"Sometimes the authors of the notes don't always paint themselves in the best light," jokes Davy Rothbart, the 27 year old indie impresario behind Found magazine, Foundmagazine.com and a fall tour that encompassed a stunning 46 destinations including Toronto and Montreal.

On stage, the lanky red head pulls another crumbled sheet of paper out of a considerable stack. He reads a rant that ends, "Why would I take your stuff, when I can get my own?...Love, Mom." He selects a communique from a jilted lover concluding, "Mario I hate you -- You're a fucking liar -- ps page me later?" Then Rothbart selects one boy's earnest description of the band he loves more than anything: "Marilyn Manson stands for your good side and your bad side -- Like Marilyn Munroe and Charles Manson."

With the timing of a comedian, Rothbart has us hanging on every word, waiting for the fateful twist that will turn the mundane into the surreally hilarious. But Rothbart isn't a comedian and he doesn't write his own gags. People send them this stuff from all over the world. They find notes stuck under their car windows -- "Stop putting crab on my car. Just. Stop. It!" -- plastered to the sidewalk, and in some cases they even risk life and limb to dash across a highway in search of a letter bobbing aimlessly down a median. In the world of found notes, Rothbart is the king of fools, urging his court jesters down dirty alleys in search of yet another serendipitous peek into the mind of an anonymous, and usually hapless, scribbler.

Smart-ass hipster whose zine mixes irreverent street-cred eubonics with a smarmy appreciation for the stranger moments in life, Rothbart is also part of an ongoing movement to turn ordinary people into celebrities. The notes he reprints in his found zine are each given a title and thus an identity. Through this process the anonymous writers are elevated to, within the small found world, fame status. "The more you get into these found notes, the more you start quoting them like would quote a movie," notes Rothbart, who tells us how several of his friends have turned found moment punchlines into personal epithets.

The urge to turn the ordinary into the celebrity has become a repeated motif in independent culture, as if the tidal wave of fame might be somehow averted by a trickling stream going the other way. So we get K-Composite, a zine turned glossy magazine that features ordinary people in full colour photo spreads complete with celebrity interviews. The latest issue features several personalities including Brooke Anne Skinner, a 21 year old who was born in Iowa City, sports brown green eyes, and clocks in at 50kg and 165 cm. (This surely must be the only US mag to go metric...) Multiple portraits of Brooke from soulful to sultry set off questions about her thoughts on the wearing of hats, the getting of massages, and her wunderkind job as an up-and-comer at an ad agency.

Then there are PeopleCards "the official people trading card", each pack containing "7 real people, 1 real artcard, 0 celebrities". There are 120 cards in the first edition of the set, and they feature such real life personalities as Kathy Ann Pernatt, aka Looney Tunes whose motto is "Honesty is the best policy." On the front of the card, Kathy floats in a swimming pool. On the back, we learn that the cheeseburger is her favourite food, orange her color and her hometown is Chaffee, NY.

In Vancouver, Andrea Gin and her cohorts recently published a limited 100 copy chapbook. The chapbook, called 1978, contains the text of a Snoopy diary written by a young girl named Shauna during the aforementioned year. Shauna talks about the boys she has crushes on, and uses her own hieroglyphic system to label each day as happy, sad etc. Now Shauna, an assumed name, obviously never considered that the diary would be published, nor did she submit it for publication. In fact, the Snoopy diary was found accidentally by someone else, and Shauna was initially reluctant and only agreed to publication under a pseudonym. But at some point, the initially reluctant author decided to embrace the project and has since made several public appearances which helped to sell out the entire print run of handsome handmade books.

All these projects relate the kind of info a devoted teen fan might want to find out about Justin Timberlake. But, in the absence of any kind of context,the magazine, the cards, the diary and the found notes are remarkably compelling reading, leaping off the page in a way that pre-packaged corporate-encouraged celeb tidbits never can or will. The beauty of this kind of work is it's accessibility. "Voyeurism has a bad rep," Rothbart explains to me when I corral him after the show. "But a certain degree of it is healthy. These found notes give us an instant, a sudden and powerful look into people. These are real...people laugh but were not mocking them, we are recognizing ourselves, the pitiful love notes we might have wrote."

Rothbart's self labelled greatest find ever consists of the "booty tape", a handmade cassette found on a Michigan college campus that became a kind of cult legend. Passed around from friend to friend, the tape -- which consists of stripped down rap tunes and endlessly repeated lines like "you shit be up in my face" -- finally made it into Rothbart's hands. He converted the tape into a CD, put tracks up on his website, and generally continued to turn these faceless dream warriors intothe minor celebrities he wanted them to be. The highlight of that particular gimmick was a National Public Radio report on flagship show "All Things Considered", and the final emergence of the kids who made the tape, now living in Georgia.

But as the crowd giggles and Rothbart delves into yet another sad deluded dysfunctional life that might just as well belong to the guy sitting next to me, I start to wonder about all of this. I mean, what is it exactly? Is it entertainment? Is it social criticism? Is it politics? After the show, I ask Rothbart if he would concede that the primary attraction of the found notes is their entertainment value. "I think people are entertained by the notes," he says a bit more carefully than his usual rapid fire patter. "I don't know. People respond to them because they feel real and true."

Therein, for me, lies the problem. In the age of the manufactured and pre-packaged, we want to be feel like we're part of something "real" and "true." Magazines, cards and performances like Rothbart's leap on this aesthetic, mixing drama, comic delivery and the conventional motifs of mass culture publishing and celebrity building with attempts to subvert the "unreal real" of our ubiquitous star system. And yet, there is something equally unreal about a 23-year old Belurussian translator whose favourite movie is the Matrix. (She is featured in card #54 wearing a baseball cap and what I think is a Warsaw University sweatshirt.) Can we subvert the system by entering it? If, as I believe, the looming and now emerging problem with pop culture is its promise of individuality and its delivery of conformity, how do these projects change that paradigm? It seems to me that after the laughter and surprise has died down, many of our thoughts regarding found notes, normal people magazine spreads, and PeopleCards inevitably revolve around our own desire to be part of the action: Gee, I'd like to a get a note in there; How would I pose for K-Composite?; What is my trading card motto?

If that's true, then at least part of what these projects do is act to extend our lust for even the most minor brush with celebrity. They can be seen, like community radio and public access tv, as farm team substitutes for the real thing.Rather than debunking the celebrity myth, one might argue that these indie projects -- like Reality TV shows -- simply add another layer to the celeb game, another component in the overall project of devaluing normal life by homogenizing our dreams. Grasping for the appeal of found notes Rothbart tells me that "there's universal experiences, feelings, emotions, and so you sense the communality...at the same time each person's stories have a little twist that makes their story individual." The global experiment that is pop culture can be described similarly. Pop too taps into the well of communal experience while promising each person the right to add their own flavour to the water.

And yet, the found notes, the PeopleCards and even K-Composite, the most contrived of the projects, all seem to transcend what seem to be their limitations. Are they offering "real" glimpses into the human soul? Are they true alternatives to the fake glamour of celebrity culture? Not really. Nevertheless, they are compelling. Not because they are going to usurp our obsession with celebrities any time soon, but because they show another side of the fandom-pop culture nexus: it's good side. These kinds of projects give us -- in incredible bursts of whimsy and intensity -- new ways to understand the pop experience as fleeting, memorable yet forgettable, unifying, and accessible to all. "I'm lucky to have experienced the people that I encounter through the notes," explains Rothbart before heading off to another thirty cities. "They stick with me. All those people are part of me now."