Unreal City:

Life keeps trying to fake me out. This past weekend was filled with delirious half waking dreams. I’m left with vivid memories of things that I know couldn’t have happened and a pair of very real socks that had disappeared over a night’s journey through Brooklyn. Somewhere in there was a super well-done stage dive during SSS-Spectre’s set at Don Pedro’s.

By Sunday, I was a wreck. What made it all better was the art of reality television: shows like Giada in Paradise on the Food Network and the new season of The Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on E!. I followed Giada on a trip to Crete where she bathed in sulfur, stomped on wine grapes with her bare feet, and picked pretty flowers with which she made fried flower dumplings. As she bites down, you wait expectantly through the three seconds of suspenseful silence, then she smiles that perfected smile and says “mmm; delicious!” What else is she gonna say? Predictable is not always a bad thing. I wish life were more so. Then Paris and Nicole go crazy as camp councilors at Camp Shawnee: turning boys to men, teaching six year old girls to say, “hey bitch” and seducing 60 year old men. What’s real and not real is pretty different between the rich and the poor, the smart and the dumb, the strong, the weak, the beautiful, the foul… it’s fucked. I don’t know where I stand and I don’t know how it’s all supposed to work but I guess I’m glad that, you know, there are these fairies out there kicking ass doing their things. But hold. That isn’t the moral of the story. The moral of the story, I think, is that the art of reality is a game everyone can play.