I'd Rather Be Celine
"A New Day..." is done. After 717 performances since March 25, 2003, Celine Dion concluded her Las Vegas residency at Caesar's Palace with a Saturday-night farewell. Caesar's invested $95 million in a 4,100-seat theater for the melodramatic French-Canadian singer, who overcame poor early reviews to eventually gross more than $400 million from the sales of some 3 million tickets. She easily earned out her initial $100 million, three-year contract, the largest sum of any Vegas act to date. "A New Day...," the DVD, was released last week, Bette Midler moves into the room in February, and Dion will soon tour the world to promote her recent album, "Taking Chances."
To non-fans, Celine is probably most memorable for this highly emotional September 23, 2005, interview with Larry King, when she seemed to encourage New Orleans looters following the levee failure in New Orleans. "Let them touch these things!," she urged regarding the jeans and TV sets being stolen.
As an artist, Dion is a polarizing figure for fans and critics alike. Worshipped by millions for her emotional generosity, she is considered bland and corporate by just as many detractors. Canadian music writer Carl Wilson uses Dion's most popular album as lightning rod for his fascinating meditation on aesthetics, fandom, and loathing in "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste." Wilson's title is the latest in Continuum's terrific 33 1/3 series of books, each devoted to an entire album, and he covers more ground than most. He talks to fans and critics. He studies demographic research on Dion's audience. He submits an extensive "Let's Talk About Love" review. He thinks long and hard and well about why we love and hate the divas we do, in whatever forms they may take. He even visits Vegas to attend "A New Day...," about which he writes:
"The songs of devotion—'If You Asked Me To' or 'Because You Loved Me'—began to probe the open sore of my own recent marital separation, and even coaxed a few tears. For a few moments, I got it. Of course, then Celine would do something unforgivable, like a duet with an enormous projection of the head of the late Frank Sinatra. Still, I could see the point of her in Vegas, land of ejaculating slot machines and flows of global capital through artificial rivers. Let them touch these things!"