authenticity

The subject of authenticity is one that contemporary theory wrestles with regularly. It is a not a pretty fight.

I'm on the plane back from New Orleans and perhaps there is no better place to think about authenticity than through this lens. New Orleans is at once a complete simulacra of what it's supposed to be and completely genuine. How can a city live with such paradox?

I glowed in the music spilling out from all the bars along Frenchman Street last night, and danced in the street to a 12-piece brass band just jamming on the street corner.

A friend spoke in glowing terms of the authenticity. I'm not so sure, but then I thought, does it matter? And what does that even mean anyway?

Why is it not authentic that Nanook of the North loved his vinyl disc? Is there a difference between staging and the dramatizations we live out regularly? I know the subtleties are there--who is the audience, who is the director, who owns the gaze and for whom do we perform--but there are gray lines, my friends, gray lines indeed.