Bret Easton Ellis

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.

I have... thoughts.

I read the whole thing, which was excruciating. Here's what I posted on a friend's FB thread:

"I’m a fan of his, with reservations post-2013. (He isn’t making it easy.) As I said on someone else’s share of this interview, I’m actually HAPPY this interview happened - because it might help inspire Ellis to shut the fuck up about politics, which he’s admittedly misinformed about (not just here, but on his podcast and social media) and stick to what actually makes him INTERESTING and of value for many of us who follow him - which gets drowned out by the political/cultural stuff, which grabs headlines and has transformed him into an all-around punching bag - his aesthetic perspectives on film and literature."

In the next week or two I'll have a review of White out in the world, which I'll link here when it's up.

my impression is that his fiction, and its portrayal of people who are often decadent and at best morally ambivalent, reflects his actual view of human nature. the validation of his work being successful has made him think that everyone's like one of his characters and doesn't get why claiming real life figures and their behavior falls within acceptable boundaries brings outrage

he's not exactly a writer of stories where characters come to epiphanies about their own behavior although he's due a few of his own

ray is otm, so much of BEE's podcast is old man yelling at cloud / millennial boyfriend. but i enjoy his film commentary, even if i disagree with him most of the time.

We could totally do without him by now, couldn't we?

We could totally do without him by now, couldn't we?

Pretty much, yeah, and I'm someone who loved Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Glamorama (the latter in particular; I've read it four or five times).

Lunar Park is the one... his most sincere & moving prose

I tried Lunar Park but couldn't make it to the end.

he's doing this to get his name in the cycle imo. if this interview goes well, who reads it? almost no-one. instead...

does he express the same dipshitted thought-free views on his podcast for hours every week and in other interviews and in his writing as part of the same long game?

yes

his whole career has been exactly like this

any decade now, he's going to write something that isn't surface-level vapid in its understanding of humans and money, and we'll all be wowed because of his careful cultivation of alternate expectations over the rest of his output