Posts tagged I am Pointless!
Twist Street
Sam Westing, Barney Northrup, Sandy McSouthers, Julian R. Eastman, & Me
3/17/12: A St. Patrick’s Day reveller reports seeing Ford “stumbling down the street … inebriated and sweaty but in a jovial way” and tells him “You’re the worst mayor ever.” Ford allegedly walks over, kissed her on the forehead, and responds, “I know, but I try.” Ford then heads into a private room in the Bier Markt on the Esplanade, where a staffer describes him as “incoherent” and “hammered.” The DJ working that night reports Ford is fighting and carrying on “like an idiot.” After “storming the dance floor,” Ford is asked to leave and escorted out by his own staff and members of the restaurant’s security team.
4/15/13: Ford walks face-first into a television camera. “Ah fuck, man. Holy Christ!” Ford yells, bending over and grabbing his eye. “Holy. Guys have some respect, you just hit me in the face with a camera.
Do you ever look at celebrities and think about how “if they die, the internet’s going to pretend the last 20 years of their career never happened” or whatever, and that’s all you think about with them…? If Eddie Murphy were to die, we would all be really, really sad— even though he stopped making good movies in … I’d say his run of good movies ended with 1994’s Beverly Hills Cop 2 (which isn’t even that good really— maybe ‘92’s The Distinguished Gentleman? I definitely think Boomerang is super-underrated). Sure, I’d make an exception for Bowfinger (where I remember thinking that was his comeback movie), and I guess kids liked the Klump stuff— but that’s not really the era a person would normally point to, to describe What He Was in his prime… which was, what, ‘80 to ‘92/’94. Now? If someone were to walk up to you on the street, and ask if you wanted to see the new Eddie Murphy movie, you’re legally allowed in Blue States to head-butt them in the groin. But if he were to die? How sad would you be? You would be so sad! Spoilers, it’ll turn out you were Eddie Murphy’s biggest fan this entire time. And not on a “every life is sacred” level— part of you’d be like, “His 40’s and 50’s were bad but I really thought he was going to turn it around at age 60.” (He’s 52 now which… wow). See also, to a much lesser extent, Jim Carrey. Remember when people loved Jim Carrey…? Like, maybe two of those movies have held up, though, is the difference. So yeah, I’m spending my Saturday thinking about what-it’ll-be-like-when-celebrities-die, so I will turn off my internet now…
The elites will become cogs in the machine. You will become a bright, silver, indestructible wrench that breaks it. You will become the creator of your own machine, and they will envy you your purity. And the money they inherited, they will give to you. And unlike them, you will have earned it. They will buy your art. They will pay you for your ideas. They will line up outside your club, behind the velvet rope you have a former athlete guarding. They will beg for backstage passes to your show. They will pay you for VIP access to your company. They will always ask themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And you’ll know, “Because you didn’t have to.”Clayton Cubitt (via mollycrabapple)
I like Clayton Cubitt’s work, what I’ve seen of it (if he’s who I’m thinking of), but: Why are nerds, misfits, etc. so obsessed with this fantasy that after high school (where they’re uniquely unhappy), there’s this 40-virgins-and-a-mule heaven waiting for them because they’re, like, all shiny? This is a strange, sad thing to believe, and worse, an untrue thing to believe. Have people ever just gone to a comic convention and, like, looked around? A lot of people that didn’t happen for, no? The world is indifferent to most everybody, and the science is not on your side— the science consistently says that kids who are well-adjusted in high school do better later in life. Look it up— that’s the science; if you can be a tall extrovert with an appropriate amount of confidence and hair, that’s scientifically the ideal way to go through life. The science doesn’t want to make those findings— what kind of geeks become scientists, poking and prodding at people like that? Those are weirdos of the finest vintage. Those are the last people happy about their own results. They’re all crying and Hojo the Lab Monkey is looking at them like, “What’s going on with that asshole? I love bananas.”
Yeah, sure, there are a tiny number of nobody people who are nerdy who defeated the odds in the arts world to become faaaaaaamous despite meager beginnings(awesome goal!); and whatever it is that weirdos project onto those guys is actually very lovely. I’d defend that. But to look at any successful geek as Manifest Destiny rather than a crew lucky enough to have found an escape hatch seems… unhealthy. It just all seems so unhealthy. Worse, it seems like sales. And— who do people think PAYS those guys? Who do they think runs those guys’s careers? Have you ever seen a movie executive? Have you ever been around AGENTS? (I don’t recommend it). Do people think that the creative personnel are really running the game and calling shots? That’s not true of nearly every creative enterprise I know, certainly not pre-internet at least. If you’re not a person who can say No in their life, then I don’t care who’s lined up to kiss your ass. Heck, it’s certainly not true now— this generation of nerds is churning out Star Wars movies and Marvel bullshit for corporations that keep nerds like pets. Drive around LA at night— a lot of people on their street enjoying the limited life they have in them in actual 4-dimensional space and … they sure don’t look like they all had a rough time in Algebra or whatever baggage this is all about. They’re not the ones holed up by themselves making their own machines because they can’t connect with people in healthier ways…
It’s just one fantasy after ever since forever. Outer space— you still hear nerds talking about outer space thanks to bad sci-fi; a species that can’t figure out how to sustain their goddamn food source long-term and these folks think science dollars should get poured into Rocketry for journeys into vast expanses of nothingness. Virtual reality. The Singularity— bluh. Bluh! And- and- and, those so-called “elites”? They’re going through their own unique journey that’s no less a human experience than anyone else’s. What kind of art does a person think they’re going to make if they fail to recognize that? Every movie is about the outcast who triumphs over society because everybody feels that way— congratulations, you’re an artist of cliche and no insight.
And say, say, say you’re the special snowflake exception that this guy’s talking about, and you get to live the dream. … That’s it? That’s your dream? Sitting in a VIP area doing coke by yourself surrounded by people you hate because you somehow don’t have the stones to have gotten over the ordinary traumas of a pretty humdrum-sounding adolescence? Yeah, that sounds really awesome, 1975 David Bowie.
I get wanting to have these fantasies. I watch a lot of porn— the things that I think are happening in our nation’s astronomy classrooms… I have a very distorted view of higher education in this country. But expecting some reward for being alienated… the reward is BEING ALIENATED. I mean, have you ever got out of your car while driving around LA at night? Get back in your car and drive! DRIVE! LA’s popular teenagers are embroigled in a twerking scandal right now! Drive and never look back. They can’t catch you cause you’re innocent…
“Here are some broad descriptions
Joel Stein trolled tumblr, Mother Jones and Think-Progress. Stein would be a merely loathsome no-talent, on his own, but look at people take him seriously because Time put his nonsense on the cover. Mother Jones! Mother Jones is the best, I’ve loved Mother Jones since college, and they’re paying attention to anything Joel Stein has to say??? Isn’t a banana farmer on strike somewhere in the world? Come on, Mother Jones! Come on!
It’s this part of Old Media that I’m happy to see dying where there are just these JACKASSES who… why do people take them seriously? So that they’ll take them seriously in return someday…? East-coast media people jacking off other east-coast media people. Who the fuck is Thomas Friedman and why does anyone do anything when he talks other than laugh at his ridiculous face? Basically, I’m just looking forward to the death of journalism, basically. After journalism is dead, who’s going to be sitting there going, “We got to scoop up Joel Stein off the job market?” Who’s going to be saying that??? Granted, we’ll probably be living in a corrupt fascistic nightmare-state at that point (which is pretty much what we have now but like… hopefully there’ll be cooler uniforms— like jumpsuits?). But anything that gets me closer to being able to say “yes, I would like fries with that, Jonah Goldberg”— I’m in. I’m in. I’m a one-issue voter.
…why is THE in apostrophe marks?
Ken Starbuck would later go on to found a very successful coffee chain. The Semi-Hard Cock and Tea Leaf. Their peanut-butter coffee cakes are delicious / exploitative-of-women.
“What every woman needs…” Also the tagline for Vinni Rossi’s far less successful sequel, Vitamin C. It’s about DTF co-eds with bad cases of scurvy. Very hot / biohazard-y.
(Source: exploitingexploitation)
Terror shatters us here precisely because ours is not a terrifying place compared to so much of the rest of the world. And also not really an objectively terrifying time, compared other periods in the American past: for instance, Christmastime, 1975, when an explosion equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite exploded in a baggage claim area, leaving severed heads and other body parts scattered among some two dozen corpses; no one ever claimed responsibility; no one ever was caught; but pretty much, the event was forgotten, life went on, and no one anywhere said “everything changed.”
A less narcissistic time, perhaps. Not now. Now, we let trauma consume us.
GRENADES? Are you fucking kidding me? Grenades! Every night around this time, I’m like “Oh, I know, I’ll check the internet before I go to bed to see what’s going on with memes.” And— last night was the Texas thing, and tonight it’s grenades. Grenades?! What in the living fuck? Jumping Jesus Jehosephats… Is the grenade thing real? No one on cable news is saying the word grenade and that’s sort of the word I’ve jumped on here.
Why the FUCK do I have CNN on? What are these jackasses possibly going to tell me? They got some Jason Sudekis-looking guy out on a street, like, pointing at an empty street. What the fuck? Useless fucking assholes. And there’s some shrill British woman freaking the fuck out, and she’s the anchor— what the hell, CNN? I’m freaking out fine on my own— I don’t need Mary Poppins’s help….
A coffin bearing the body of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was placed in a chapel in Britain’s parliament before her funeral on Wednesday as a debate about the ceremony’s scale and guest list deepened.
Draped in the red, white and blue British flag, Thatcher’s casket was driven through London’s Whitehall government district in a black hearse as tourists and parliament workers looked on in bright sunshine.
Four undertakers then carried it on their shoulders before placing it inside the crypt of the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, a cavernous vaulted place of worship first completed by King Edward 1 of England in 1297.
GPOY-all-day-every-day. The internet’s been around for years. Shouldn’t I be better at looking at it by now? Why aren’t I improving at using this thing? Or if— if I took the equivalent amount of time and spent it on anything else— I’d be like Bill Murray at the end of Groundhog Day, making ice sculptures and playing the piano and saving Brian Doyle-Murray from choking.
(Source: xkcd.com)
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, California leads the nation in laser attacks on aircraft, with more than 500 reported last year.
“North Hollywood teen who aimed laser at aircraft gets prison term.” California leads the nation in laser attacks. Okay: sentences I didn’t expect to read today. Teenagers in Los Angeles attack airplanes with laser beams!! Sure, sure— of course they do. Kids today. In my day, when I was a teenager, Cincinnati didn’t have no fancy laser beams— we set off Works bombs, hung around pool halls, and accidentally got pregnant. No frickin’ lasers.
Also: “The case is the second prosecution of its kind in the country since the laser law was signed by President Obama in 2012“— President Obama signed a Laser Law...? Where was I?? I would have watched this youtube clip in triumph, whispered “Finally… FINALLY” to my imaginary cats, and then thrown my fist into the area at the end like Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club (and/or Easy A).
Laser laws, flying death-robots, and a War on Easter— President Obama’s actual presidency is becoming weirdly similar to my President Obama fan-fiction. If Obama ends up on the mouth-end of an oreo-sex scandal with a Failure-to-Launch era Matthew McConaughey and Lando Calrissian, my short story “Moonbase: Obama 2014” will be 4 for 4, prediction-wise… (There’s no actual moonbase in it; the moonbase in the title was a metaphor for Failure to Launch).
Two small things I’ve enjoyed recently, kind of related:
1. This month’s issue of Los Angeles Magazine has “KILLER IN SUBURBIA! Is one of California’s Worst Criminals still out there? HELP US CATCH HIM“ on the cover.
Help Us Catch Him.
2. Before movies, they’re playing these ads that I’ve kind of fallen in love with, for this TERRIBLE AWFUL looking show, by the makers of Lost called … BATES MOTEL. It’s Psycho except Norman Bates is a teenager…? It’s Teen Psycho. The big moment in the trailer is his mom hugging him and saying “We own a motel, Norman Bates!” Ooooh, I don’t get it. I really found myself laughing pretty hard at this thing— I guess I can’t explain why too good; it just looks so bone-headed. I just really enjoyed these ads in a “everything is just the worst, but the good news is we all died eons ago and our souls are trapped in a recurring time-loop prison locked in the darkest pits of Hell” sort of way.
My favorite part is when one of the boy-bimbo actors in the commercials goes, “This show will challenge everything that you think you know.” Get ready to poo standing up!
The Vatican’s communications office just tweeted that the new pope [76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio] will be “Francesco I,” or Francis I.
(Source: NPR)
I’m enjoying the You Made It Weird episode with Aziz Ansari during my commute— it’s a good talk. Except: right at the very beginning, Aziz mentions how he had Ice Cream Paint Job stuck in his head, which has meant that since then… I’ve got it stuck in my head pretty good. I put Aziz’s version on top of some ice cream commercials.
In Defense of the Happy Girl
Sasha Weiss considers why people find Anne Hathaway, Hollywood’s “happy girl,” to be so annoying: “Little girls learn very quickly to modulate their excitement if they want to be acceptable… Anne has somehow managed to retain that bright look, and many people would like to wipe it off her face.”
Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XFpWAi
I don’t know if it’s a function of age, but the more of these that go by, the less and less I understand the whole celebrity-backlash thing. It’s just usually weird to me who it’s aimed at. Michael Cera. Lena Dunham. Tom Cruise. Remember that weird-ass Diablo Cody one? What the hell was that one about? People cared about a writer. Writers are lame. And, what, now it’s Anne Hathaway? Why?? I didn’t watch the Oscars and I probably haven’t seen her last couple few movies, except for the Batman thing (I don’t remember that movie well but I thought she made a good Batman), but: what the hell could Anne Hathaway have possibly done to anybody?
Granted, she hasn’t blown any Italian supercriminals in a while— is there a Change.Org petition I can sign about that, so that starts happening again? I enjoyed that whole thing very much. But besides that, I don’t know what she possibly could have done to anybody. Heck, I remember Devil Wears Prada being pretty fun…? She plays this girl who doesn’t dress well so Meryl Streep is all like “put some fancy clothes on your bitch-ass” and Stanley Tucci was there. What’s not to like? Plus, she’s topless in a lot of movies— that seems like a pretty cool thing to do, you know, helping the teens and the lonely like that.
Maybe it’s just an age thing though. I’m just feeling OLD lately. Just.. just noticing my age a lot lately, kind of incessantly, which… weeee, I highly recommend THAT! But, yeah: maybe hating celebrities is a young cat’s game, and I’m just so irrelevant myself that I don’t understand why she’s irrelevant. (I seriously am always confused when I hear young people yelling the word “relevant”— I honestly have no idea what they’re talking about!) Maybe I just need to accept things and shift all the way into Old Bro mode and like just get really into jazz now. Silver lining, being Old guy: I get to be bottomless in gym locker rooms now. I can just embracing dangling. Dangling and Anne Hathaway’s continued success!
(Source: newyorker.com)
There’s this statue down the street from where I work— it’s about a block from the Whole Foods— so anytime I want to spend too much money on olives or whatever (rich people and their olives!), I have to walk by it. It’s a dad taking a photo of his son, family dog, and Baby Momma— it’s basically a statute to TOURISM. And everytime I walk by it, I get all annoyed by it and uppity and complain about public art and lovingly caress the chip on my shoulder that is my constant companion in life because it’s just so gaudy and lame and what kind of limited mind erects a statue to TOURISM?
Except: except when it rains (or drizzles like today). Then, it becomes the greatest statue. Because then it’s a dad forcing his wife and child to pose for him in the pouring rain. Then, it’s a statue to ABUSIVE FATHERS. ”You ungrateful sons of bitches will stand there in this monsoon and smile for the camera— I want something to commerate this happy goddamn memory. I work and slave all day so you will stand there and get pneumonia or so help me God, I will— SHUT THAT DOG UP. Hey, smoke up, Johnny!”
I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in college. Paid off.
