Mark Borkowski - Mark my words - Borkowski Blogs » sleb

Kanye Fix It?

Mark Borkowski — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:41:46 +0000

There has been a lot of debate about the relevance of PR council to the stars since the Twitter revolution. Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Ross Brydon all do a pretty good job of managing to reach out to their fans. With these examples, and others, in mind, stars like Kanye West may wonder why they need to spend money on a PR when they have the DIY tools at their fingertips. But Kanye is proof positive that some slebs need sound and serious PR advice before they attempt to engage their fans over the net.

West has been letting rip on Twitter with unrelenting detail about himself. He has picked a fight with a journalist from the LA Times music blog who had the temerity to accidentally miss out a word from the title of his album but the incident that generated the most ire was his use of a robot to pump out 300 tweets in a few minutes containing lyrics and some nasty invective.

With a lot of people complaining about his bombardment and suggesting that it was “time to give that ego some beautyrest”, it’s clear that Kanye has been digging his own grave in public.

You only have to go to his Twitter site to see the lurid details. As Grace Dent put it in a tweet yesterday morning: “kanye is actually a complete twitter bellend. they should suspend his account for spamming about himself.” He has proved that a sleb can disengage a fan base in mere moments.

Other celebrities take note – the world really is watching. Take your publicist’s advice and quell the urge to pick fights with the world. And please find something to talk about other than yourself.

The Sleb’s Prayer

adam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:17:03 +0000

Our publicist which art in Chinawhite
shallowed be our names.
Thy quick-fix come,
thy stunts be run
in Heat as they are on Popbitch.
Give us this day our daily big-ups
and forgive us our coke deals
as we forgive those who report our coke deals to the press.
Lead us not into the Priory
and deliver us from journalists
for thine is the Twitter, the spin-cycle and the story
for fifteen months and forever.

Amen.

Adam Horovitz

Written after hearing that a chain of hotels frequented by celebrities, which are to be featured in a reality show, have asked to use The Fame Formula as a replacement for the Gideon’s Bible – something for the down-at-heel Z Lister to turn to for inspiration.

Snapshots of the Past

Mark Borkowski — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:22:12 +0000

A bumper day for picture stories in the Telegraph. First up, there’s the photo op for the launch of the Guinness Book of Records, which shows that the Barnum model of photo opportunity has never gone away – this picture of He Pingping, the Mongolian man, who, at 2ft 4in, is the world’s shortest man being a direct reference to the one staged by PT Barnum, below.

I believe that Barnum would revel in the way that the Guinness Book of Records has legitismised his interest in the biggest, smallest, oldest and oddest – and he’d surely revel even more in the fact that the sort of picture opportunities he was creating with General Tom Thumb 140 years ago are still as eagerly lapped up (and copied) by news editors today as they were then.

And then there was the image of British Catholics venerating the remains of ‘the greatest saint of modern times’, the Carmelite nun who died in 1897, at Portsmouth Cathedral.

It is rather astounding that such mediaeval-seeming devotional practice still takes place in this modern era, replete as it is with the Jordan vs. Pete parables and the secular Sleb iconography of Heat and its peers. More astounding still is the fact that people are knowingly coming to look at a coffin containing only portions of the saint’s thigh and foot bones, her body having been divided into three after her death. Normally nowadays that’s the sort of behaviour that lurid tabloid headlines are built on…