Bret Easton Ellis

I think BEE didn't know how reticent an interviewee Armisen is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1tX54iDJLY

lol it's funny actually i think armisen did it in character and brickwalled BEE after the overbearing intro on gender and how carrie brownstein was the first woman on the podcast

got that feeling listening to it the first time, that he had completely offended them and was struggling to get by the whole hour, and he did a whole intro about how armisen looked 'disgusted' during the taping but was perfectly nice and normal before and after… great stuff

*did a whole intro on that the following week when Ivan Reitman was a guest, and like all BEE's guests, was just sort of like "yeah…I'm sorry about that" after his intro rants. LOVE IT

adam carolla on this week p good he usually bugs the shit out of me

He should drop the intro rants, theyre terrible. If he has something to say about someones work, isnt it better to say throughout a conversation? The guest is just left there going "ummmm, ok" and being slightly reticent for the rest of the interview, which I found was the case with Malkmus's interview as well.

malkmus sounded blazed/burnt out as hell

yeah he did sound a bit stoned

Also it's funny how, say, Marc Maron and Carrolla record their long intros without the guest present--whereas I picture BEE's guests staring into space for 10 minutes as he goes on, with them sitting there waiting to speak.

it always throws me on the Champs podcast when they start out with their upcoming dates, and i assume it's recorded separately but the first thing they say to the guest is usually "how about you, got any dates?"

i love how no one ever agrees with his opening ahahaha

God, what an ordeal this is to even listen to. He is probably the worst interviewer EVAH. And so hugely, aggressively BORING. Ugh! Unbelievable. Fuck him. Why would any want to guest on this show?

Each episode rails against message-driven movies, while each podcast shoehorns the interview into BEE's messages. He's a lot like Mamet in that way.

BEE's messages are so rambling and broad that it's hard to take anything from them. It's like he wants you to know he understands all the views on the issues so he spends minutes outlining those. He'll state very confidently his view, then walk it back by acknowlegeing an opposing viewpoint, take in three or four other extraneous things then when he finally relinquishes the microphone to the guest, whatever "question" he might have had has long since evaporated and the guest is pretty baffled as to how they are supposed to respond.

hah you really nailed it

http://www.vanityfair.fr/culture/livre/articles/generation-wuss-by-bret-easton-ellis/15837#.VCfzaoCUDMs.twitter

This is why if anyone has a snarky opinion of Generation Wuss then that person is labeled by them as a “douche”—case closed.

i don't understand how Ellis can't see how severely psychologically damaging the context of the Clementi case is. how tf could he think of that as a "harmless freshman dorm-room prank"? other than that, spot on essay...

Watched Less Than Zero for the first time. Surprisingly dreary, like most films about addiction. Ellis didn't seem to have any involvement in the movie.

(One small problem a function of my own timeline: found it hard to see Jami Gertz as anyone other than her Seinfeld character.)

Memorable only as RDJ's first eye-opening performance; he's better than the book's conception of his character.

It's been over 20 years since I read the book, but doesn't the book's Julian character live while the film's Julian character dies? Duh, Hollywood needs to make a point about hedonism and depravity, but killing him off was a hard swerve.

Actually found Downey one of the harder things to take in the film; really overwrought throes-of-addiction stuff (for which I blame the filmmakers, too). Yes--dies in the film.

I think the best film ever about drug addiction is primarily about something else: Jungle Fever.

kim gordon on the podcast today, another great interview

just catching up with the Mark Z. Danielewski interview from monday, v good

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/read-bret-easton-ellis-excoriating-monologue-on-social-justice-warriors-and-political-correctness-a7170101.html

tl;dr version: "Why can't girls just shut up and let men talk about their tits, Sky Ferreira I'm looking at you?"

(Bonus: "God, that dumb Stanford chick couldn't even get raped right.")

milo and bret leading the misogyny pack

I like parts of Glamorama and Lunar Park, but he's been a caricature of a caricature of himself for so long.

And he's back

https://www.patreon.com/breteastonellispodcast/posts

great episode. sounds drunk in the second part.

Jeselnik owes this guy royalties for taking his shtick

Did Bret blow through his savings? Why is he going the poortreon route?

"poortreon"? dude is already famous & has a fanbase. he says in the second part that the company he was with for four years (podcast one) really wanted him to stay, and that he was being courted by audible. if you're already established patreon is by far the best way to do a podcast: no overhead, fewer middlemen (patreon takes a modest cut), the podcasts can be totally freeform.

If you're independently wealthy, it's even easier and more freeform not to ask people for financial support.

yeah, he has 633 patrons at $1.50 apiece, so he's making about $1000 a month. that would be an enormous help to a lot of people but seems like chump change to ellis.

the weirder thing is, only those 633 people can listen to his podcast. i'm not sure what his audience would be if it were free, but probably much much larger, which you'd think would be the most important factor for him.

EDIT: since starting this post he now has 636 patrons, so maybe he's still rapidly building his audience

684.

new book White out April 2019.

Combining personal reflection and social observation, Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction is an incendiary polemic about this young century's failings, e-driven and otherwise, and at once an example, definition, and defense of what "freedom of speech" truly means.

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies. An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and refused categorization, he captured the depravity of the eighties with one of contemporary literature's most polarizing characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain. In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo.
Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being "accepted," and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity.
Provocative, incisive, funny, and surprisingly poignant, White reveals not only what is visible on the glittering, pristine surface but also the riotous truths that are hidden underneath.

What a pseud

glamarosa or gtfo

Review of White, and boy is it a doozy: https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/026_01/20825

The prose in White is shapeless, roving, and aggressively unedited. One waits in vain for an arresting image. Several passages recycle or embellish material from the past few years, including a baffling 2011 essay for Newsweek on the difference between “Empire” and “post-Empire” celebrity that reads like Marshall McLuhan without the rigor. For a man who prides himself on roguish individuality, Ellis uses a laughably derivative vocabulary, a mélange of Breitbart talking points and weirdly apolitical antiestablishment ideas, as if he has just discovered Nietzsche on his older brother’s bookshelf. He bemoans “the democratization of culture,” he calls social media “Orwellian,” and he regularly tosses off words like “groupthink,” “corporate,” and the dreaded “status quo.” The Man, man. “Social-justice warriors never think like artists,” Ellis declares, as if this is a sentence. Like his hero Joan Didion, Ellis believes that style is everything; what a shame he has written a book with so little of it.

Mostly, Ellis hates social media and wishes millennials would stop whining and “pull on their big boy pants”—an actual quote from this deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter.

From the writer: https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/55458151_324343171769101_6588478681012764672_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.xx&oh=cd58fe617a2cc410518bac28c2a403ca&oe=5D454E40

that was a pretty excellent takedown

well-written negative reviews of books are such a joy to read

the author was also responsible for this recent classic

https://www.affidavit.art/articles/no-one-wants-it

“I’ve been rated and reviewed since I became a published author at the age of twenty-one, and I’ve grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised.”

Social-justice warriors never think like artists,” Ellis declares, as if this is a sentence.

say what you will about the sentence, but it is definitely a sentence.

literalist

well, when you're writing about bad prose...

god i wish there were more interviews like this, ellis is such a fucking self satisfied dope and out of his depth

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump

Agreed. Agreed.

Well, you said it—of course you agree. So what you are saying is that everyone can agree assault is wrong, but maybe we are going too far?

so good, man

Ouch. I almost couldn’t finish that, I was so embarrassed for him.