Maybe. Truth be told, I have no idea. But a picture can be pretty persuasive and here is Kevin Spacey with a man in his lap, whose pants are being pulled down to expose his smooth, hairless buttocks. The picture looks like a set up. It looks like a camera man paid some drunk Croatian a couple of beers to go dive on a celebrity's lap while some conveniently-placed bystanders yank the lad's trousers down. Look at Spacey's legs; they aren't even uncrossed. Had he willfully received a strapping young Croat into his lap you'd think he would have at least uncrossed them to make a better flesh cradle for his eager nubber.

Celebrity news is a mystery to me. I don't understand what's so interesting about whether or not famous actors behave properly or have certain gender preferences for their lovers. I understand prurience. The need to leer and gawk at those in the crowd willing to plumb their own depths for entertainment, or no purpose at all. But I wonder who cares about Kevin Spacey being gay? Who cares if photos of him surface happily frolicking in a Croatian disco with some pretty young boys into the wee hours of the night?

I like to go over the news headlines that Yahoo! puts on their front page every so often. It's an exercise in cultural insanity. The schizophrenia our culture is leaving in its wake is so startling it's almost unnoticeable, numbing. Right now you can read about Hurricane Gustav being downgraded to a tropical storm, find the 20 best steaks in America, learn about strange blue clouds spotted at the edge of the earth's atmosphere, or see how children with older fathers have a higher propensity for bipolar disorder. It reminds me of Glamorama, where popular culture, news, and politics eventually devolved into a hallucinogenic fantasia of violence, pornography, and celebrity gossip. Is that Stephen Dorff?

These are the kind of vapid poofs off useless information that we collect and build psychic forts out of. TMZ, People Magazine, Newsweek, Entertainment Tonight, Oprah. It all blends so easily into a kaleidoscopic pastiche in which we're told to care about people that fill the channels of the media and to hold them to the behavioral standards of mannequins. It's just fun, though, you might say, flipping through the pages of People magazine. The things we say to each other matter, and the channels we use to share those messages are important. The culture of celebrity news is as sure a sign as any that we've lost a handle on our most basic forms of civility and are headed straight into the maw of the beast. As Ellis quotes Hitler in the epigraph of Glamorama, "You make a mistake if you see what we do as merely political." People winds up in more homes than The Economist. What does that say about us? 

But so what really strikes me as curious is the pack of cigarettes in the corner of the frame. Does Kevin Spacey smoke? It makes sense that I have little real information on his sex life because that's something that happens at home (usually), or at least under some sanction of privacy. But smoking, that's something he should be doing on the red carpet or at the E! after party on Oscar night isn't it? Why have I never seen Kevin Spacey smoking before? Is he hiding something from us?

[Source: TMZ]