I’d Use The Words “Meta” And “Ironic” If I Could Only Remember What They Meant

And we’d watch but the infinity mirror started to hurt our head too much:

The Burg is a single-camera scripted series filmed mostly inside this apartment and on a few street corners around the block. The episodes, ranging from one to 15 minutes in length, can be viewed at www.theburg.tv or downloaded through iTunes. Or observed in real time at any number of stops along the L train.

“The thing about Williamsburg,” said Kelli Giddish, a blond aspiring actress who plays a blond aspiring actress on the show, “is all the ugly people are trying to look pretty and all the pretty people are trying to look ugly.” She paused to let the observation sink in, then pulled a faded white satin nightshirt over her starlet-thin frame, belted it up tight with an oversized tan suede sash, topped it off with a white crocheted shawl and pronounced the new look “Granny Chic.” Several of her co-stars applauded.

The Burg is about the precious scenesters of Metropolitan Avenue and the silly things they do to be cool. Ms. Giddish has another soap job, on actual television, playing a onetime stripper named Di Kirby on ABC’s All My Children. On the Web, she plays Courtney, a sporadically anti-capitalist ditz.

Courtney’s friends in the Burg are more of the same: Spring, played by Lindsey Broad, is a youthful brunette who cares about the environment and wants to break her generation’s credit cycle. Jed, played by Bob McClure, wears thick black plastic glasses and forcibly prevents his friends from drinking anything other than Pabst. Xander, played by Matt Yeager, is a starving artist with a huge inheritance.

In place of holding steady jobs or contributing to the local economy, Spring, Xander and the gang spend their days coordinating their American Apparel leggings and their thrift-store cowboy boots with 18 plastic bracelets and two vinyl headbands from junior high. Their days are occupied with chemical boycotts, bike trips to Astoria, auditions for independent films and hours spent cursing gentrification and analyzing the complicated etiquette of modern bohemia.

It’s like Rent, only instead of AIDS, some of them have trust funds.