When X17 paparazzi photographer "Dano" describes the night an outraged Britney Spears attacked his Ford Explorer with an umbrella, it's with an almost child-like glee.

"She was breathing like a bull," the Mexican-American Angelino told writer David Samuels in a recent cover story for The Atlantic magazine. "It was like smoke was coming out of her nostrils. Then she leaps out of the door screaming 'Motherfuckers!'"

Ironically, her rage-fueled lapse in judgment (perhaps spurred by being denied visitation with her sons minutes earlier) made Dano a star. His net profits from sales of the photos totaled $400,000.

According to the Atlantic story, Britney-related photos/videos/etc. bring the celebrity-stalking industry over $100 million in proceeds annually -- and that's just Britney. With Paris, Lindsay, TomKat, and Brangelina in the mix, along with hundreds of other movie stars and socialites, we're talking astronomical sums of money. Once a highly specialized business, it's now a piranha pool roiling with opportunists.

Because it is so profitable, chasing celebrities has become a bloodthirsty game. And it may surprise you to know that its most successful players are former pizza delivery drivers, valet parking attendants, and other service industry rejects. The modern paparazzi are not professional, lone wolf photographers, hauling expensive camera equipment from location to location. They are mostly packs of immigrant kids, armed with simple digital cameras and camcorders, who are willing to risk life, limb, and incarceration to bag a "big money" shot.

X17 photographers are the biggest breadwinners in the business, mostly because they are so organized. Francois "Regis" Navarre, himself a Parisian immigrant, owns the company. He and his wife, Brandy, run a stable of 60-70 photographers which they pay, on average, $800-$3000 a week, to bring them fresh celebrity meat daily. They, in turn, sell the pictures and videos (of which they retain full rights) to outlets like Us Weekly, People, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and other national and international media outlets.

The promise of four and five figure bonuses for extra-hot stuff like the Britney head-shaving pics (which were shot by X17's Luiz Betat through a one-inch hole in the salon's plastic curtain) keep the paps poised and hungry. Betat is part of X17's elite Britney-stalking force known as "The Brazilians." He is loyal to Navarre, who plucked him from a valet parking job. "For sure I get excited, but I don't have a shaking legs or bullshit like this," Betat tells Samuels, of taking the famous shot. "You can tell from the first frame that she never saw I was there."

While all of this sounds uncomfortably Mafioso, the other "reveals" in Samuels' story are even more disturbing -- particularly when we learn that the informant that tipped-off X17 to Lindsay Lohan's recent "family therapy session" was her own father, Michael. You can be assured that, like the rest of the company's "tipsters," he was paid handsomely. Samuels also describes ride-alongs with the X17 paps that involve racing through the streets of Los Angeles like money-drunk Indy car drivers, swerving to the wrong side of the road and jockeying for position while in full pursuit of Britney.

"What the paparazzi have done is developed a lawless society where the rules don't apply," Los Angeles Councilman Dennis Zine told Access Hollywood, after proposing a law that would limit the proximity that paparazzi must maintain in regard to their subjects, "(driving) on the wrong side of the street, jumping out of cars at the red lights, swarming the car, you don't do that."

Zine says that when Britney is taken, by ambulance, to the hospital, it costs California taxpayers $25,000 just to cover the patrol cars, police motorcycles and helicopter support needed to keep the streets safe as the paps chase her. And while some argue that these actions are protected under the First Amendment, Zine points out that they are also "violating everyone else's rights, freedoms, and privileges."

In the same story, X17 Vice President Brandy Navarre stated that such a law would mean nothing. "I don't think it would change things that much," she says. "I mean, the photographers would just stand back a little more."

Though there seems to be no viable solution on the horizon, the problem is growing at a thunderous rate. Magazines rarely shell out for "exclusives" anymore as there are rarely any truly "exclusive" photos available - due to the sheer volume of photographers in constant pursuit of celebrity flesh.

"Fame is vapor, popularity an accident and riches take wings," New York Tribune Editor Horace Greely once said. "Only one thing endures and that is character."

Apparently, character is something Francois and Brandy Navarre have decided they can live without.

Wendy Case is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Arts & Entertainment.

junk kid culture: good kid culture. Your daughter zoning out on preteen Disney musicals? Rent Help! and A Hard Day's Night. Hyper-driven, commercial-laden Nick programming driving you nuts? Throw Modern Times in the DVD player. Cries for Happy Meals driving you crazy? Go out for sushi. My son hasn't kicked his Hannah Montana crush or Power Rangers habit, but he knows the words to a dozen Beatles songs and loves Charlie Chaplin. And his favorite breakfast is a tin of surimi from the local Latin takeout restaurant: inch-long eels smothered in olive oil and peppers and garlic.

I'm not bragging about my five-year-old's sophisticated taste. Okay, I am bragging -- but I'm making a point too. A huge part of a parent's job is to curate and expose him to culture. For me, it's so much fun singing "Ticket to Ride" with Cole, I can't even call it a job.

Of course, as long as Pixar's around, you can trust your offspring with at least some of today's pop culture. With Wall-E, the kings of animation have hit the ball way out of the park.

Anthropomorphic robots are a staple of cartoons and sci-fi; Robots and The Iron Giant are also excellent kiddie flicks. But rarely has a nuts-and-bolts character had the vaudevillian soul of Wall-E. He looks more than a little like E.T., and he serves a similar function: as an emissary from another planet (which in this case used to be our planet) who reminds us humans of the humanity we've lost in ourselves (ditto Iron Giant).

With his sad eyes, forlorn shabby appearance, and slapstick pratfalls, Wall-E also draws a lot on Chaplin. Like the Little Tramp, he will do just about anything for love. In Eve, he finds a va-va-voom modern girlfriend.

But Wall-E is no mere sentimental cartoon: It's a pointed apocalpytic parable. Wall-E and his pet cockroach seem to be the sole inhabitants of an environmentally blighted Earth. Fat, lazy humans with their greed and consumerism have buried the planet in trash and then fled. It's An Inconvenient Truth come to cartoon life.

Despite my opening graf, I'm not really a total snob. I like a lot of kid's movies -- better than most adult ones. We have a running joke in our house that we haven't seen a new film that doesn't feature a talking animal in years. And I don't really mind.

Wall-E is quite simply one of the best. It's definitely up there with Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Bambi. The landscapes and artistic direction in the film are stunning, their towering bleakness lightened with comic touches, like the robot's collection of found objects (a Rubik's cube, lighters, a tape of Hello, Dolly! that provides the film's unlikely soundtrack and romantic analogy). New York Times critic A.O. Scott called the first 40 minutes a "cinematic poem," and that's not wrong. Wall-E is the antidote. And the fact that millions are taking it in makes me feel more hopeful than ever about November 4.

Evelyn McDonnell is MOLI's editor at large. Her Populism blog runs Tuesdays and Thursdays.

With a band name like Gameboy/Gamegirl, you'd expect that three MCs from Australia (with beats courtesy of a DJ from Oz known as Miami Horror - but we take no offense ... ), would know how to have a good time; but fun doesn't even begin to describe the energetic music that the silly electronic trio makes. Their self-described "coochie club music" has a powerful, hip hop-influenced sound that draws from sources as diverse as Crystal Castles and old school Dr. Dre, creating an end product that will transport you straight from your cubicle to the dancefloor at Mansion without skipping a beat.

So what's the track that got the international blogosphere all abuzz and is teleporting me all about town? A catchy, irresistible number known as "Sweaty Wet Dirty Damp," a song that's the perfect soundtrack for either of this trio's favorite fun time activities-dancing and partying. "We've done a lot of ridiculous stuff to come up with ideas [for songs]," Gamegirl Katy has said. "We'll just write word and ideas down and put them in a big hat and pull them out ... sometimes it surprises us what goes together as as match."

Shaggy Brooklyn rock act the Creaky Boards had a good-natured go at British megastars Coldplay last week when 'Boards' singer/songwriter Andrew Hoepfner posted a video on YouTube openly accusing Coldplay main man Chris Martin of pilfering his (ironically-titled) tune, "The Songs I Didn't Write."

In the video, which has gleaned hundreds of thousands of views since its June 14^th posting, Hoepfner compares and contrasts his song with "Viva La Vida," the title track off Coldplay's new album, which debuted this week at the top of the Billboard charts. He also suggests that Martin was in the crowd when the Creaky Boards performed the track at New York's CMJ festival in 2007.

Are the songs similar? Yes, definitely. Is it plagiarism? Doubtful. Although this unfortunate statement, attributed to Martin recently by E! Online, comes at a particularly sensitive time:

"We're one of the world's worst -- but most enthusiastic -- plagiarists as a band. We'll try and copy anything but tend to fail, so we come up with something ... that sounds like us -- only through trying to sound like somebody else."

I might be a little more cynical had the same thing not happened to me about 10 years ago. I was feeling cocky about a little 2-and-a-half minute masterpiece I'd penned when I walked into a bar and heard some friends of mine playing what, in essence, was the same tune. When I confronted them about it after the set, the singer informed me that it was a Kinks cover.

Doh!

I don't think it's that unusual for music or melody to leave a subconscious emotional imprint. Surely George Harrison, one of the most talented musicians who ever lived, didn't need to purloin the Chiffons' "He's So Fine," to make a hit record. But, when "My Sweet Lord" came out, it was clear that Harrison, subconsciously or not, had re-written history.

In the case of the Creaky Boards, they certainly have enough of a doppelganger in "Viva La Vida" to make a case. But it appears that Hoepfner and his pals are perfectly content just to have the attention their cranky, somewhat silly, video has brought their way. They've even tacked on an amendment stating that Coldplay's claims that Martin was in London at the time of the CMJ performance must be true.

Hoepfner has told at least one news outlet that he now believes it was Prince Charles that was in the audience that night. Or, perhaps, it was a time-traveling Joe Satriani (whose "If I Could Fly" came out in 2004).

Ouch! Trumped by the corny metal guitar wizard!

Wendy Case is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Arts & Entertainment.