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The Loss of Realness and the Rise of the Inauthentic: Does Anything Genuine Happen Anymore?

We now live in a world where Kim Kardashian’s butt in a pair of “see-through” jeans is delivered to us by the internet feeding tubes as a real and unprotected moment caught by happenstance and not on purpose.  We know by now that nothing reality fame whores do is spontaneous — or even interesting any longer — their behavior is all so predictable and transparent and, frankly, boring. We exist in a constant “on” society where everything counts and nothing matters and the ideal of “over-sharing” being uncouth died with the invention of the broadband connection and the ever-dumber smartphone.

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YUUUP! Storage Wars is Fake!

Dave Hester — of silly Storage Wars YUUUP! infamy — is of one of those odd, and sadly self-serious, folk who happen to wind up on “reality” television and are then routinely surprised when people like us, who have never met them in person before, yet still know precisely who they are just by watching how poorly they treat others on television.  This phenomenon is uncommonly known as “The Kardashian Effect” or, less routinely, perhaps, as “The Mark of Dave Hester.”

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Against Instagram and Other Filtering Agents

I do not like image filtering services like Instagram and their ilk, because the purpose of those services is to change reality and alter in situ facts.  Why bother preserving in image if you don’t want it saved and displayed with the highest possible, non-filtered, quality?  I recently mentioned my concern in the comments flow for this article:

Here’s what I don’t get about services like Instagram — we always want better cameras with higher megapixel counts and clearer optics — and then many of us “dumb down” those crisp and beautiful images with predefined filters from services like Instagram.  Why?  If you are preserving a moment in history — why are you coloring that moment, and inherently changing it, to look like a 1970’s Polaroid?  Why are you losing all the magnificence of the original shot that your camera is able to create?

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Does it Matter if Snooki is Pregnant?

I would like to open by answering the question posed in the title of this article of whether it matters if Snooki is pregnant and the answer is absolutely not. Having written this, I would like to explain further why it is that it does not matter that Snooki may or may not be pregnant.

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Finding Reality at Easy Street Records

A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.

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Why is Kate Gosselin on Television?

I don’t know anything about Kate Gosselin except the very little bits of herself that she eagerly puts on television for public consumption, and after swallowing her bits without chewing for flavor, I cannot understand the essence of why she is on television and why she has a fan base.  I’ve watched her repeatedly degrade her children and her former husband on television.  I have watched her get pushed and dragged through dance routines on “Dancing with the Stars” as if she were a household cleaning appliance and not a dancer. Is that Kate Gosselin below or the Dyson Ball vacuum?

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TLC and their Little People Fetish

UPDATE:  March 1, 2010.  TLC did it again!  They added yet another “Little” show to their Fetish Agenda:  Our Little Lives.  Now this is getting out of hand!

TLC — The Learning Channel — is a strange place to watch stories about American lives.  TLC is infatuated with dysfunctional large families like “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” the Disgusting Duggars Family in “18 Kids and Counting” and their now litter of 19 children and, finally, “Table for 12.”  We can rightly dismiss TLC’s infatuation with big families because they are trying to recreate the fading revenue magic of the Jon and Kate misanthropy; but why is TLC fetishising on Little People?  How many Dwarf shows does one network need?  The answer appears to be:  Three.  The first, and most famous TLC Dwarf show, is “Little People Big World” starring the wacky Roloff family.

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