Plain Pockets: September 2008

Monday, September 15, 2008

$ee You at the Oscar's!

Every time I receive a dollar that someone has written

a message on I try to imagine who wrote it and why.

This dollar was received as change in Los Angeles, September 10, 2008.

Now there is a website that will post your

"Graffiti-ed Greenbacks" at GreenbackGraffiti.com.

If you e-mail them a jpeg of any bills you have

received that have been written on, they will post it.

And who knows maybe even get a response from the author?

Any ideas on what the story behind this one might be?

*If you were to see a casual photographer around town and called him a paparazzi, beware; he might be tempted to throw his camera at you, especially if he considers himself to be a

photojournalist. So what's the difference you may ask? The answer is in the meaning of

paparazzi, "buzzing insects."

In 1960, these pesky freelance journalists were immortalized in Federico Fellini's internationally popular film La Dolce Vita, Italian for "The Sweet Life." La Dolce Vita focuses on the life of a jaded journalist, Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni), and his

photographer colleague, Paparazzo (Walter Santesso). The origin of the name Paparazzo is

disputed, but its onomatopoeic resemblance to the Sicilian word for an oversize mosquito,

papataceo,made it apt to compare with Fellini's statement: "Paparazzo suggests to me a

buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging." Fellini also drew an image of the character in

which he describes; the drawing is of a human-like figure that has no bone structure and instead, looks like a vampirish insectile, implying that paparazzi, like mosquitoes, are also parasites.

After the movie was first released in Italy, the word paparazzi became synonymous with

intrusive photographers who chase the stars to get that revealing act on film. However, Fellini said it was not the photographers he tried to emulate. Fellini claimed that he was putting newspapers and weeklies on film, and many of the vignettes that make up the movie refer directly to news stories. He wanted to capture the paparazzi-inspired events where reporters often begged involved parties for a story. However, it was the freezing-frenzied movements in the pictures captured by the photographer that sparked viewer interest, even for Fellini. "It recreates life in movement," he once stated.

The incorporation of the word paparazzi into the English language is indefinitely tied to La

Dolce Vita when it was released in the United States in 1961. Time magazine introduced the

word to the American public in an article entitled, "Paparazzi on the Prowl." Included is a

paparazzi picture of throngs of reporters blocking the car of a princess visiting Rome. The text discloses "a ravenous wolf pack of freelance photographers who stalk big names for a living and fire with flash guns at a pointblank." Soon, the term would be spread across the pages of major news and entertainment publications across the globe, often accompanied by incriminating photos of the stars. Publications that were soon to follow this trend included Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Life magazine. It was later introduced on the television screen by popular news-oriented shows like 60 Minutes. But no matter what the medium used to report on these "celebrity bounty hunters," it was clear that paparazzo was a derogative term.