{"id":22649,"date":"2011-10-27T13:00:56","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T17:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=22649"},"modified":"2011-10-28T11:02:59","modified_gmt":"2011-10-28T15:02:59","slug":"screen-shots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/27\/screen-shots\/","title":{"rendered":"Screen Shots"},"content":{"rendered":"

An early foray into fandom: I was eleven, maybe twelve, full of lust and greed. After school let out that day, my mother picked me up to go grocery shopping at Gemco, the massive warehouse supermarket that had recently opened on the outskirts of our Sacramento Valley town. Inside, while she got a cart and started making her rounds, I hung back at the newsstand, in my Catholic school uniform, and tore photos of boy heartthrobs from glossy teen magazines and then stuffed them into the waistband of my blue plaid skirt.<\/p>\n

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C. Thomas Howell.<\/p><\/div>\n

I didn\u2019t consider it stealing. I wasn\u2019t taking the whole magazine, just a few pages. I didn\u2019t even think about the fact that I was defacing property. Nor did I contemplate simply asking my mother to buy me the magazines. I wasn\u2019t going to put these photos up on my bedroom wall; they would go inside my closet. This was the early eighties, so I would\u2019ve been obsessed with The Outsiders<\/em>\u2014Ponyboy, Johnny, Soda, all the rest. Into my skirt went Rob Lowe. Into my skirt went C. Thomas Howell<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cSilver Screen\/Silver Prints: Hollywood Glamour Portraits from the Robert Dance Collection,\u201d<\/a> an exhibit at the Grolier club on East Sixtieth Street, takes a much more decorous approach to celebrity. The introductory wall text points out the link between religious and secular worship, and there is something hushed and chapel-like about the exhibition room with the brass-railed balcony and the high coffered ceiling and the quiet visitors. Mine was only the fourth name on the sign-in sheet at the Club, where the exhibit will run until November 12. Here is fandom as High Church veneration. Nothing unseemly, certainly no speaking in tongues.<\/p>\n

(And certainly nothing like the explosive fervor that overtakes the young women in Peter Watkins\u2019s 1967 film Privilege<\/em> in which Paul Jones stars as tormented pop icon Steven Shorter. Here is fandom as ecstatic frenzy:)<\/p>\n