OH SHIT WHAT IF WE DIDN’T NEED TO ASPIRE TO ANYTHING ANYMORE, EVER
I’ve been thinking about what it means to write about yourself in a world where everyone is “writing” about themselves all the livelong day. I think it has to do with committing to long form.
Long form is the new rebellion. It feels weird, as someone who loves Donald Barthelme, and all of the snippeters of the past, to accept that. Instead of touching things lightly and letting them dissolve, you need to get all up in there.
This is so obvious, but something I just needed to say.
ALSO
Writing about things other than objects of desire, and by that I mean not love interests in the Love Interest sense but beautiful items. This is another form of rebellion.
It’s always fascinated me how people can devote their lives to the making of, and celebration of, beautiful things. I somehow got a free subscription to Vogue — a gift from a focus group I participated in for a fashion deals website — and just waded my way through the September issue.
It’s about a thousand pages of super-hyper-crafted images of women (ads or no) in various states of DRAMA.
Why do we need fashion to create DRAMA in our lives?
Or is it about taking the DRAMA of our lives and projecting it onto some other, more beautiful kind of DRAMA?
And what is it about DRAMA that is so appealing, particularly to women?
In this way, I think Vogue and its ilk are even more self-destructive and evil than The Real Housewives of New York.
RHONY — or any of the RHO’s in their various incarnations — take the actual drama of real life and slap some lip gloss and Cadillac Escalades on it. It’s TRUE in a way that Vogue would never aspire to be and therefore finds repulsive. (But this is exactly why I don’t find it repulsive, as some do.)
Vogue is still pretending like As The World Turns didn’t get canceled.
RHONY reveals the inherent emptiness and vacuousness of yacht trips and 40,000 square foot houses, eats it, and shits it out. Shit being the great equalizer.
I think the great crazy next reality TV show of the future should be intentionally boring. Perhaps without editing. And definitely without soundtracks. Paradigm shifter. It can’t get any louder or more heightened.
It already exists and it is the internet.
The decision-makers don’t want you to realize that, but it’s true. And there are little Countess LuAnn-making-Ramona-taste-test-her-own-Pinot-Grigio moments happening everywhere. If you pay attention.
