So Many Handbags, So Little Time (Review of "The Bling Ring")

London Review of Books ^ | 6/20/2013 | Andrew O'Hagen

[mojito]

....Fame today is a matryoshka doll: inside each celebrity is a series of smaller, hollow simulacra, and, at the very core, there is a hard little being who feels buried alive. In Alexis’s gang there were four girls and three boys: the main culprit, Nick Prugo, was a gay kid working his way out of the closet. When he was eventually arrested by the police he was wearing a striped top he’d stolen from the house of the actor Orlando Bloom. And that’s what they did: after days of shopping or doing pilates, hanging out on MySpace, texting or oh-my-god-ing on their iPhones, studying Google Maps or celebrity websites to find addresses, they would travel in their big, gas-guzzling cars to the houses of their heroes in the Hollywood Hills, and rob them. At Paris Hilton’s house, they tried on her perfume and her shoes, they took money and handbags. It was almost as if Paris had been waiting for them: there was a key under her doormat, and her dressing-room, the inner sanctum, was filled with cushions bearing her self-adoring image. The burglars stepped gingerly over the little dogs called Marilyn Monroe and Prada.

[mojito]

Hollywood has always attracted the damaged, but we seem to be reaching a nadir. Our culture is a cesspool.

We can not remain a free people if we are turning out brain-damaged miscreants such as these instead of citizens.

A compelling if despairing read.

[Da Coyote]

“Fame today is a matryoshka doll: inside each celebrity is a series of smaller, hollow simulacra, and, at the very core, there is a hard little being who feels buried alive...”

Change “...hard little being who feels buried alive...”
to
“the most complete vacuum in the multiverse - incapable of even supporting random quantum events...a literal black hole of nothingness”.

[livius]

Lol! I think your version is much more accurate!