanye West attributes new wife Kim Kardashian with teaching him to better manage his celebrity. However, analogous with popular discourses defining the couple as shallow and fame-obsessed, West’s verbiage ultimately doesn’t say anything. West never defines “Kim K. skills” as more than some kind of intangible communication skills, but expects that the interviewer, and subsequently the general public, will know exactly what he means. Though only mentioned peripherally by West, Kim K. skills are, however, delineated in the new mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Through the game, Kardashian legitimizes her celebrity while also propagating her brand by redefining fame in her image – as the accumulation of “Kim K. skills.”

Kim’s avatar demonstrates the first Kim K. skill in the game’s initial sequence: charm is the key to everything. She charms you into reopening a boutique so she may outfit herself for an upcoming event. Your only option is to help Kim, which is rewarded when she invites you to the event. As you progress through the game, charm becomes a form of currency. You cannot connect with new people outside your current celebrity rank unless you use your hard-to-come-by K Stars to charm them. Whenever you choose “charm” as an action, your relationship grows stronger, which increases your celebrity.

Charming people to like you underscores another Kim K. skill: perceived relationships are paramount in achieving fame. Charm gets you into Kim’s event, but it’s your association with Kim that makes the paparazzi care. As a result, Kim sets you up with a manager and a publicist to help you work towards A-List stardom. Your relationships with these intermediaries are static, but they give you opportunities to improve your public personae. Other in-game relationships, however, are necessary to level up. Bars and clubs are populated with people of varying celebrity rank who can increase your celebrity. Whether you choose to network with or date new contacts, relationships are only cultivated in professional capacities.

Your network can join you at personal appearances, and dates happen in public to be seen and subsequently tweeted about. The game allows players to integrate their real-life networks, as you can interact with your friends’ avatars.  Even negative relationships gain fame. When a celebutant expresses jealousy over your relationship with Kim, she sparks a feud that establishes your Twitter following.

In addition to social currencies, the way to celebrity is through accumulating stuff. Kardashian herself comes from wealth, and the association between money and fame is integral to game play. Though the game itself is free to download and play, it becomes quickly apparent that advancing is easier by investing real money. Various reviews have reported how easy it is to spend real money on the game. The types of currency are in-game dollars, energy points, and K Stars. You earn money from constant modeling gigs and paid appearances. Energy is needed to do anything, and is easily expended causing you to wait until it’s replenished or trade precious K Stars for more. K Stars only come from leveling up or from in-app purchases.

The dollars one earns are inadequate to keep up with Kim. Players increase their celebrity status with new outfits, homes, cars, and buying gifts to improve relationships, but most lifestyle enhancers can only be purchased with K Stars.

Although many items have high price tags, acquiring them creates momentary relief before anxiety sets in again about what else you need to augment your celebrity lifestyle. And, as mentioned, K Stars also act as social currency.

The most ubiquitous Kim K. skill throughout the game is the power of personal branding. Kardashian’s brand is everywhere: the revamped Hollywood sign; each Kardash boutique interior mimics its DASH counterpart; the K Stars.

Kim herself is the most important brand and celebrity signifier. She is your entry point into the celebrity game/game-play and her approval makes you worthy of attention. The game reinforces the celebrity system and Kim’s position in it, both of which depend on hierarchies to establish their value. Likewise, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood addresses the specific dichotomy informing reality TV celebrity personae: that stars need to be approachable and authentic to attract viewers, but ultimately need to remain separate to be special. Celebrity reinforces capitalism because celebrities constantly remind regular people of what they don’t have and should want. In the game, you need virtual and real money for the Tribeca loft and new Louboutins to project a celebrity lifestyle despite whether or not you can afford it.

Even when you get to the A-list, you still need to accumulate fans to increase your ranking. Curiously enough, Kim Kardashian is not a rankable celebrity. Players don’t compete with her, as she is above the celebrity system because her celebrity is established. Kardashian is the definitive arbiter of Kim K. skills, and ultimately unreachable in her version of celebrity.

College football kicked off this weekend, and it should come as no surprise that one of the biggest stories surrounded Johnny Manziel. The Texas A&M quarterback rose to national prominence last year with a terrific season, winning the Heisman trophy, and garnering the nickname “Johnny Football.” Returning after a Heisman-season is enough to put one squarely in the media’s lens, but Manziel’s off-the-field summer activities made him a much bigger target.

At the beginning of August, ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported the NCAA was investigating whether Manziel was paid for signing hundreds of autographs, citing two witnesses and multiple other sources. NCAA bylaw 12.5.2.1 states student-athletes cannot use their names or likenesses for commercial gain. More and more sources came forward, including an autograph broker claiming he paid Manziel $7,500. Finally, in late August just days before the season began, the NCAA revealed the results of their investigation: they found no evidence of Manziel receiving payment. However, Manziel would be suspend for the first half of Texas A&M’s opener against Rice this past Saturday for violating the ‘spirit’ of the rule. Many questioned the odd decision and the message it sent, some wondering if he got off too easy.

ESPN played up the controversy as they hyped the opening weekend. This promo video from ESPN writer Wright Thompson shows how the network presented Manziel as a superstar celebrity, emphasizing his off-field personality more than his athletic achievements:

After the game, ESPN got exactly what they wanted: not just a great athletic performance but fuel for the fire of Manziel’s cult of personality. Although Manziel had a great game, this was almost entirely overshadowed by his antics on the field, including autograph and money-based taunting and a personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct. To be clear, this post is not interested in Manziel’s sportsmanship, eligibility, guilt, or otherwise. What is fascinating about this story is how it was reported and discussed on ESPN immediately afterward, and what that reveals about the nature of celebrity, sports, and media representation.

A quick game recap featured on both ESPN’s website and SportsCenter broadcasts introduced Manziel as the “biggest villain in college football.” When the recap reached the unsportsmanlike conduct call, the reporter said, “I suppose when you win the Heisman trophy, you can do things like that,” although he was quick to add, in a somewhat parodic manner, “but it’s just not becoming of a champion.” In other words the quick-style reporting of the incident did not question Manziel’s actions, and even went so far as to play up the antagonistic behavior.

This reporting is in contrast to several analysts’ takes on the situation, including one from Jesse Palmer calling Manziel’s antics “inexcusable.” After reiterating the ways in which Manziel is viewed as a villain (referencing Heisman jealousy and fraternizing with LeBron James), Palmer shifts focus to Manziel’s performance saying, “Now on the field, I love what Johnny Manziel did today.” Here we see the ways in which ESPN (and several fans) are attempting to both celebrate Manziel’s athletic accomplishments while acknowledging and criticizing his personal presentation.

Davis, Holtz, and May

However, a segment featuring two of the networks stalwart college football analysts, Mark May and Lou Holtz, alongside host Rece Davis pulled back the curtain on how ESPN decides to deal with Manziel as both athlete and celebrity. When discussing Manziel’s taunting, Davis claims, “One of the reasons we love Johnny on the field is because he’s flamboyant, he’s reckless, he takes chances… but there’s a line and he’s got to find that boundary and stay behind it.” When Davis says “we,” he might as well be saying “We here at ESPN,” as he is acknowledging the antics of Manziel are what makes him the celebrity figure he is; loved or hated, it gets a reaction from viewers and gives people a reason to watch ESPN.

After Davis continues to play Manziel’s advocate, claiming Manziel made these gestures last year, May and Holtz immediately argue that Manziel has indeed gone too far with Holtz saying, “I don’t think it’s good for the game… It think it’s good for ESPN, but I don’t think it’s good for the game.” Davis immediately responds by saying, “Well what’s good for ESPN is good for the game,” though he barely gets the last word out as he appears to realize what he is saying. In that brief, unfiltered moment, Rece Davis reveals exactly the position ESPN is in; they are a business who’s role is not to support ‘the game’ as an abstract concept, but to profit alongside the NCAA through stars like Johnny Manziel. (Student-athletes’ inability to make money off their own names/likenesses, of course, makes this problematic).

Rece Davis is absolutely right, from ESPN’s perspective, as Manziel’s antics will only drive more viewers to the screen. By creating the persona of Manziel as the villain or heel, ESPN can engage viewers on a more emotional level, giving people another reason to tune it. This is ESPN creating a narrative to further engage their audience. Just like Breaking Bad or professional wrestling, the desire to see justice prevail and villains punished pulls us in deeper and keeps us watching. They are stuck in the middle between glamorizing and promoting the natural celebrity of Manziel while at the same time criticizing the very actions which make him a celebrity in the first place. ESPN wants it both ways. When it comes to showmanship vs. sportsmanship, ESPN are enablers, wagging their finger with one hand and patting the back with the other. It becomes easy to forget that at the center of all of this is a 20 year-old kid from Tyler, Texas named Johnny.

Much of our writing about our LeakyCon experience so far has explored a perceived blurring of previously assumed cultural categories at play in LeakyCon, including a destabilization of identity categories, a merging of fan, geek, and nerd in a general celebration of “awesomeness,” and a conflation of niche and mainstream, subcultural, and pop cultural. In my previous post, I spoke specifically about a blurring between celebrity and fan that permeated many of my LeakyCon experiences. I focused primarily on the ways in which stars positioned themselves as fans by demonstrating their fannish cred.

But performing fannishness was not the only ways stars blurred the line between fan and celebrity and destabilized the fan/celebrity relationship. They also frequently expressed their love for and awe of fan creativity and fan investment. They described fan creativity as similar to their own experience as budding artists, and talked about the way in which fan work has inspired and influenced their current creative endeavors. At a panel for press questions, I was able to ask the cast of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries about their responses to the fan creativity elicted by the web series. The cast’s replies emphasized the way in which the creative work of fan production felt humbling and awe-inspiring to the actors, and also reflected their own experiences as aspiring cultural participants and artists. Ashley Clements, who plays the series’ title character, talked about how she was herself inspired by the creative inspiration fans drew from the web series: “I mean it was always incredible when our show inspired people to make anything, from fan art to fan fiction to videos and to all the dolls and anything. It was just inspiring that we inspired them to make something.”

In a similar vein, Daniel Vincent Gordh (William Darcy in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) talked about the impetus behind fan work as akin in spirit to the type of creative calling that inspired the cast members to be artists.

We all have things like that, art (that)… inspired us at some point during our development… in such an impactful, deep way… that it inspired our creativity, and I think is the reason that we’re doing this… I think that this is part of the general nature of art and how it operates in our society. But there was the part of awe that *we* were the ones doing this, it’s … a kind of a coming of age, almost, for me as an artist at least to be like “oh, and now I’ve gotten to a place where we’re able to release this and it’s continuing the cycle.”

Gordh’s words cast fans and actors as similarly artistic and creative minded but perhaps at different stages in their realization of (or professionalization of) this creativity. While this might suggest an erasure of the differences between professionalized creative labor and fandom’s logics of the gift economy, wherein fan artists don’t necessarily strive to become professional artists, I did not sense an overriding assumption that all fans want to be professional artists or are only at the beginning of their path to do so. Rather, fan creativity and professional creativity seemed to be recognized as concurrent and complementary modes of cultural expression in contemporary popular culture.

The most memorable story I heard over the whole Con was in Mary Kate Wiles’ response to my question about fan work. (Wiles played Lydia in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; I’ve written about Wiles’ web series work and relationship with fans here.) She described an instance in which a particular work of fan creativity directly influenced her own performance choices in a key episode in LBD:

My favorite experience, along with seeing fans talk to the characters on twitter or whatever, was that on the morning that we were to shoot the episodes when Lydia finds out about the sex tape and is recovering from that, I found a fan fiction that was about Lydia and Wickham’s relationship. And I read it that morning, and it was so much like what I had pictured in my head, and in it Wickham gives her a necklace. And because I had read it that morning and was going to shoot that afternoon, I ended up picking a necklace that was to be from him. And that was such a crazy thing for me to experience, having made work that made someone else make something that then inspired me… how cool is that? That you’re getting to interact with your audience in a way that contributes to your own storytelling. I think it’s just so beautiful, and it’s something that you don’t really get to do, ever. You don’t get to do that on a movie or TV show. It’s wonderful that we’ve gotten to experience that.

I find myself quite compelled by this story, most especially by the notion that a piece of fan fiction could directly influence a small but significant detail in a source text. We all know of stories of fan fiction premises that have surfaced in official productions, both with and without the consent of the fan authors. But this instance, the way it was framed by Wiles, seems much more a personal response to a piece of fan artwork, in turn embedding a personal detail into a larger production in a way that isn’t even necessarily meant to translate to viewers. This anecdote offers a landscape that personalizes fans and actors as creative interpreters working together to weave popular culture, one web series/plot interpretation/wardrobe detail at a time.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

Glass’ celebrity is further influenced by fan engagement and productions such as Adam WarRock’s “Ira Glass” rap. Throughout all of this, we see Ira Glass very much constructed as a figure who has brought pleasure and entertaining aesthetics to broadcast journalism. Though the paratexts mentioned above arguably create as much meaning about Glass’ star text, his celebrity is always constructed in reference to TAL, and the program’s unique exploitation of the radio feature format. For this reason, we can see how TAL shapes our understanding of Glass’ radio pioneer public persona.

TAL‘s aesthetics make it markedly different from other television and radio journalism. TAL invites listeners to revel in a sort of postmodern opposition to mainstream journalism. The program weaves together informal conversation, first-person monologues, actuality field recordings, sound bites, music, and more into a hip, irreverent weekly radio show. Its self-reflexive style is one aspect that differentiates it from traditional hard news. The show’s commentary and reflection in its own production, usually heard via Glass’ conversation with a producer or participant, works in conjunction with its commentary on traditional journalism to sonically construct the show as self-aware. We see this in the first 10 minutes of Episode 455, “Continental Breakup,” which first aired on January 22, 2012.  This episode is about the European debt crisis, and is guest hosted by Alex Blumberg. Here we see TAL taking up a traditional “hard” journalism topic. Yet, the topic is presented in an informal and playful manor. Glass’ nebbish, high, nasally voice begins the program as if in the middle of a private conversation with the listener. He begins quickly by saying, “I think at this point even the most casual news consumer has run across a lot of stories like this….” Next, TAL edits in sound bites from recent news stories and we, the listeners, hear a serious sounding male news reporter saying “The focus of the European debt crisis move today…,” and other successive sound bites related to the economic situation in Europe. This informal, stream of consciousness opening is typical of TAL, as all TAL episodes begin without an introductory frame. This might give listeners the feeling that we enter the show already in the middle of a conversation with Glass and company.

Next in this episode, Glass does introduce the program, and turns it over to Blumberg. A conversation between Blumberg and Glass ensues, and includes several informal moments that convey naturalness and liveness. Before Blumberg takes over as host, Glass announces, “From WBEZ Chicago, it’s This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. Alex, I’m just going to hand they show over to you.” This is followed by an unpolished moment of confusion:

Alex Blumberg: All right and I say, like, “from WBEZ Chicago,” that thing?
Ira Glass: No, I just said that. So you don’t have to say that.
Blumberg: So I don’t have to say that?
Glass: So you can just proceed. Have you heard this show before?
Blumberg: No, you didn’t say “today’s program.”
Glass: All right, I’ll say – you can say “today’s program.”

Blumberg and Glass speak over each other, laughing in a light, friendly way. This unpolished exchange could have easily been edited out in post-production, especially since the trained ear will notice that besides laughter, all signifiers of the body (breathing, et al) have been smoothed out through dialogue editing. This apparently unscripted moment is, however, kept intact, and accomplishes the task of conveying an artificial spontaneous liveness to listeners.

Overall, Ira Glass is repeatedly constructed in TAL and other media as a charismatic, jovial, informal, self-reflexive, and playful radio journalist. This difference from traditional broadcast journalists who you might find on CNN or even NPR’s All Things Considered has contributed to Glass’ personality as a pioneer of the new age of radio journalism. This is further shaped by TAL’s experimental distribution via events like This American Life LIVE!, where the radio program is performed live onstage with dance numbers, animation, other video, and more. The performance is beamed to movie theatres across the country live. First done in 2009, a new This American Life LIVE! is being broadcast around the country on Thursday, May 10^th, and I know I for one will be attending it at a local theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin.

This blurring between storytelling, journalism, and media formats troubles traditional notions of ethical reporting and conceptions of truth. Glass goes to great lengths to distinguish himself as an untraditional journalist, and despite (or perhaps because of this) he has received countless major broadcasting awards for journalism.  The most recent coverage of the kerfuffle and drama surrounding the veracity of an episode aired earlier this year, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” and TAL’s subsequent retraction of the episode in the March 16^th in the TAL episode “Retraction,” points to mainstream journalism’s inability to reconcile TAL’s postmodern style of journalism. Having heard the original “Mr. Daisey” episode, I question TAL’s retraction, as the program was very clear that it was featuring portions of Mike Daisey’s one-man play “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” and even included a disclaimer at the end noting what Glass and his team were able to fact check and what they could not.

However, this controversy is significant, not because it questions or clarifies the “truth” of This American Life’s episode featuring Daisey, but rather it points to the significance of TAL within the American mediascape. Moreover, at the end of the day, it recuperates Glass’ integrity. In “Retraction,” Glass doesn’t just retract TAL’s previous episode, he interrogates the show’s fact checking process and interviews Daisey again, during which he is self-reflexively critical and idealistic about the boundaries of radio features. Thus, in his humility and self-awareness, Ira Glass is ultimately able to retain his persona as an unconventional, pioneering radio journalist.

How bizarre that one of America’s foremost political celebrities would so fundamentally misunderstand the nature of celebrity (though one must admit that Palin uses exceptionalist logic in almost everything she does). No single politician today—not even Obama—has so adroitly crafted her or himself as a celebrity figure and icon as Sarah Palin. From her reality television show, to her guest commentator position on Fox News (including having a TV studio built in her Alaskan home), to her Twitter and Facebook missives, to her book release tours, and even to crafting a family vacation/media circus entourage/ bus tour road trip of America’s historical sites, Palin has mastered the modern art of celebrity production and sustainment. If Palin farts (metaphorically, though perhaps literally), we can be assured it will receive media coverage somewhere.

So it seems particularly strange that she doesn’t understand the darker side of that celebrity. That is to say, with such spectacle presentations, fabrication of attention, insertion into people’s lives, and fawning, worship and adoration that is characteristic of celebrity culture comes the opposite: the outright hatred for all that (and in very personal ways). Most celebrities realize (if only from their fan and hate mail) they are loved and loathed at the same time, that people love their achievements but also (and at times simultaneously) revel in their failures, fatness, fakeness, and so on.

But perhaps Palin actually does understand this. While it is still strange that one of America’s most venomous and hate-filled politicians would take umbrage at others returning the feeling, perhaps she does understand that part of the media/celebrity game is that celebrities benefit from crafting such antipathies, and it is simply part of celebrity culture. What is Keyshia Cole without Lil Kim, David Letterman without Jay Leno, or Rosie O’Donnell without Donald Trump? Perhaps Palin does understand that such battles are the fuel that celebrity runs on.

But what makes political celebrity different from strictly entertainment celebrity is that the ideological yoke is always present. For right-wingers, to witness an attack on Palin is to be personally attacked as well (in ways that, say, attacking Lady Gaga simply doesn’t register). Similar to religious beliefs, political values and beliefs run deep. Feeling under attack, of course, is the bread-and-butter of the contemporary Republican Party. For over two decades, media pundits such as Rush Limbaugh (and now politicians) have perfected a victimization rhetoric built on binary oppositions, and in the process, using such rhetoric to transform political opponents into ideologically justified mortal enemies. One can find an audience, raise money, craft movements, be elected, and overthrow governments based on hatred. And it is central to Palin’s celebrity and brand as well.

Celebrity hating and oppositions have value in politics too. Why are Hollywood celebrities always a much more frequent target for right-wingers than, say, Senator Bernie Sanders—a true-to-life, living and breathing socialist who actually has political power? Because most Americans don’t know or care about legislative politics. What they care about is symbolic politics, and celebrity brands are the apex of symbolic meaning and value in a consumer society. Palin, in fact, does know this well, for it is one of the primary reasons she shed her duties as governor of Alaska mid-term (who the hell needs those tiresome burdens?) to embrace more fully and commit more time to her primary job as symbolic figure.

Political celebrity is an important part of contemporary American political culture. Politics can be as profitable as any other form of entertainment, and there are many such people—Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, et al.—for whom politics is central to their celebrity brand. For Sarah Palin to reject the anti-fandom that comes with such celebrity is disingenuous, for what she knows better than most is that it is damn good for business.

Obviously the terrible shape of the economy is on almost everyone’s mind. And it should come as no surprise that anger about our current condition would find its way to the ballot box. The political right has exploited that anger because, well, it makes for good politics (they have little else to sell) and attacking Obama also makes for profitable media. The political left, on the other hand, calls this “Obama’s inheritance”—that these are conditions that Obama did not create but inherited from eight years of Republican corruption, malfeasance, and incompetence (as the most recent conversation between Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank demonstrates).

The left, of course, has a point. The polity’s mood is directly related to the fact that Americans are notoriously ahistorical, not to mention ill-informed and contemptuous of politics. Given current conditions, it is simply easy to blame Obama and the Democrats for not turning things around more quickly—never mind that guy who was in charge 365 days ago.

What interests me more is what we see in the middle. What has grabbed my attention is how presentist our media is in their reporting. By presentist I mean the way in which news media are generally focused on explaining the now with little regard to what happened last month or last year (although I do enjoy the double entendre of the dictionary definition of presentist–“a person who maintains that the prophecies in the Apocalypse are now being fulfilled”). Even NPR is breathless in its “reporting” on how the public feels right this minute and connecting those feelings to Obama, with little attempt to frame its stories in the broader context of the slow processes of governance and economic change.

Political scientists say that the modern presidency is dominated by the “continuous campaign,” whereby campaigning for public office continues every day that one is in office. They bemoan the fact that the dynamics of campaigning destroys one’s ability to engage in the politics of governance. What political scientists often fail to recognize is the continuous campaign’s connection to our entertainment culture, and celebrity politics in particular.

Celebrity politics isn’t just about the selling of politicians such as Obama and Palin on the campaign trail (and the public’s affective relationship therewith). It is also the way in which news media treat governance in the same fashion that they treat celebrity culture. Who is up or down on any given day, as determined by the gods of popularity? Is the celebrity being worshiped or vilified by the public right now? News media, like celebrity itself, must sell its meaningfulness or relevance to the public every day, and aligning with popular sentiment becomes the basis for how reporting gets done. Looking backwards is only helpful in end-of-year specials. And describing the intricacies of how power works simply doesn’t sell like the red carpet spectacles featured in OK! magazine.

If the public is ahistorical and the press is damningly superficial in its role in framing or reporting reality (much less helping the public understand governance), then Obama best return to campaign mode soon, for the road ahead looks to be a particularly bumpy ride.