Fin de siècle.

The French, they say, always have a propensity to put across things rather stylishly. Literally speaking, “fin de siècle” means “end of the century”. The phrase contains a hint of a suggestion, though, of the end of an era and the onset of the coming one as well as of a time of degeneration and a time of new beginning. In a broader and worldlier context, it connotes a sinister mixture of decadence and opulence. All of which sounds a mouthful and bombastic and pretentious. Reading Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber and Faber, London, 1990) is one entertaining way to get an insider’s view of a fin de siècle. The Whitbread Prize winning novel is set in a decaying London just before the onset of Thatcherism when Britain was said to have become totally "ungovernable”. The protagonist, Karim Amir, a second-generation British-Indian, is the bi-sexual son of the Buddha of Suburbia, Haroon ("Harry") Amir, who had emigrated from India in the late fifties or early sixties. Pop music in the times of the Punk Rock supremacy, theatre, art, deceit, fast-changing sexual mores, race relations, fake gurus, social climbing and “moving away” from the decaying suburbs are what The Buddha of Suburbia deals with in an often farcical vein.

The more, the less sexier?

I recently read somewhere a Brad Pitt interview where he had said that Jesse James was one of the earlier celebrities in America in the times of Mark Twain. Then celebrities used to be few and far between. He was talking in the context of his latest film, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". He added that, even in those days (at the cusp of the 19th and the 20th centuries), there were tabloids and a lot of sensationalizing and hype. Remember this is "the apex of celebrity" http://digbig.com/4xrch talking (Brangelina, no less). He ought to know. What he was saying in fact is that now that there has been a celebrity population explosion, being a celebrity does not have the same value it used to have in the times of Twain and the James Brothers. It has been considerably devalued like the rupee or the dollar. Remember, though, that in those days, the population of the US of A was a mere 76,094,000, according to the US Census. http://digbig.com/4xrcj. It quadrupled to 305,397,000 by 2008. http://digbig.com/4xrck. Common sense suggests that the demand for celebrities must have gone up too, what with the population of tabloids and fanzines and fan websites having soared up as well. In other words, there being more worshippers, there is a demand for more icons in every conceivable field: movies, theatre, ballet, television, music, sport, fashion, literature, art, science, you name it. This may sound like specious reasoning, come to think of it. Speaking for myself, celebrity antics leave me cold. But then I am in the minority. When I look at the way celebrity gossip is manufactured and lapped up and celebrity is used to sell products, though, even I have to agree that celebrity is here to stay for a long, long time to come.