"This is absurd. This is absurd".
--Sigmund Freud (last words)
My daughter, Rita, made breakfast for the Real Housewives of Atlanta this week.
Rita is a chef. She works for Opera, an opulent Atlanta nightspot that caters to beautiful people willing to tolerate -- and pay high dollar for -- the sort of supercilious netherworld that these kinds of mega-clubs provide.
In the 1920s Opera was, in fact, an opera house. The owners invested millions to renovate the joint into the hot throbbing metroclub it is. The amenities include the original proscenium stage, a 100-foot domed ceiling, plush red-velvet couches, VIP mezzanine opera boxes and a main room that can accommodate nearly 2,000 celebritants.
Besides the nightclub business the club books the place for special events and, as such, maintains a catering business to furnish fine eats for it's clientele.
That's where Rita's talents come into play.
And what better place to host an end-of-the-season breakfast for Atlanta's para-celebrities, the Real Housewives of.
Though Opera can host thousands, the fete for cast, crew and friends was booked for 30 people. More than 70 showed up. These sorts of events attract free-loaders with influence.
The catering personnel and the other employees of Opera were required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Security was tight, and when Rita attempted to snap a few digital memories of the spectacle, she was pulled aside by Bravo Network thugs and required to delete the unauthorized images. There were many cameras on the scene, but only sanctioned photography was allowed. These guys would have done Blackwater proud.
The breakfast was buffet-style. Cheddar/chive biscuits with lavender gravy, turkey sausage, applewood smoked bacon, Tilapia (In a previous episode Housewife, Kim -- not actually a housewife, but why pick nits -- was having brunch at a French restaurant and wondered why the fish was labeled "poison".).
The Housewives, all bougoised to the nines, wouldn't break bread with the dregs and hauled their plates off to their individual trailers parked on the street.
Sadly, I have to admit that I've watched the program. I live in Atlanta and I've come to regard it as a bleak, artistically vapid place built on the artifice of commerce and buttressed by greed and rapacity. I have issues.
So the Real Housewives of Atlanta has become a ritual of reaffirmation for me.
These five women are all squealing "Look at me!" when there's nothing to see but underhanded feint. Materialistic dames, they have fallen victim to the recent economic downturn (three of the five have had their houses foreclosed on). Much like the region itself.
They are Kim Zolciak, NeNe Leakes, Kandi Burruss, Sheree Whitfield, and Lisa Wu-Hartwell.
Kim Zolciak, a face like a man, a wig like brassy road-kill, fake tits as big as dirigibles and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth is white trash incarnate. This woman would be right at home knocking back a 40 in front of her doublewide. Kim aspires to be a singer (first a country singer and now a pop chantuse) but without talent. She has a taste for garish jewelry and luckily her indulgences are funded by fucking "Big Poppa", who's married and chooses to remain off-camera. For a time Kim did the bump and grind, stripping out of a nurse's outfit at Atlanta's Cheetah club. In an earlier time this woman would have made for a diverting and a morally-challenged character in an Erskine Caldwell novel.
NeNe Leakes, built like a linebacker and bellicose, with the mouth of a hood-rat is "writing" her memoir. By that, I mean she's having someone write it for her. She fancies herself a director but the woman -- like her cohorts -- is delusional. She spends her time narrowing down the list of who could have been her "Daddy", and squelching the rumors she used to work the pole at strip clubs. In a crude and unwieldy attempt at philanthropy NeNe has started a charity for battered women that she promoted by having women in high heels foot-race around her cul-de-sac for charity. Abusive behavior towards women, it seems to me.
Sheree Whitfield, divorced from a NFL football player, fancies herself a fashion designer and is attempting to launch her own clothing line, "She by Sheree". But Sheree is no Valentino, as demonstrated by the butt-ugly apparel paraded down the catwalk during her fashion show. Sheree contracted an artist to create a gigantic portrait of herself. A self-important image that would have done any Cold War socialist despot proud.
Lisa Wu-Hartwell has her own real estate company but hasn't been able to move a property in 2 years. She and her husband, Ed (a former NFL linebacker) defaulted on their home loan for their 10,000 square-foot house and moved out into less fancy digs. Lisa also fancies herself a fashion designer, but she's no Karl Lagerfeld. Lisa dreams of ostentatious opulence as she and Ed slowly circle the drain of economic reality.
The new housewife this season is Kandi Burruss, whose ex-fiance was recently beaten to death in the parking lot of a strip club, an actual real-life event . And a lucky turn of events assiduously exploited by Bravo, ratings sparkling in their eyes.
Perhaps the most interesting housewife of all isn't even a housewife, but that doesn't seem to be a requirement. In fact, technically he's not even female. Dwight Eubanks is an over-the-top queen aflame. Emotionally shrill, perfumed and pedicured, he flits from housewife to housewife, effeminate, persnickety and unashamed.
So how did we end up here? Things looked so promising. I mean, in '69 we watched murky black and white images of a man walk on the moon (or so we were told) on quaint, fat, tubular screens.
As technology marched on the images have achieved crystal clarity but our collective intelligence is the thing that has become murky. Dwindling and withering away, I'd say. Because today we have the Balloon Boy, Kendra, Rock of Love and the Kardashians -- on 52 " high definition plasma screens with built-in Dolby® Digital virtual surround sound (with wireless subwoofer). "My Mother the Car" was easily more substantive than this contemporary balderdash.
This all begs the question "Was man (or housewives) really cast in the image of God?" If so, heaven must be an asylum populated by lunatic cherubim and demented seraphim, and administered by a delirious crackpot deity.
Or some sort of cosmic joker.
How else is one to explain the trajectory of humans? From single-cell organisms, to aquatic creatures with a wanderlust to explore terra firma, to the cave artists of Lascaux, to Leonardo Da Vinci, to Galileo Galilei, to Shakespeare, to Kurt Gödel, to "The Real Housewives of Atlanta"? Is this some kind of celestial joke?
Or maybe some sort of evolutionary Alzheimer's?
I think the world may well end soon, but not with the cataclysmic commotion predicted by the apocalyptical fanboys. More likely, with our brains pureed into mush, we will -- en masse -- simply wander out the back door, confused and disjointed. And expire quietly and alone in the cold and forbidding woods out back.
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Comments
Hollywood House Husbands anyone?
:)
I don't watch TV that much anymore due in part that my work schedule puts me into the infomercial schedule by the time I watch TV and the other part is, I get sick to my stomach watching these shows, they're the same plot, "Bitch slap! GRRRRR!! DRAMA!!!"
Bring back the SitCom...the funny ones, not the 'hahaha!! Oh my!' coming from the TV executive cause those ones suck and fail miserably and then its decided the public doesn't want that kind of show as House Husbands' Dog Walkers of Fargo, North Dakota gets big numbers!!
:-(
Can't let that happen! We've got to keep each other thinking. Nice job!
rated
Truer words were never spoken. I used to live in Atlanta, escaped just before the '96 Olympics, then was dragged back, kicking and screaming. Finally, I escaped again to Asheville. I hate, HATE Atlanta. But I admit, business was good there, because there is so much greed and rapacity. Now I'd rather be poor than set foot in that cesspool again. (And Life is Good, Atlanta DOES make Jacksonville look like a cultural nirvana)
As always, great piece. R
I really enjoyed your cartoon too...you have said so much in such a short space, your talent in writing and drawing sucks me in.
R
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a whimper
And dude, your television just puked all over you!
Skip, this is fantastic. I've never seen "housewives of the Atlantic" or whatever, but the minute you launched into the sequence of condensed bios I let out an audible cluck of deliciousness. LOVED IT! (z-snap)
Loved this whole post!
Great analysis.
I live in Charlotte, which has struggled to be just like Atlanta for decades. Both are overgrown hick towns that make allegations of progress. Shit, ca-ca, poo.
Beautiful, man!
DAG
Excellent take on this and the larger view of TV.
love it. so well put!
Rated & Cheers!
except the woods are paved and covered with mcmansions.
I've never watched any Housewife show--I was at a wedding in the Hamptons a few summers ago and met the cast of the NY show--if they were as arrogant and empty as that in person, I couldn't imagine watching them on TV.
Your descriptions of the Atlanta wives is enough to scare me away forever! I wonder all the time how we got to the point of so many reality shows--will it die down anytime soon? One can only hope!
Thanks for the correction about Lisa Wu Hartwell's husband. I will rectify my error. I guess I'm just not paying attention.
http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2009/10/israeli-police-storm-jerusalems-holiest.html
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I have no shame and freely admit to watching a few episodes of the OC, Atlanta and New York versions of this show. All of the women are ghastly, but Atanta is by far the worst.
Fortunately, I have been to Atlanta and understand that most of the women there are nothing like these creatures. They are embarrassed by them.
It's a little cold out now. I think that I will leave my jacket in the closet and take a nice long walk.
"Kim Zolciak, a face like a man, a wig like brassy road-kill, fake tits as big as dirigibles and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth is white trash incarnate."
I haven't seen the show, but I'm now too afraid to because of that description.
"These five women are all squealing "Look at me!" when there's nothing to see."
The other reason I don't watch it.
Great points. Gross time. Literally gross, at times.