Emerz as Cerberus, Lording Over the Triborough Bridge

"First they come for your friends, and you say nothing," says Emerz, "and then they come for your city..." He is blasting the squirrels that sixty-nine the bird-feeder with a pellet gun, eating glovefuls of snow. "What?" he asks, "You got a problem with this?"

"Not at all," I say, "as long as you don't start wetting the bed or starting fires." Emerz is, for better or worse, a born and bred New Yorker, who is currently posted up in a tri-state resort community in search of a little breathing room. Whitney Port is doing the opposite, keeping her head amid the skyline, and doing it suspiciously close to how Emerz remembers doing it, one hand busy held aloft, sunglasses the size of apartments, Dinner parties! Eating outside! Coffee! and chanting that untrue refrain, "What a small world, what a small world, what a small world..."

I say the problem with the show is that it takes the vibrancy of NYC and condenses it into banal conversations about manufactured juvenile drama. Instead of talking about art, they talk about art dealers. "Fuck art dealers," says Emerz. "And their kids."

What's cooler, I ask Emerz, the uptown crowd or the downtown crowd?

"How the fuck am I supposed to know," he says. "Downtown like what, 61st St.?"

Whitney seems similarly confused, attending an "uptown" party in Tribeca. "Well, it's a state of mind," says Emerz. "Everyone knows that."

Finally, says Emerz. A show about dating in the big city.

"Does that work?" I wonder aloud after Alex asks Whitney to meet him to discuss her boyfriend. Do girls do that? Listen as other men just blast out a rumour like a cannon ball warning shot? Do men do that? Just assume that eventually a guy with an accent is going to slip up and fall into his place in your elaborately constructed reality? I guess they do, I finally realize, while watching it all unfold across an elaborately constructed reality, taxis swimming uptown like salmon, full disclosure kept in safety deposit boxes. The City within the city, vaguely familiar people and places. It can all be a little much. "I don't want to think about anything," says Whitney. I tell Emerz I would think she'd be tired of that, but who can blame her? After all, who would want this, this exploded life?

"The unexploded life..." says Emerz, stroking the pellet gun across his lap.

So where does this leave us, I ask Emerz. "Eyeing the metropolis from afar? Thinking about people who are not thinking about us?"

"I'm redoubling my efforts to become a doorman," he says.

"A doorman to what?" I ask, "A building? A club? Uptown? Downtown?"

"The city," he says. "I'll be the doorman to the city."