"Nicole Kidman talks about her surprisingly real life." is what the magazine says on the cover. There are tons of magazines in the rack at the shop across the street from my apartment, and through this week my eyes keep drifting towards that sentence.

It seems to me that this simple sentence encapsulates so well the trappings of our celebrity-centered culture. Because the implication is, obviously, that Kidman's life should not be "real" (otherwise how could it be "surprisingly real"?). Therefore what must be real is our lives, that of those that don't appear in magazines. And yet the focus is on what is apparently not real. That's were we project ourselves, or where the media would have us project ourselves. Reality TV, after all, perfectly sums up the notion that we want to see "real" people but not quite--since immediately we assign them celebrity status, turning them into "not-real".

A welcome change would be for everyone to appreciate their own lives, and accept that actors, politicians, and so on are also people, like everyone else. Better known, with more money, sure. To get away from our focus on surface.

Which also reminds me of:

"Remember when they were interviewing the pilots, when they came back from the bombing raids in Iraq, in Baghdad? I remember, one guy, in the debriefing, they were asking him about his experience, you know, in a real war-zone. I mean, he'd only seen his targets through night-sights, and scanners, and on video screens. And they asked him, what did it feel like. And his only comment was: 'it's very realistic.'

Well... that's kinda where ZooTV is coming from."

Bono, on an interview in Zoo Radio during the 1992 ZooTV tour.

ps: btw, ZooTV? Best. Rock. Tour. Ever. :)