Sunday, May 29, 2005

There is no "I" in Realty

I'd like to take this pregnant moment to catch you fresh and unawares to point out the following:
The more that newspapers and magazines resort to publishing advertisements disguised as genuine, unbiased articles; the more that television networks broadcast commercials veiled as bona fide shows; the more that forced improv sitcoms are passed off as Reality TV -- the more likely we are to catch on to the bald fact that none of it ever really has been genuine, unbiased, bona fide, or real.

If it isn't advertising, it's agenda, in this highly suspect environment where retarded sons and retired actors rule the nation, and the richest man in America (with the poorest hairdo) ends up with the cheapest excuse for a TV show. I wonder if we refer to television viewing as "watching the tube," because we've been effectively reduced to "eating shit through a tube"?

I could also say the media text is so slanted as to render italics obsolete.

Having just spewed that, having made another potentially self-blinding generalization that implicates all those even remotely involved and sends them to an even remoter hell.......I was reading an article in the LA Weekly the other day....

Yeah, I was. Or, was it a Realty Developer's ad? Stay with me, folks.

In either case, it was throwing the spotlight on an accelerated trend in today's housing market towards apartment dwelling and loft living. It definitely romanticized loft spaces in downtown LA for me.
Romance: when the cost of home-ownership reduces you to the truth of hole-ownership. The flaccid buyer quickly becomes the virile renter.

There's just something dreamy and, well, lofty about being comfortably poised several stories above the desolate and the desperate. The give-me-another-drink in a lifetime of bars that led to the give-me-another-quarter on the street below, is transcended by the give-me-another-rep in the gym above-- where personal trainers drown out personal failures.

Notwithstanding the surface tension between a carpeted world and a cardboarded one, I think something decreasingly peripheral in my vision, my vision of a hip life downtown, would catapult me back...

Back, over the sandblasted wall, beyond the landscaped moat, back -- not to Reality, not to Realty, but back -- to keeping it Real.
Yes, as appealing a reverie as the Urban Fortress might hold, it would pale pitifully next to the glory, the grandeur, the vision of Urban Music. Hear me now:

Back out I come yo, rolling the Sub-Urban y'all,
'Cause I'm beneath it all, back to the estates with the gates that separate...
Can't hear ya, won't see ya, conspiracy? don't believe ya.
Ain't it a bitch yo, I flip the switch yo,
And down glides the screen in my 4WD.
Got LCD, DVD, satellite-feed MTV,
Ain't down with that? got Reality...
Flowin' my deals to the Biggest Wheels,
What you saying now, G -- "They be Spinnin' Me?!"