HOLLYWOOD, California — Inside Club Privilege, Christine “ForBiddeN” Dolce — the “Queen of MySpace” — is celebrating her imminent nude debut in Playboy, and everything looks and sounds a lot like her MySpace page.
Girls and boys with RGB-colored hair strike MySpace portrait poses for roving photographers. Internet fame seekers on the dance floor dress in the equivalent of the HTML “blink tag” — not so elegant, but you cant take your eyes off, either.
Click here for photos from the party. Comments fill the air, while music blares from speakers along the white walls — just like the embedded players on the popular social networking site. There are 700 or so packed into rooms only zoned for 500, max. And the long line outside could be waiting for MySpace’s pokey web pages to load.
The reason they’re here has more to do with paper than pixels. Having already attained online fame by garnering nearly a million friends on MySpace, Dolce is celebrating her Playboy debut in the pages of this month’s magazine.
Neither Playboy nor MySpace sponsored tonight’s party, which is appropriate, given Dolce’s self-made icon status.
She’s busy these days. Her MySpace page hawks a wide range of products: ForBiddeN wallpapers, ringtones, her own line of “Destroyed Denim” jeans, and an upcoming promotion for Unilever’s Axe men’s deodorant.
ForBiddeN is here in the flesh, pouting in platform heels on a white leather banquette beneath the DJ booth, surrounded by a bevy of similarly surgically-enhanced babes.
“Much love, kisses, bites, chokes, hand shakes, milk shakes, butt shakes, whatever you like… to you all!!! :o),” Ms. Dolce bids her fans on MySpace, “Love u all <3."
In person, things are different.
I step forward to snap a Polaroid. She shrugs and says something I can’t hear over the Bee Gees trance remix. I snap the pic, but a towering security guard grabs the photo as the camera spits it out. “Go away!” he screams. “No more pictures. You! Get out of here, go, go! Now!”
And that’s where the similarities between MySpace and this Hollywood club end. Online, self-styled narcissists practically beg you to take their picture. Here, the successful ones hire beefy bodyguards to keep snappers away.
But others are more accommodating. One subject, decked in bargain bling and a red hoodie, identifies himself as Joe Blow, an internet entertainment entrepreneur.
“Yo, Im not trying to get all up in your business or anything, but my brother is a bomb-ass hiphop artist and he is going to be huge,” he shouts in my ear over the club din. “I’m not frontin’. He’s gonna be bomb-ass huge. Check us out on MySpace!” He types a url into my Treo and saunters off.
Also present at ForBiddeN’s party is Danah Boyd, a fellow at USC Annenberg Center who studies online social networking. She believes many will try to duplicate ForBiddeN’s internet fairytale path to mainstream celebrity, but few will achieve the same success.
“Technology makes you feel like you can get closer to fame, but for most on MySpace, the results of that may be disappointing,” she says. “Look at all the people and businesses commenting on her MySpace profile. What’s the advantage of doing that? Are they trying to get her attention, or the attention of all the thousands of people paying attention to her? And why are all these people here tonight? To mingle with ForBiddeN, or be discovered as she was?”
On the other side of Hollywood, the punk pinup site SuicideGirls is kicking off a nationwide burlesque tour at Club Dragonfly. The crowd includes Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis, musician Dave Navarro, comedian Sarah Silverstein and celebrities like Kevin Federline, Carmen Electra and Paris Hilton.
On stage, the pierced pinups perform a skit impersonating Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson and Ms. Hilton, who ends up being beaten up. In the crowd, the real Ms. Hilton snaps pictures with a digital camera.
Shortly after leaving the club, Hilton is pulled over by police for “erratic driving.” She fails a field sobriety test with a .08 blood alcohol level and is promptly arrested for DUI.
