Kanye West marred what would have otherwise been a perfectly delightful nightmare circus. I don't think the DVD set of Celebrity Rehab could make a person so uneasy. In the middle of this tornado of botched video editing and inconceivable production decisions was a young girl who undoubtedly wanted to click her heels together and make it all disappear: Taylor Swift.

On mute, the VMAs plays like a David Lynch film (Inland Empire or Mulholland Drive, to be precise) -- various bizarre, vaguely connected events that evoke unexpected emotional reactions play out like some Freudian flipbook. Treading water the entire time is the beautiful but innocent country girl trying to stay afloat. Of course, this is television, so maybe Taylor was in on the whole thing (just as Lynch's protagonists might be). 

My favorite little touches? That extra few minutes of crowd confusion set to the music of some jam band I'd never heard of kinda sorta rapping after every commercial break. I really liked that nobody bothered to tell Diddy (that's his name now?) about the whole Kanye thing before he stepped out on stage to nominate Kanye for an award, naively assuming, I guess, that he'd actually been following the broadcast. Then there was Lady Gaga's looking totally different -- and stranger -- every time the camera cut to her (if you rewind you'll see her date is actually a wardrobe). It didn't help that a couple of those times she was dead and bloody (coupled with the hermaphrodite thing this sent my psyche to some strange places). 

But the truly cringe-inducing  moment was when Serena, of all people, walked on stage. I mean, I think she was wronged at the US Open, but it was as if the producers dredged up the one other celebrity who'd chosen an inopportune time to cuss someone out. It was like one of those moments when you thought the Bush adminstration couldn't get any worse, and then it got a lot worse, or a nightmare where you show up to a math test you haven't studied for, and they discover you're naked, and then discover there are ants crawling over you. 

Of course, the VMAs are now essentially without Music or Awards. Anyone actually paying attention was presented with the logical impossibility of  Taylor Swift's video not being nominated for best video alongside Gaga and Beyonce, even though it won over both videos in the female video category. This, however, is easy to explain next to both Eminem and Britney winning awards -- kinda like letting your suicidal friend win at Checkers (guess I just explained it).

In the end, Swift managed, using her giraffe-like legs, to escape the bar mitzvah that had assaulted her on the subway and return to the stage to finally give her acceptance speech. For the epilogue, we learned about some more chicks Russell Brand wants to fuck (who may or may not have penises). Hari Krishna.