(Or Is My Whole Life on the ABC Television Network?)
Friday, May 20, 2005
Point #13:Desperately Seeking Reality
I started writing for the Long Island Paper in October of '04. The editor-in-chief and I hardly had anything to talk about. I overheard him talking to the senior arts editor about "Desperate Housewives" one day and the senior arts editor said,"Yeah, everyone is talking about how 'Desperate Housewives' will kill reality TV."
Doing a little more research on the web (when I moved away from home again, I had no television in my new place), I saw this article in which a CNN entertainment writer "mistakenly" called "Desperate Housewives" a reality show. Har-de-har-har. A brave journalist gets choked for clearing the smoke. Who's to say my reality wasn't really a fictional show? The success of "Desperate Housewives" and ABC coincided with my meteoric rise by joining the Long Island Paper. Since ABC was having a good season, my character would get a break because now, for the first time since maybe the early '90's, more people were likely to watch my show. After I told the editor-in-chief that I watched the new hit series, he said "Yeah, it's great." This is the only conversation we ever had. Five months later, he promotes me from editorial assistant to journalist. Wow. Promote one ABC product and the world is yours for the taking. This doesn't only work for me. After all the eyerolling over the Bush administration's idiotic search for WMD's, his moronic social security plan and the sharp drop in civil liberties, Laura Bush makes one joke about "Desperate Housewives" and becomes the cat's pajamas and slippers.
In the comments to my last post, Linfluenza quoted Walt Disney: "Disneyland is the star. Everything else is in the supporting role." 'Nuff said. Since protest was no option and I was hellbent on scaring advertisers away from sponsoring my show, I began to read communist works. After finding The Communist Manifesto to be the most boring 48 pages in the history of Western literature, my inclination was to Google communist art web sites. The best site I found was this. It had all these wacky comic strips and a kickass essay on cultural Marxism by the hottest friggin Trotskyite I know: Esther Leslie. Now what could be more anti-Disney than communism? You guessed it: communism isn't anti-Disney - it's just mad because it plays a supporting role. Esther Leslie wrote a book lauding early Disney films as esemplastic exercises in revolutionary transmogrifacation. If a communist writes a book, she knows that the book is a commodity. Why pretend to escape the capitalist system? Walking away from the stinking mass of Bolshevik theory, I rode the copyfight wave. The Boing-Boing crew tirelessly documents the stupidity of copyright law. Even if the writers on it were fat-cat Republican oil tycoons, they deserved credit: in no way would they support a corporation - even Disney - that sued anybody for copyright infringement. That Cory Doctorow, one of the writers of the site, loves Disney should come as no surprise. That he wrote a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom should come as no surprise. How can I knock him for extolling Disney when I'm a TV character on ABC myself? He merely plays a supporting role.
Point #11: Ooh, That Smell/Can't You Smell That Smell
This point is real easy to make.
One day in spring of '04, I saw a website that linked to an ad for a Disney protest. It decried Disney's sweatshop practices. For those of you numbskulls who don't know, Disney owns ABC. So what could be more fun than a reality show star like myself to completely lambaste the network he works for by shitting on its parent company. Seems a lot of people were shitting on Disney at the protest. How else could you explain the smell of all those malodorous, malnutritioned malcontents? Most people would walk away thinking: a) protestors smell bad; b) they can finally find a white chick - sorry, a white postfeminist who blurs the lines of gender codes with her rainbow bandana - who will accept them no matter how bad they smell. For a few seconds, I thought the latter. But I was thinking. The ruse would be too obvious if Disney paid all the people around me to act like they like Disney. There has to be some form of dissent to make it realistic. Walking down to Central Park after talking to the Indian cabby about Aishwarya Rai, I felt for the first time since 1996 like I wasn't on TV. Hanging my head in soul-crushing disappointment, I left the demonstration realizing that Disney paid the Disney-hating extras to smell bad. The unbearably noisome throng was too much for one enlightened individual to withstand. So I walked back with ABC making me look like I realized protesting against Disney was useless.
Note: I'd like to thank Linfluenza and Buddafied for being forthcoming and telling me my life is on TV. All those crack scandals you read about me in the papers aren't true, I swear. Check out Buddafied's blog. Wait - he didn't write another post - maybe THEY GOT TO HIM!!!
Reality TV has been a reliable cash crop for broadcast networks. So what would be more popular than a reality TV show that covers a war? ABC knew this was a good idea and aired a reality show in 2003 called "Profiles from the Front Line," which documented Special Forces in the war on terror against Al-Qaeda. The show's last episode was on March 27th, almost a week after the war in Iraq began. Ever since Gulf War II: This Time, It's Personal began, the focus has been on Iraq and not Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. Which makes me wonder: what if the war in Afghanistan was a failed ABC show and the one in Iraq was real? All of a sudden, I'm supposed to forget about Osama Bin Laden and the Saudis and I'm supposed to focus on food for oil scandals, democracy in the Middle East and how Newsweek is the real enemy. What happened to the war on terror? Who's putting the Saudi's feet to the fire? Does it take a real, ugly imperialist war in Iraq to stop ABC from making a fake war on terror? Some might say I wish the war on terror was fake. On the contrary - I wish it was real. I hope Osama and Zarqawi and even the Saudi fundamentalists pay for what they did. That we have a fake war on terror and a real senseless war is outlandish and completely asinine.
The family vacation to Disneyland in '02, like any other vacation we took, was product placement for Disney, my parent company. This was our first time in California, so we were all psyched. On the way to the Disneyland hotel, my mom pointed and gasped appreciativley at Anaheim's lovely Spanish townhouses with moss on the walls. After checking in, I went into my air-conditioned room, unpacked, sniffed the fresh Mickey Mouse soap and started reading the new issue of Spin magazine that I picked up from the Downtown Disney newsstand. Some article that I read about an LA band, concert or something gave me a frisson: I was in California and could finally visit LA and Hollywood! With the Phantom Planet song appearing as an auditory hallucination, I strode gallantly to the concierge and asked him how to get to Los Angeles.
"Did you just say the L Word?" "What?" "Just kidding. I call LA 'the l word.'" I let out a sheepish chuckle. "Why would you want to go to LA when you are in Disneyland?" Quizzicaly creasing my eyebrows, I said "Uh, because I have never seen Los Angeles before?" "Well, LA is big, what part would you want to see?" "Whatever's close." "Yeah, LA is far and it's big. Might as well wait till tomorrow when you are well rested." "Well, I respectfully disagree. What buses run to LA from here?" "I don't know." "Well, you are the concierge. Aren't you supposed to tell me?" "Tomorrow I could-" "LISTEN-HOW THE FUCK DO I GET TO LA?"
Embarrased by the shrillness of my own voice, I stormed out and hung my head when I got into the elevator. I waited by the bus stop near California Adventure for a ride to Los Angeles. After waiting a half hour, I lit up a cigarette hoping that the bus would come simultaneously, like it did in New York. In Anaheim, however, this was an open invitation for people to stop and give you dirty looks. Two hours passed and not one bus came. Inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, I began to walk over to the nearest standing cab and put my hand on the driver's side handle. Before I could have pulled him out and stolen the cab, a bus magically appeared. Running to the stairwell of the magic bus, I gave the bus driver the same speech I was going to give to the cab driver:
"Take me to LA now, motherfucker." The bus driver laughed and said "LA is huge man. What part?" Like a cop from a failed TV series, I said "Let's go downtown."
Two hours later, I got off at some residential district near Wilshire Boulevard because the ride was too long. The first place I wanted to visit was the bathroom. Down each impossibly long block I walked, there were no pedestrians to be found. All the houses looked uninhabited, which made me wonder if they were facades. My first thought was "You could murder somebody here." My second was "You could shoot a film here." Indeed, downtown LA looked like one big movie set that was crudely built while I was waiting for the bus. The fact that I had to walk fifteen city blocks to find one bathroom convinced me of this. Even Hollywood Blvd., which I visited a few days later, was impossibly short. The market district was perhaps twenty city blocks long. And supposedly everything closed at 2 AM, including the bars. That there was nothing to do and everything closed at two made me feel like I was on a soundstage that was supposed to make LA look boring in comparison to Disneyland.
Between the creepy concierge that wanted to keep me in Disneyland, the two-hour wait for the bus and the fake LA movie set that the bus took me to, I was convinced at this point that my whole life was on television. Everything that came after was a small piece that completed the puzzle.
Note: Linfluenza wrote in the comments for point #8 that Disney bought shares in Infoseek, trying to convince me that Disney might take over the web. I realized today that the link he sent me was from 1998. Perhaps Linfluenza is working for them, trying to scare me from using the Internet. Well, I'm not scared Linfluenza. I will continue writing this blog on the Internet. And I promise, one day I will break out of the confines and see the real LA.
