Celebrity Dumb Quotes

pinguerin wrote:It's rare that I invoke this privilege, but I actually have a PhD in English, and in my professional opinion, that poem stinks like a fish stuffed into a heating duct and left for a month. My frosh write better than that and many of them are still in "if I dump my feeeeeeelings on the paaaaage then it's a poooooem" mode. (I am not trying to mock them. They usually get better. Ms. Palmer, well...)

Yeah, way back in the day I was the poetry editor of my HS lit magazine, and this is worse than the poems submitted by the girls who dotted their i's with hearts.

Also conflating "I don't like your shitty poem" with "I don't have any empathy" is so appalling. I can probably summon up more empathy for Tweedle-dum the Terrorist Moron than for Amanda Palmer at this point.

That "poem" is garbage. I don't mind the notion of trying to get into the bomber's mind because I think everyone's curious about those guys' mind frames/thought processes, but Palmer's result is just plain literary excrement.

choubetcha wrote:Last night, she retweeted something like "empathy isn't about the other person, it's about you."

Oh my God, it's like she's Ron Burgundy and THE ENTIRE WORLD is Christina Applegate. "No...there's...no way that's correct."

Is she completely braindead, or does she just actively enjoy spouting stupid crap?

I still think she knows exactly what she is doing. Seriously Chicken Bucket did too. Any attention is good attention.

Well, on Friday she did a presentation in NYC and that was all she tweeted about. No mention of Boston. Obviously her presentation got no attention whatsoever. Two days later came the worst poem ever. So yeah, she totally knew what she was doing.

How old is this woman? I've met 12 year olds with more maturity.

That's exactly what I was about to ask. I've never heard of her outside SF, but she sounds like a pompous and insufferable twit.

"Ah, but you have heard of me."

Oh geez. That actually would be her retort, wouldn't it?

She should have lunch with Elizbeth Wurtzel and compare terrorism PR notes-Wurtzel on 9/11

I have no idea who Elizabeth Wurtzel is. On the one hand, I can sort of understand what she's saying. I had zero emotional reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Whether that's because I might have some form of autism or that I was suffering from undiagnosed depression and thus hadn't started taking my medications, I can't be sure. I spent the morning alternating between watching the news in the conference room and sitting at my desk reading a Star Wars novel because I was a temp in the security office of Orlando International Airport and nobody knew what to do with me while they were still figuring out what to do with themselves. After eight hours of doing nothing productive, they let me go home, where I watched the news with my wife and parents and still felt zero emotional connection, but I at least had the good sense to comfort my wife who was reacting enough for both of us.

Which is where we diverge and I assume Wurtzel is a psychologically disturbed person and not just someone possibly on the autism spectrum like myself. Because while I had no emotional reaction myself, I certainly wouldn't accuse anyone else of overreacting or think "Wow... what great art." And I wouldn't confide in someone and tell them, "I can say this to you because you're an Other and you'll understand that I'm being edgy and not an asshole." I think the country as a unit overreacted and went overboard with crazy airport security protocols and the PATRIOT Act and two unnecessary wars, but that's a mostly separate ball of wax from individual responses.

Art is a practice of self-expression, not total self-adsorbtion. Lord Byron wrote about the battle of Waterloo, without making it all about him, or even all about Napoleon. I'm not carping at feeling overwhelmed, numb, shell-shocked, or empty, or even totally out-of-step with the reaction of others. I'm talking about obliviousness, which is not bothering to feel, and is not autism but pathological instead.

Right. I wasn't contradicting that or defending her. I started at a point where I understood her initial reaction but then acknowledged that she went and took it off the deep end with her later reactions and comments.

Wurtzel wrote Prozac Nation, so to be fair she is open about the fact that she has a LOT of issues. I don't like her, I just think she has said issues and they run even deeper than depression.

Good thing she married a psychiatrist. Oh wait, no, that's possibly the worst idea in the entire universe.

Didn't they make a terrible movie from that book starring Christina Ricci?

Yes. Yes they did. Watched it during my high school/first year university Jonathan Rhys Meyers phase.

Back, about the Poem For Amanda Palmer, Neilk's comment underneath:

I feel that the artistic integrity of this expression is compromised by the lack of any way to donate $5 to the author.

-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

The Amanda Palmer Problem

I particularly enjoyed how the author puts a shank to the ribs of the TED audience:

the forum Palmer chose to unpack her philosophy as a whole turned out to be both the most ideologically friendly and the easiest to mock: She recently gave a TED talk. As TED talks go, it hit all of the right marks. She wrapped the length of her career, from street performer to lecturer, around the kind of single, simple insight that appeals to people who regularly consume fairy tales about creatively “disrupting” established business models and summoning Utopia via Wi-Fi.

Also this bit of truth-telling:

sure, I find it incredibly annoying when artists respond to substantive criticism by suggesting that their art must be wonderful to have gotten so many people talking. But you might argue that this is the sort of annoyance from which the world can easily look away; doesn’t there come a point where people are pointing and groaning at the “attention-seeking” person because we’re actually getting something out of it?

I think so. I'm enjoying reading this and posting about it.

Amanda actually RTed it and said she thought it was "spot on," which made me a little suspicious. But I thought it made a good point about how "crowdsurfing" only your loving supporters isn't really how the internet works anymore, if it ever did. (Although I also think the article went a little easy on the "play music for me for free except in NY where I will actually pay musicians because the unions would kick my ass if I didn't" aspect.)

But you might argue that this is the sort of annoyance from which the world can easily look away; doesn’t there come a point where people are pointing and groaning at the “attention-seeking” person because we’re actually getting something out of it?

Well, yeah, and I think the the "something" people are getting is called schadenfreude. Even before the internet, celebrity magazines let people take joy in the downfall of whichever famous person did something stupid that week, and before mass media, there was town gossip about the ill-advised antics of whichever local guy or lady was in the focus that week. It's nothing new--just way, way easier to find fodder for it these days.

Gwyneth Paltrow:

“I’m like RuPaul!” she joked. “I have so much makeup on. Foundation! [At the Met Gala] I was literally a transvestite.”

No. NO. Girl. So much no.

Also:

"People perceive that I have too much. I understand that, but I also feel like I've suffered so much. It's not something I talk about. I don't have a perfect life. I don't have a perfect anything. I have incredible struggles, and I'm far from perfect. I struggle like every other woman, every other mother. I understand that things look a certain way."

She really, really has no damn idea, does she?

I thought the second one was out of touch, but not as awful as things she's said in the past. I mean she probably does have shit going on that isn't great, but yes she is a privileged white woman that doesn't realize her privilege, but the first....I didn't really see anything that bad about it? Drag queens wear a lot of make up. I've said before that I look like a contestant on Drag Race. I mean if she said transsexual, I'd be horrified, but she didn't.

I did wince at the literally though, and please let me know if I'm missing something and being horribly offensive.

You know, I feel kind of bad for her, because she honestly has no idea what it's like to be a regular person, but she really wants to know. It's very, very sad.