Bring up Jersey Shore in a discussion and even some of the most devoted reality TV fans will distance themselves from it, as if it were the Ebola virus or Lindsey Lohan’s undergarments after a night on the town. MTV’s megahit show has become the emblem of “trashiness,” the symbol of a generation gone wrong, of humanity on the decline, of innocence subjected to a libido-charged desecration, of a station stooping to new lows in a ratings-first, quality-second, network-eat-network world.

How wrong they are.

People are surprised when I count myself proudly among the millions who watch every week, sometimes more than once, with eagerness and after-the-fact satiation. For all its vehement detractors, Jersey Shore absolutely crushed its competition, dominating the summer programming war by grenades and landmines. GTL, IFF, DTF* have all become a part of modern vernacular, just as all eight characters have far exceeded their 15 minutes of fame, with no sign of slowing down.

– Adam Spunberg, AwardsPicks.com.

Good piece by SNY.tv’s own Spunberg defending the MTV’s oft-deemed-indefensible hit program. I’ve seen all of three episodes of the show but I’ll back him up a bit.

I disagree in part with the crux of his argument — I don’t know that any “reality” TV is genuine because I think there’s some artifice constructed a) whenever anyone’s conscious of a camera and b) by the production company picking the cast, since presumably each member of the Jersey Shore crew was the most ridiculous member of his or her previous social clique, the one whose antics inspired all the eye-rolling from everyone else in the club in Staten Island or Franklin Square or wherever. Selection bias.

But where Adam’s spot-on, I think, is in the argument that Jersey Shore is not corroding our culture or corrupting our youth or anything like that. Maybe I’m naive or pathetically optimistic, but I just don’t think anyone watches the show as an instruction manual for how to behave.

It’s a clown show. No one takes it seriously, perhaps not even the subjects. They’re busy hamming it up to earn big money to DJ at bar mitzvahs, to appear at nightclubs, to Dance with the Stars. The Kansas City Star reported that The Situation will rake in $5 million dollars this year.

And that, well, I mean, yikes. But it is what it is. If you object to the show so thoroughly, don’t watch it and stop talking about it, and it’ll go away.

Or you can just yield to the notion that people have been getting paid and watched and chastised for silly and destructive behavior since time immemorial.

Plus Snooki’s got her priorities straight:

“The reviews were so angry,” said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own long silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.

Virtually none of it was real. Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of “Paris, Texas” to degrade the images.

“I never intended to trick anybody,” said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.”

– Michael Cieply, New York Times.

Oh, so it turns out Joaquin Phoenix rap career was all an elaborate hoax intended to make a good “documentary”? F@#!ing shocker.

Also, it really sounds like Casey Affleck only gave up the big secret because the reviews were bad, right? Like he was just a little bit defensive about all the criticism of the crappy camerawork and everything else, and so came out and was all, “Well the joke’s on you because it wasn’t even real!” Even though the crappy camerawork was real.

I love the idea of the long-form hoax, but I think if you’re going to do it you really need to have an endgame in mind. Revealing it to the New York Times “over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich” does not seem like a suitable culmination of two years of deception.

I went and saw Man on the Moon before it opened at a special showing in D.C. and Bob Zmuda, Andy Kaufman’s frequent collaborator who was played by Paul Giamatti in the film, spoke afterward.

Zmuda said that he and Kaufman actually once worked on a script about a comedian who faked his own death and showed up at the premeire of his biopic 10 years later. So though Zmuda was nearly certain Kaufman was actually dead, he said he still harbored some small doubt that he could show up on the red carpet. He didn’t, obviously. But that, that’s a hoax.

Joaquin Phoenix pretending to be drug-addled and crazy for two years? Meh. Not even really that convincing a performance, to be honest.

I mean, a noble effort for sure, and maybe I should check out I’m Still Here before I judge, but you really shouldn’t effort performance art these days without involving James Franco in some form.

Also, I love that Affleck says, “I never intended to trick anybody.” Ahh, excuse me, Casey Affleck? Isn’t that exactly what you intended to do?

Oh, and furthermore: One time in college I was at an end-of-year barbecue for the campus theater group and I wound up very, very drunk, something I don’t often do. I’m not proud of it, but I was behaving terribly in all sorts of ways, just a total lout.

Anyway, in a brief moment of lucid thinking I realized that if I didn’t come up with some way to redeem myself quickly, these people were all going to know me as the wretched, vile human being I exposed that afternoon.

So before I left, with great focus, I feigned sobriety and proclaimed that I hadn’t had even a drop of alcohol that day and was just acting all along. And the party full of theater types clapped for me as I exited.

In truth, the most impressive part of the performance was that I managed to walk out without stumbling or otherwise betraying my inebriation.

If anyone who was at that party finds their way to this post, I apologize for my behavior, twice over.

That’s not much of an endgame, but then that wasn’t as involved a hoax.

In the comments section yesterday, djonpoynt brings up an interesting point about Dr. Dre:

Dre is known to use “ghost producers” on some tracks on which he gets sole production credit. This is tough to substantiate because it’s such a touchy and ambiguous subject in hiphop. And obviously, Dre would never go on record and admit it.It’s been talked about in hiphop circles since “Chronic 2001″ was released when he had a production team working with him, including Scott Storch (former Roots keyboardist and now super-producer himself). Dre isn’t known for his instrumental skills, so he usually relies on others like Storch to lay down riffs, basslines, etc. Though to his credit, he’s probably the one who lays down drums and ultimately sequences these beats.

In fact, if you check out his production discography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre_production_discography), it’s littered with co-producers whom he does give credit to. Notables: Storch did the famous riff on Still DRE and Xzibit’s X. A key guy named Mel-Man co-produced Chronic 2001 and The Marshall Mathers LP, doing significant synthesizer work on Xxplosive, Next Episode, Forgot About Dre, and Real Slim Shady.

My personal take is, he established himself by doing the bulk of production for the original Chronic and Doggystyle. But after he reached celebrity status, he needed to enlist others just to keep up with demand, which is completely fine.

Where it gets fuzzy is, how many no-name producers did he work with who never appeared on liner notes? I’m sure there’s more than a few, which probably isn’t that big of a deal given how hiphop production works in the first place (sampling, drum machines, etc). It’s just that a lot of people solely associate Dre with certain classic tracks, when much of the time he actually has a team of co-producers working for him.

I can’t speak to the uncredited producers part of it, but I can say this for sure: Very, very few pieces of art in any medium are truly the work of an individual. Certain works of fiction, maybe, but even then there’s usually plenty of editorial interaction. It is the tendency of the consumer and critic to associate the finished product with a single artist, usually attributing to that artist some sort of unified vision, but clearly that’s not often how it works.

Even some great Renaissance masters didn’t actually paint large portions of their paintings. They sketched out ideas for what they wanted them to look like, worked certain important parts of the pieces themselves, and then left big portions up to their apprentices and underlings. Blew my mind when I learned that. I always envisioned the lonely-painter-in-a-studio type image we romanticize, but those guys — like Dr. Dre, really — were in high demand.

Probably the best and most obvious example is with film. We talk about Woody Allen movies like they’re all his own because it’s simpler to do it that way than to consider the creative input and choices of the hundreds of other people involved in creating a motion picture.

And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or anything else, it’s just a thing. But the truth is, perhaps the person making the final, overarching aesthetic decisions should get the bulk of the credit, since he or she is the one making the choices that ultimately determine the piece’s success.

No, Dre didn’t play the riff on Still D.R.E., but presumably he recruited Storch to record on the track, influenced what Storch played and selected that particular riff from many that got left on the proverbial cutting-room floor. And while maybe none of that classifies as typical nuts-and-bolts production in one sense, it seems like it should all fall under some larger umbrella of “producer.”

After all, those tracks are nearly all unified by the throbbing funk we identify we Dre’s production. It could be that he’s relying on co-producers as an easier way out, but it strikes me — and this, I should say, is entirely uninformed and spoken mostly as a hopeful Dr. Dre fan — as equally possible that he’s leaning on collaborators to help develop his production beyond the scope of his own limitations.

Regardless, the most awesome news is that Dr. Dre has a sweet robot helmet:

Here’s the thing: Even before he came out on stage during Eminem’s performance, Dr. Dre was already the star of the show. That’s what I was thinking, at least.

Nothing engages a crowd like the familiar, inimitable bounce of Dre’s grooves, and though Eminem apparently lacks the attention span to perform more than a single verse and chorus of any of his songs, his renditions of classic Dre-produced singles like “The Real Slim Shady” and “Kill You” were clear highlights, at least to those of us appreciative of the funk.

Then 50 Cent showed up and played “In da Club,” and it became unmistakably clear to me that this concert was really about exposing just how awesome Dr. Dre is at making hip-hop beats for stadiums full of drunken dancing revelers.

But for whatever reason, I didn’t consider the possibility that Dr. Dre would actually show up until he did show up. Eminem started “My Name Is…” — another funky Dr. Dre bounce — and got up to Dre’s lyrical cameo in that song, and the music stopped.

Then, after appropriate fanfare, Dr. Dre showed up. It was awesome.

They played “Still D.R.E.” and then “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” with Eminem doing the Snoop Dogg part. During the latter, 50 Cent came back out on stage and it looked for a moment like he might be there to do something, about which I felt ambivalent.

But it turned out 50 Cent was just there to watch Dr. Dre do stuff, and that’s cool. I don’t imagine me and 50 Cent have all that much in common, but one thing we seem to share is that we both appreciate Dr. Dre. That’s good to know in case I’m ever in a situation in which I have to make idle chit-chat with 50 Cent.

Then Dr. Dre more or less promised that his long-awaited third album is coming out soon and is going to be awesome. I don’t remember exactly how he said it but I think he included something like, “Y’all know I won’t let you down.” And I believe him.

Later, Jay-Z hosted a musical revue featuring a bunch of artists I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing, like Kanye West and Drake and Chris Martin of Coldplay. He had a tight band with a horn section and an amazing light show and computer-graphics display, but the performance entirely lacked Dr. Dre.

‘Beavis and Butt-head” — the show that celebrated the slacker way of life and helped make MTV into a network that did more than just play music videos — is coming back.

The move to resurrect the hugely popular 1990s animated anti-heroes has been rumored for several days. But yesterday, sources at MTV confirmed that a new batch of “Beavis and Butt-head” episodes are in the works.

– Michael Starr, N.Y. Post.

Chris M reminded me of this in the comments section earlier; I missed the news entirely when it came out but I heard something about it a few weeks back.

With this, as with all new iterations of once-great TV series, I worry about the quality of the new shows. Will they live up to the standards of the originals, or will they work so hard to recapture the magic of the first run of episodes that they create, essentially, a parody version of Beavis and Butt-head, an over-the-top and ridiculous new installment of a series that was patently over-the-top and ridiculous to begin with?

Mike Judge is on board, so there’s reason to hope not.

I would also be concerned, as well, that the new show would not resonate with me the way the original did because the first run coincided with the time in my life spent mostly watching MTV, blowing stuff up and desperately and unsuccessfully pursuing female attention.

But when my friends and I took up watching the original episodes after college, we found them every bit as funny as we did when we saw them in middle school — if not moreso — though perhaps for different reasons.

At the very least, like the Post article says, the new episodes will give MTV a forum through which to start showing music videos again. And I always felt there should be entire hours of that network dedicated to showing videos through Judge’s hilarious animated filter, like Mystery Science Theater 3000, only, you know, with Beavis and Butt-head.

Plus it’ll give me a reason to figure out what channel MTV is on DirecTV.

I’m back home, firing up the barbecue for Labor Day. I’ll have a bit more on Chicago tomorrow, but for now, wrap your heads around this item from SkyMall:

That’s right: In the midst of a catalog filled with elegantly photographed products nobody needs, a product nobody needs for elegantly photographing stuff which you can then sell on your own. Start your very own SkyMall! Or just take nice portraits of your favorite lamp and football, as seen here.

And you’ll note, of course, that those photos of the photo studios are very obviously themselves taken in photo studios. And in that studio holding the studio, just beyond the frame, there are probably lights that look just like those prop lights, lighting the lights in the studio for the studio.