In the Future Everyone Will Be Stalked for Fifteen Minutes (Inexplicable Bryan Adams Stalker Alert)

For reasons that have to do with the fact that I met him once and wanted to smack him, this is deeply gratifying.  One-time interesting person Bryan Adams is being stalked by "Romanians".

According to UK's Daily Mail, Adams has called the police to defend himself against a possibly deranged mother-son pair:

The 49-year-old, who lives in Chelsea, has been hounded by the obsessed fans for a number of weeks, and has now involved Scotland Yard.

The pair, understood to be from Romania, first saw the Canadian singer in a restaurant and approached him for an autograph.

They later turned up at his west London home and have been shadowing him ever since. It is thought they are suffering from psychiatric problems.

Suffering from psychiatric problems? Mais no-fucking-way.  Those two are emissaries from the edge of Western empire, come to reveal the future of celebrity.

In these days of media saturation, when HD-capable cameras are one shopping season away from ubiquity (global economic meltdown notwithstanding), our definition of celebrity is due for an overhaul.

At one time, celebrities were famous for their accomplishments, even if that accomplishment amounted to growing giant pumpkins or being able to stand in a movie camera without drooling (Unless you were Ol' Drooly Pete, 1925's hottest newsreel sensation).  Andy Warhol engaged in self-conscious experiments in celebrity invention, proving in the process that anyone can become famous if you simply keep a camera trained long enough.  At the time it was a bold idea and an ironic comment that has since become the norm.  Today's art is tomorrow's wallpaper, I guess.

All you need to do now is be looked at. But with the cameras pointing everywhere, how do we know who the celebrities are? Do we choose based on beauty?  Forget Paris Hilton then.  Talent?  Forget nearly everybody between the pages of People.  Money?  Maybe - but the truly wealthy are the privileged few who can avoid the lens.  The sad truth is, when everyone is visible, only the invisible stand out.  But no one wants invisible celebrities (except for Christians, and even they have a photogenic stand-in for their absent Allfather).

It's time to get back to a more wholesome, less mediated kind of celebrity.  Stalking should be the new benchmark for fame.  Shut off the cameras and let the deranged stalkers prowl a grid across the land, choosing their objects of desire and shooting off flares to mark their locations.  Then we'll gather the new celebrities and put them on an island, which will get rid of those attention whores and their crazy stalkers in one blow.

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