A few years ago, I was sure that Ellen Burstyn would win for Requiem for a Dream. How could she not? She was fucking incredible.
Julia Roberts won, of course. For Erin "Fuck My Titties" Brockovich.
And continuing the tradition of safe, pedestrian mediocrity that inexplicably enamors itself to the general public, Ellen DeGeneres is now doing those annoying fucking American Express commercials with that Flying fucking Tomato kid and Martin Scorsese. Watching those, it's like, Marty, say it ain't so. Say the coke dependency ain't that bad that you need to be doing this shit. You redeemed yourself with The Departed, man. Stay on that tip. Please. I want so bad to like you.
And there's Ellen, making a lame, safe, non-funny joke about how her bathing suit bursts into flames when she swims. All delivered with that bland, non-threatening demeanor. It happens every time I swim. Hehe.
I just don't get it. How is that funny? How is any of her shtick funny? Or am I missing something? Am I supposed to cut her some slack because she had a hard time in Hollywood before she came out?
When my bud Henry makes a lame joke, I still won't laugh and he's one of my best friends and he's a cocksucker and he knew it by the time he was about five and he got the shit beaten out of him for it by a lot of meatheads when we were growing up.
And continuing the tradition of safe, pedestrian mediocrity that inexplicably enamors itself to the general public, Ellen DeGeneres is now doing those annoying fucking American Express commercials with that Flying fucking Tomato kid and Martin Scorsese. Watching those, it's like, Marty, say it ain't so. Say the coke dependency ain't that bad that you need to be doing this shit. You redeemed yourself with The Departed, man. Stay on that tip. Please. I want so bad to like you.
And there's Ellen, making a lame, safe, non-funny joke about how her bathing suit bursts into flames when she swims. All delivered with that bland, non-threatening demeanor. It happens every time I swim. Hehe.
I just don't get it. How is that funny? How is any of her shtick funny? Or am I missing something? Am I supposed to cut her some slack because she had a hard time in Hollywood before she came out?
When my bud Henry makes a lame joke, I still won't laugh and he's one of my best friends and he's a cocksucker and he knew it by the time he was about five and he got the shit beaten out of him for it by a lot of meatheads when we were growing up.
Fuck him, though.
If a joke's not funny, it's not funny and I'm not going to laugh at it simply because it was made by someone who likes dick. That'd be like laughing at a non-funny joke about what happened when the banana crossed the road that a Special Olympian just made, because you feel bad for them. I don't feel bad for Henry.
I don't define him by his sexual preference and he's not my token main gay, either.
I hang out with him because he's a good friend to me and he's even meaner and smarter than I am, and he's way funnier, and he should know better than to make an ass backwards joke and expect me to laugh. I hold him to a higher standard than that.
I don't give him pity laughs.
Maybe it's me, though. Maybe lots and lots of people think that Ellen DeGeneres is funny. Maybe most people think she's funny. Maybe I have the problem. Maybe it's me.
More and more, lately, I've been thinking this. Maybe it's me.
Maybe it's not other people. Maybe hell isn't other people. Maybe I create my own hell and populate it with people who make me want to club them upside the head with a blunt instrument.
Maybe it's me, though. Maybe lots and lots of people think that Ellen DeGeneres is funny. Maybe most people think she's funny. Maybe I have the problem. Maybe it's me.
More and more, lately, I've been thinking this. Maybe it's me.
Maybe it's not other people. Maybe hell isn't other people. Maybe I create my own hell and populate it with people who make me want to club them upside the head with a blunt instrument.
But maybe they're not hellish at all. Maybe they're pretty okay and have healthy worldviews and are the rational judges of this world and it's me who's all out of wack. Maybe it's all just me and my diseased, Schopenhauer-esque worldview.
I think this at work when an innocent email asking me about a project code sends me into an almost epileptic fit of rage. I think it when someone’s backpack sharply nudges me on the subway, from the Broadway-Nassau stop to Times Square and I try to figure out what the legal ramifications would be if I just turned around and punched them in the face, as hard as I could.
But maybe it's not just me. Maybe a lot of other people out there are fucking pissed off and sick of bland, disingenuous shit that hacks and flacks try to push off to a bored public as the Next Big Thing.
That Shia Labeouf kid? Why is that fucking kid on the cover of Vanity Fair? Does anybody know who the fuck this kid is? And more importantly, does anyone care? Why are they comparing him to Tom Hanks? Does anyone really even like Tom Hanks?
Hanks annoys the shit out of me every time he's on screen, all jowly and bellowing about the fire he made and becoming instant BFF's with the large black man whose incarceration it was his job to enforce.
I think this at work when an innocent email asking me about a project code sends me into an almost epileptic fit of rage. I think it when someone’s backpack sharply nudges me on the subway, from the Broadway-Nassau stop to Times Square and I try to figure out what the legal ramifications would be if I just turned around and punched them in the face, as hard as I could.
But maybe it's not just me. Maybe a lot of other people out there are fucking pissed off and sick of bland, disingenuous shit that hacks and flacks try to push off to a bored public as the Next Big Thing.
That Shia Labeouf kid? Why is that fucking kid on the cover of Vanity Fair? Does anybody know who the fuck this kid is? And more importantly, does anyone care? Why are they comparing him to Tom Hanks? Does anyone really even like Tom Hanks?
Hanks annoys the shit out of me every time he's on screen, all jowly and bellowing about the fire he made and becoming instant BFF's with the large black man whose incarceration it was his job to enforce.
And all that shit a while back about him being the new Jimmy Stewart made me cringe because Jimmy Stewart has always fucking made me cringe.
Yeah, yeah. He's a National Treasure and the quintessential Everyman and all that Leonard Maltin crap.
Whenever I watch It's a Wonderful Life on TV, his voice always sounds like he has marbles in his mouth and didn't he do Campbell Soup ads? So every time I hear his voice, all I can think about is someone choking on chicken noodle soup because they had a mouthful of marbles and couldn't swallow.
There are a couple young comedians coming up that are being hyped to shit. I won't say who because they’re still small potatoes and that’s not cool. Non-bold face names are off-limits. It's cowardly and smacks too much of peer envy to bash non-famous assholes. Once they're rich and famous, bash away. That's my philosophy, anyway.
But good God. These two comedians are not funny.
One is a guy who is “cute," or what passes for "cute," in comedy world. His whole shtick is how tough it is being a nerd even though after shows, a gaggle of skinny jeans who recently moved to Williamsburg from North Dakota throw themselves at him and invite him along to Misshapes.
The other is a girl who peppers her comedy with dirt, dirty, icky poo, potty talk. Sometimes she even uses the, gasp, C word. Somehow, this is meant to make her tired social observations and awkward racial slurs hilariously irreverent. Again, she is "cute," in a comedy world sense of the word.
Both seem to be scarily ambitious, though. And attention whores. Which is probably why, in the next year or two, you'll be seeing them on the cover of Vanity Fair, with some kind of tagline like, "Can X Save Comedy?"
This begs the question: Why do magazine covers always ask you, the reader, if so-and-so can save the film and/or music industry? Or, “Is X the Next Hot Thing?”
Um, I don't know. I'm reading your fucking magazine in my underwear, in my crappy apartment in Brooklyn. I'm stoned; I think I got food poisoning from the Caesar salad I ate at lunch; and I'm about to be fired from a job I hate but that I really need so I can pay the rent. If I knew what could save the film and/or music world, don't you think I'd be doing some other shit besides sitting here getting high by myself? Why the fuck are you asking me? You do the research, assfuck. Then report back to me.
Don't even get me started about music industry hype. I exhausted myself bitching about that a while back.
I don't know what's worse: how shitty and in what poor taste most mainstream culture is or the hyper-possessive, ever-fickle elitism of New York tastemakers. The vast majority of mainstream culture is complete shit and bemoaned by said tastemakers. But the minute mainstream culture discovers something belonging to the tastemakers they, in turn, impugn it. If it's been accepted by mainstream culture, it's lost its relevance.
It's sort of a lose-lose situation.
In the end, though, as much as tastemaker assholes throw their hands up about the stupidity of the mainstream consumer, they need that stupidity.
After all, if everyone knew about some band that's playing next week in a burned out warehouse in Greenpoint, where would they be? Who would they be? They'd be just like any other schmuck. I mean, they might as well be living in Des Moines, Iowa, for God's sake. They might as well not have had that haircut and not gotten those ubiquitous fucking glasses and be working a boring, non-creative, nine-to-five job. The horror. They didn't move to New York for that. No sir. They're gonna do something Really Creative here. Possibly Get Famous. Actually, just the Get Famous part is okay. In the meantime, they can at least listen to the same music Really Creative people listen to. And wait to Get Famous. And at least live an Artistic Lifestyle. Even if they don’t have an artistic bone in their bodies.
If I go to one more fucking party and some fuckbucket challenges me to an iPod-Off, they're going to get it smashed right in their fucking face.
Yes, I have hot-this-millisecond hype bands in mine. Yes, I also have all of The Fall's albums. And yes, I know that punk did not start with Green Day. Eat it. Get your fucking iPod out of my face and take your odd combination of self-congratulation and insecurity and go exorcise it on Facebook.
Come back to me when you have more important shit to stress about than whether or not your iPod is curated impressively enough. Then we can talk. Then we can listen to some depressing shit and get drunk together and you can tell me about the day you realized that you and me and most of our peers are fucking idiots with strictly first world problems and that we have way too much time on our hands and that we waste way too much of it obsessing about stupid shit while somewhere else in the world, a twenty pound kid with a distended belly and flies circling his head just keeled over from malnutrition.
There are a couple young comedians coming up that are being hyped to shit. I won't say who because they’re still small potatoes and that’s not cool. Non-bold face names are off-limits. It's cowardly and smacks too much of peer envy to bash non-famous assholes. Once they're rich and famous, bash away. That's my philosophy, anyway.
But good God. These two comedians are not funny.
One is a guy who is “cute," or what passes for "cute," in comedy world. His whole shtick is how tough it is being a nerd even though after shows, a gaggle of skinny jeans who recently moved to Williamsburg from North Dakota throw themselves at him and invite him along to Misshapes.
The other is a girl who peppers her comedy with dirt, dirty, icky poo, potty talk. Sometimes she even uses the, gasp, C word. Somehow, this is meant to make her tired social observations and awkward racial slurs hilariously irreverent. Again, she is "cute," in a comedy world sense of the word.
Both seem to be scarily ambitious, though. And attention whores. Which is probably why, in the next year or two, you'll be seeing them on the cover of Vanity Fair, with some kind of tagline like, "Can X Save Comedy?"
This begs the question: Why do magazine covers always ask you, the reader, if so-and-so can save the film and/or music industry? Or, “Is X the Next Hot Thing?”
Um, I don't know. I'm reading your fucking magazine in my underwear, in my crappy apartment in Brooklyn. I'm stoned; I think I got food poisoning from the Caesar salad I ate at lunch; and I'm about to be fired from a job I hate but that I really need so I can pay the rent. If I knew what could save the film and/or music world, don't you think I'd be doing some other shit besides sitting here getting high by myself? Why the fuck are you asking me? You do the research, assfuck. Then report back to me.
Don't even get me started about music industry hype. I exhausted myself bitching about that a while back.
I don't know what's worse: how shitty and in what poor taste most mainstream culture is or the hyper-possessive, ever-fickle elitism of New York tastemakers. The vast majority of mainstream culture is complete shit and bemoaned by said tastemakers. But the minute mainstream culture discovers something belonging to the tastemakers they, in turn, impugn it. If it's been accepted by mainstream culture, it's lost its relevance.
It's sort of a lose-lose situation.
In the end, though, as much as tastemaker assholes throw their hands up about the stupidity of the mainstream consumer, they need that stupidity.
After all, if everyone knew about some band that's playing next week in a burned out warehouse in Greenpoint, where would they be? Who would they be? They'd be just like any other schmuck. I mean, they might as well be living in Des Moines, Iowa, for God's sake. They might as well not have had that haircut and not gotten those ubiquitous fucking glasses and be working a boring, non-creative, nine-to-five job. The horror. They didn't move to New York for that. No sir. They're gonna do something Really Creative here. Possibly Get Famous. Actually, just the Get Famous part is okay. In the meantime, they can at least listen to the same music Really Creative people listen to. And wait to Get Famous. And at least live an Artistic Lifestyle. Even if they don’t have an artistic bone in their bodies.
If I go to one more fucking party and some fuckbucket challenges me to an iPod-Off, they're going to get it smashed right in their fucking face.
Yes, I have hot-this-millisecond hype bands in mine. Yes, I also have all of The Fall's albums. And yes, I know that punk did not start with Green Day. Eat it. Get your fucking iPod out of my face and take your odd combination of self-congratulation and insecurity and go exorcise it on Facebook.
Come back to me when you have more important shit to stress about than whether or not your iPod is curated impressively enough. Then we can talk. Then we can listen to some depressing shit and get drunk together and you can tell me about the day you realized that you and me and most of our peers are fucking idiots with strictly first world problems and that we have way too much time on our hands and that we waste way too much of it obsessing about stupid shit while somewhere else in the world, a twenty pound kid with a distended belly and flies circling his head just keeled over from malnutrition.
27 comments:
Someone needs a fuck.
I HATE when Ellen does that stoooooopid white girl dance.
Amen, Sister.
i also sometimes think, maybe it's me. maybe everyone else is normal and rational. but then i look around and i get really annoyed at something or someone, and then i'm back to the whole it's them, not me thing. my thinking that probably means that it is really is me, but whatever.
"...take your odd combination of self-congratulation and insecurity and go exorcise it on Facebook."
Brilliant. If you don't mind I shall quote you on my Facebook profile. :)
Yeah, but you blast ellen because the mainstream likes her, then blast people who hate everything the mainstream likes.
You (rightly) think impressing others with your ipod is retarded, yet you tell us that your ipod is in fact trendy enough.
I really like your writing and most of your points, though. Maybe you should just move away from New York. People there and in LA are so high schooler-y in trying to impress everybody all the time. Its really not so bad in other places.
It might be a good idea to get out of New York and live somewhere civilized for a few months.
If your job or career goal has something to do with the music business, Nashville might be right.
Most of the City is quite safe, and there's no logical reasons to visit the places that aren't. So you won't be exposed to the panhandling pervert shit-bags who make you so angry.
Doubt you'll run into ANY spineless sheeplings who challenge you to an "Ipod-Off".
A) it's not you, Ellen is amazingly unfunny. There's a promo on the air now (which I KNOW neither you nor your friends had any part of) where some twat entones "Ellen is the best part of my DAAAAY". She needs to be shot.
B) a frighteningly large majority of society remains willingly oblivious to their immediate surroundings. they don't pay attention to anything, especially the people they are annoying when they hold you up in line somewhere, drive 15 mph under the limit on an interstate, or ask you a blatantly retarded question that, with the smallest modicum of thought, they could have answered their goddamn selves.
C) Sorry, my ipod has mostly 80s stuff on there. Mainly b/c every song i hear on the radio now sounds exactly the same. Becoming a geriatric isn't as much fun as i thought
D) to respond to the first comment....we ALL need a fuck!
It's not you, it's them. Just because you tell a lame story the way you would tell a joke, and make a few spastic movements, doesn't mean it is *actually* a joke, or funny. See Mr. Dane Cook for example. People need to go back to comedy school or maybe just die.
tom hanks can suck my left one.
yowza!
...a good fuck AND some chocolate.
I love this post so much, not just because I fucking can't stand Tom Hanks (and also Ellen Degeneres, but Hanks more), but because you express so articulately and hilariously so much of how I feel.
That sounds trite but I don't know who else to say it.
Oh and it's not just New York. Even here in Melbourne (now one of the 7 hipcool cities in the world! or some such shit thanks to some bloody hipster magazine, from NY of course) we're filled to the rafters with uncreative people from bumshit town with the haircut and the op shop chic playing bad music everyone thinks is cool and sneering down their noses at those who are truly creative.
It's THEM. Not you. You just have the misfortune of having a decent brain.
You know what pisses ME off? When someone ends something with kids dying of starvation and some smart ass asshole writes somebody needs a fuck. THOSE are the people you're talking about. It also pisses me OFF that you publish those comments. I like that you are fair and equal about it but JUST DON'T PUBLISH THEM. You are giving them a fourm for their stupidity. Come on.
i'm totally in love with you. thank you for saying everything i think but in a funnier way. i want to like ellen, but she's not funny. tom hanks makes me hate white people. hipsters just make me hate everyone. and until now i've never even heard of an ipod-off. holy fuck...an IPOD-OFF. is that for real? i'm from san francisco where everyone has an ipod and 50% of everyone is a hipster and i've never heard of that shit.
anyway, i think you're fucking hilarious.
Seriously, people try to have an ipod-off with you at parties??? I believe you may be going to the wrong parties. Sure, every party has its share of tools but that is beyond retarded. I've yet to come across that in my Brooklyn party travels - thank god. How could anyone think that was cool? How? Ugh, it makes my fucking head hurt.
I think you might have stolen that last sentence from an argument I had with my boyfriend last week. Sometimes I cannot believe how fucking boring and tunnel-vision impaired I can be.
I have no idea what an ipod off is, but if someone challenged me to one at a party I'd say, "What kind of jack-wad would I be if I brought my ipod to a party?"
An ipod-off? Finding Ellen not funny and needing a fuck ain't your biggest problem.
Also, although I'm supposed to care about world hunger, in my day-to-day life I really don't and there is really fuck all I can do about it. I s'pose I could adopt some kid and send him change but am I really going to do that? No. And neither are you. So anyone who trots out the ol' there-are-starving-kids line as if to neatly tuck everything else into perfect context is full of shit.
I still have a mad girl-crush on you though. Wanna get stoned and make out?
People, I don't think she means a LITERAL iPod off. I think she means when peope compare iPods to see whose is cooler. whats up with y'all, it's a figger o' speech.
I hate our peers too and myself for being a lazy piece of shit.
Oh! A figure of speech! That would make more sense, wouldn't it? I was wondering what those crazy Brooklyn hipsters were up to since I vacated Williamsburg... I wouldn't put an actual iPod off past them. Perhaps now we'll start seeing them on corners and subway platforms, all Zoolander Walk Off style. L Magazine will write about them, it will spread to the midwest and we can all say we heard it first on Forksplit.
I'm a 30-year OLD WOMAN shaking my head and muttering about kids these days. I should just stay inside and stay stoned. It works out best that way.
The general American public has just had a long, hard day at some horrifying job that no one should ever have to waste their life on, and is also demographically full of baby boomers who are all getting old fast, so the public mostly just wants to sit on the couch and chuckle softly at Ellen while slowly spooning some pudding into its collective mouth. If you don't want that, please, for all our sakes, don't *try* to want it.
Underneath the sweetness, Jimmy Stewart was a rotten reactionary bastard who ratted out commies in the 40s to his close personal friend, probably the single greatest monster in American history unless maybe it was Andrew Jackson: J. Edgar Hoover. It's a cliche that the sweet all-Americans are rotten underneath, but that's because it's often true.
Also: Kickboxing classes. Really.
No, seriously, there were nights at clubs here in Melbourne where people would bring their iPods and 'dj', against each other, like a battle. A battle of ironic music. It started in about 2004 here, and people were doing it last year.
Some of my (hipster) friends did it. If I still had the email invites I'd show you. But I cleared those ones out a long time ago.
*hides*
Forksplit, I love your writing like a monkey loves to masturbate, but I gotta tell ya - listening to The Fall is no way to cure a case of misanthropy. I mean have you read an interview with Mark E. Smith? He's not really a people person.
Also, the best way to deal with Brooklyn hipsters is to get old and fat. I did and now they avoid me like the plague. Best decision I ever made. Now I only talk to real people, not the freakish losers from Ohio or wherever the fuck with their aymmeticral haircuts and skinny jeans.
I have vague memories of some sitcome Ellen was in that I liked when I was a teenager, mainly because I was a lesbian and so was she. I remember laughing at it, I don't know if that means it was funny. Maybe it was. But her talk show is very-very NOT funny. I've turned it on a couple of times cos I remembered the sitcom fondly and thought she might be funny, but she really really isn't. Not only that but she's offensively bland and sycophantic and her guests are RUBBISH.
So no, it's not just you.
Um, Wight D... Yeah, we get it. What the fuck would a "literal ipod-off" even be? Obviously she meant comparing ipod song lists and see who has the cooler taste. Everybody got it, thanks.
damn. i came to check because i thought you would have a really great entry about sept 11 since it's the anniversary and everything, but i guess not :(
WHERE ARE YOU?????? I hope everything is o.k.
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