Since I always need to have my own seriousness deconstructed, I was delighted to find this cartoon at truthdig this morning, celebrity being what it is. Mr. Fish has in effect sent up both my reaction to the viral spread of yesterday’s Obama celebrity video and the video itself.

Here’s another celebrity, deconstructed in the act of studying us humans. One of the things that make writing this blog fun (aside from the fact that people do occasionally read it) is the opportunity it gives me to discover new blogs as I read the ones I know and branch out.

Apropos of deconstructing celebrity, I stole the title of this piece from a review by Kathryn Osenlund of a recent play by Steve Martin. Here’s a sample deconstruction in the speech of one of Martin’s characters.

I was walking down the street one afternoon and I turned up the stairs into my flat and I looked back and he was there, framed in the doorway, looking up at me. I couldn’t see his face, because the light came in from behind him and he was in shadow, and he said, “I am Picasso.” And I said, “Well, so what?” And then he said he wasn’t sure yet, but he thinks that it means something in the future to be Picasso. He said that occasionally there is a Picasso, and he happens to be him.

Elvis turns out in the course of Martin’s play to be a third transformative figure of the twentieth century along with Picasso and Einstein, neither of whom understands the other (or himself) very well. So . . . the great Elvis moves through space/time like god reading the dictionary, trying on various incarnations without necessarily understanding any of them. It makes sense. I’ll be sure to remember later today when I cast my vote for Barack, for whom I cheered myself hoarse as Ted Kennedy downtown two nights ago.