one month passes...
I have been a fan of the Gutfeld Institute of Rational Brain Activity for several years now. Writing this review will probably be one of the hardest reviews I've written in Amazon. Taken on its surface, Greg takes on just about every form of lunacy, pop culture, crazy Hollywood "stars," crazy dictators, crazy Hollywood talking heads, all of the news networks, several crazy representatives of different cultures which make up our society, fracking, Obamacare, the American society as it stands today, and if I named everything, that would be my review!
I cannot tell you how much I laughed at various phrases he uses to describe totally ridiculous things people who should know better say or do throughout his stories. The Chapter on Hugo Chavez nearly made me pass out.
I know intelligence when I see it. And from the first day I saw Greg on Red Eye, I knew he was a whole lot smarter than he let on. Greg is that very rare person who has the ability to see through all the BS going on around him, ferret it out, and somehow not only make it make sense, but make sense in a way that make liberals blow flames out of their ears and leave conservatives wondering if he's on their side or not.
Nevertheless, his grasp of today's youth, today's average social network surfer, today's COOLness and how upside down society is becoming because of it, is so spot on, it's like he took a million post it notes, somehow put them in order, and actually makes sense how this invasion of the quantity vs. quality social scale came to be. Then, somehow, he uses his snarky wit and crazy/sane verbiage to bring it all together and MAKE SENSE! A dry fact-filled book would sit on a shelf and collect dust.
Greg reaches out to today's youngest generation whose parents are so busy working, taking part in social media, keeping the kids busy in after school activities, because THEY are as confused as their parents. Somehow they manage to find down time, Yoga, the Gym, book clubs and possibly the more necessary wine clubs, to get in their free time trying to rest up to do it all over again tomorrow.
His comments and additional stories about SO MUCH STUFF COMING IN TODAY are critically relevant. The fact that EVERYTHING has become politicized, making the field much more muddy, makes his effort to let us know COOL is not (or should not be) our ultimate goal in life. As some of us watch things sag, more and more, not seeming to have an engine to run it or a rudder to guide it, it seems like everything depressingly has no direction. Sort of like algebrabraic equations no longer equal anything. He pushes back, pointing out how dumb it is that we are caught in this sad maze of who to blame, what to do, where to go, how to get it, turns it on its head and points his finger at the who, what, where, and why and in very plain and colorful language, accurately puts the blame where it belongs (on us!!! :-0 ). WE make decisions every day that affect our families, our friends, our parents, our children and buy INTO this crazy society that COOL is, indeed, COOL, and we must attain it at any price. Of course, when he says it, over and over again, it is funnier and full of biting wisdom.
Greg is asking us to wake up out of our stupor, and perhaps on any Hollywood award night, maybe we should NOT be glued to the empty-headed nonsense going on in the media, and turn it BACK to where it belongs: TOWARD THE FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN! GET INVOLVED IN POLITICS - HELP BRING BACK ALL THAT WE'VE LOST! DO SOME RESEARCH AND SUPPORT A GOOD CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATION THAT WOULD PASS THE TEST OF THE GREG GUTFELT INSTITUTE of RATIONAL BRAIN ACTIVITY!! We can do this!!! And Greg is at the head of the line!!
Our priorities are hideously twisted, Greg's entire book shouts that out. We MUST read this book carefully to find out HOW, while there is still time left, we break the hold that money, technology, fashion, peeking into other people's lives via reality TV, and ANYTHING Hollywood is trying to sell us in general, has on us, that we check out the Constitution, check out the business pages now and again, and most importantly, get educated on religions, groups of people, those living on assistance, government hand outs, and the most important thing given to us of all: FREEDOM! We live in the best country in the world and we let these false-faced nutballs in the media dictate our lives!
Now he is on FOX NEWS NETWORK ON The Five (at 5:00 p.m.Monday through Friday), a brilliant addition to the team, still has his fun on Red Eye (also on FOX News Network), has written his (I think) 2nd full book (Edit: 3/21/2014 - I stand corrected - Dana said today on the Five that this is his SIXTH BOOK - my most humble apologies to the author), is winning the respect of no less than Bob Beckel (not an easy thing for a guy like Greg to do!!), is turning up on Bill O'Reilly, and is on his way to becoming one of the great thinkers of his generation (seriously!).
This book has much more meat to it than the last book. I think it could have been cut into four books, with more factoids added to educate the masses to the mess this country is currently wallowing in. Greg Gutfeld is one of those writers who can, in one sentence, cut the lies out of the mouths of (fill in the blank) and tie it up in a bow so funny, you might have to go back and ponder what he said for several days.
I don't like my own review, even though I've been at it for two days. I can't catch Greg's amazing ability to cut through all the BS handed to us every day and somehow have it make sense and make it edgy and funny at the same time (funny as in funny rational). So, go out and buy his book. NOW!!!!! His numbers will make him lots o' money, yes. More importantly, it will show the Hollywood COOL and the Washington D.C. COOL and the campus COOL people that we have their number. While Hillary and Obama danced, four of our best men died in Benghazi. Just this week, while they danced again, the Crimea section of the Ukraine was stolen and taken away by Putin. On the international front, things do not look good. On the National front, things don't look good. WAKE UP, AMERICA!! While the cat's been away, the mice have been carting out little pieces of what made this country the exceptional nation it WAS.
NOT COOL is one of the finest relevant books on the state of our world today. Greg has the intelligence to pull it all together, the thick skin not to care who he skewers (they deserve it), a vast range of observations and knowledge to pull from, and a slightly self-deprecating way to end it. One thing I know, you will learn much you did not know when you started Not Cool. I will be keeping this one near me as a reference guide to the Not Cool and don't know it crowd!! Five stars for a book well done, Greg Gutfeld! Very, very cool book! No, having heard Greg say today (Edit - 3/21/2014) on The Five that Greg thinks cool is actually evil (in terms of its collective effect on society) - very, very, GOOD book!
― marcos, Thursday, 24 April 2014 14:30 (ten years ago) link
one month passes...
http://jessemichaelsblog.tumblr.com/post/89178134860/white-guy-record-collection-and-cultural-materialism
an ilxor/facebook friend posted this and then i read it and tried to go back and facebook did the thing where it reorganizes the entire order of the feed and also reminds you to purchase something from Dollar Shave Club, so i'm sorry that i can't say exactly who posted about it.
so this is a lil tumblr post focusing in on that particular kind of social interaction where it feels like people are subtly (or not so subtly) competing to name cooler and more obscure bands than you are, and it pisses you off because you're not playing the same mindgames and maybe you just wanted to talk about a specific band in a genuine way.
1) The cultural materialism game ruins and devalues art. It takes what is good and worthwhile in a world that is overwhelmingly empty and vicious, and turns those songs, books, movies, whatevers, into poker chips for the big, nauseating ego struggle that most genuine art serves to oppose.
i sympathize with that argument, on the occasions that the other person(s) in the terrible conversation/game are doing the oneupsmanship thing on purpose. but then there's the following paragraph:
2) The cultural materialism game ruins and devalues social interactions. I simply don’t care about how much internet research somebody did on Detroit garage rarities / chopped and screwed hip hop / unknown Friedkin scripts / obscure British sketch comedy / little known hallucinogens / Fringey French Filosophers / African post punk / carnivorous plants that double as analgesics / Foucault / Derrida / Zizek / Huelbeckqxgfdm ETC ETC ETC. Again, I am NOT saying all those things are not interesting or shouldn’t be discussed. Of course they are all great things, especially Huelbeckqx˙∆˚∫. ˙ I am saying that when people converse by shoving savvy-objects in each others’ faces, it destroys any possibility of real, non-pressurized human interaction.
i get that he's offering a parody of the aforementioned oneupsmanshipping mindgamers by rattling off his own list of semi-obscure genres of note, but he's also (unintentionally, i think) demonstrating that some people casually rattle these things off simply because they KNOW about them and think they're relevant! there certainly exists a subset of total assholes who reference and speak on a very shallow level about certain things just to show that they know about them and are therefore cool, but there are also many
people who actually know about these things and find them relevant and bring them up in conversation because they feel like they're adding something useful into the conversation and possibly offering someone else a new artistic path to explore. hell, maybe that's how they found out about obscuro band x - through a conversation where someone mentioned it.
the infuriating thing about watching norms complain about hipsters is that they often conflate people who are being shallow douches with people who have a deep well of knowledge and aren't afraid to share it with others.
anyway, i actually like the linked post for the most part! i understand and sympathize with what he's saying, and since the people he's complaining about are friends of his, he's probably not making a mistake in attributing their conversational motivations to the desire to seem cool. it just points to a pet peeve of mine, this gut instinct of some people to roll their eyes at any reference that they deem to be "for show". if you talk to some people they seriously think that listening to radiohead makes you a hipster (or arcade fire). and then there are people that roll their eyes at anyone that doesn't wear running shoes on their days off who roll their eyes at the people who are rolling their eyes at the people who listen to radiohead, because they've never even heard of radiohead - "how pompous that this guy is standing here complaining about how someone else mentioned this band i've never heard of! god what a fucking hipster, this guy who doesn't wear running shoes on his days off". it's a terrible fucking spiral that just leads to lowest common denominator conversations where people are afraid to mention anything that others don't know of for fear of appearing to be a hipster. ugh, fuck that.
there was a lil' post on twitter yesterday (again i forgot who, i can't remember anything) where someone was saying that it's so fucking sad when someone starts speaking passionately about a subject in conversation and then stops themselves short and apologizes ("i'm sorry, i just get excited when i talk about X") and changes the subject, because it's a sign that at some point some fucking asshole criticized that person while they were talking about something they were really into, and now they've internalized the feeling that it's not cool to speak about things you really like to people who don't know about it. whoever said that on twitter, OTM
(sorry for rambling posts these days, i go through phases and currently i'm in the one where i can't stfu apparently)
― Karl Malone, Thursday, 19 June 2014 15:39 (nine years ago) link