A blog re Chuck Barris, Michael Moore, etc.

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. 01.09.03 I hate Chuck Barris. And I don’t spend that emotion on many in the entertainment business - what’s the point? If a Baldwin offend thee, change the channel. I don’t hate Michael Moore, I pity him - he’s going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels, his autopsy photos posted to The Smoking Gun's new 3D holographic photo section. People in Hollywood may be idiots; they may be full of sophomoric moralizing, they may trot off to Baghdad and play the puppet for a megalomaniac toddler-torturer, but I can’t hate them. You have to husband that emotion and spend it carefully. Once, twice, maybe three times in your life you’ll come across someone who just plain needs hatin’. Hitler. Bin Laden. Stalin. Barris. Check, check, check, Chuck.

I’m one of the 17 people in the world who read “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” when it came out - that’s the “autobiography” in which he details his double life as a TV producer and a CIA agent. I reviewed it back in the college days. Now a major motion picture. It was an incoherent sack of self-loathing, loaded with contempt for anyone who didn’t love him - and if you did love him, he was contemptuous of you, because COULDN’T YOU SEE how contemptible he was? STUPID BITCH! I read the book because I’d watched every Gong Show episode there was - as a dull-eyed teenaged TV addict I wasted hours every day soaking up the craptacular output of the game-show and sitcom bilge factories. I loved the Gong Show, because it was what PoMosexual critics today would call “Transgressive.” Meaning, it was rude. It was stupid. It was cruel. We loved it. Couldn’t get enough. More! More, Chuckie! More, you sweaty little homunculus with the stoner grin and the Leo Sayer hair! MORE!

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003

Answers

The smutty drivel of the Dating Game, the floodlit humiliations of the Newlywed Game (hosted by uber-arsehole Bob Eubanks), the Gong Show, the pathetically gynophobic $1.98 Beauty Pageant - each show just screams contempt for its creator, its participants, the audience. He was smart enough to toss sex and envy into the mix, so in the end hating Chuck Barris was the last thing on our minds. Why, we were positively grateful.

I see his picture, and I am filled with loathing. It’s completely irrational, I know. What surprised me when I saw his picture in Entertainment Weekly was how old he looked. Chuck Barris looked like a guy my dad would know. Inasmuch as men of a certain age start to look alike, Barris almost looked like my dad. I read the article: Chuck Barris is 73.

WTF? My father’s three years older. He fought in WW2. Barris was the capering imp on TV when I was in high school; he was the anti-dad, wiry, youthful, Pan with a hashpipe instead of a flute. The idea that Barris and my dad are peers Does Not Compute.

Barris will get national obits when he kicks. Every day WW2 vets die, and they get an inch in the local paper.

I hate Chuck Barris. And I wish him a long life, because he knows what a coal-hearted, solipsistic SOB he is. Ten more years on the beach, grappling with his perfidious uselessness? Make it twenty.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003


Tell me you don't love, [Michael Moore's] going to die in 15 years of a massive coronary on a cold tiled bathroom floor, awash in the blasts of his emptied bowels, his autopsy photos posted to The Smoking Gun's new 3D holographic photo section.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 2003



-- Anonymous, January 12, 2003

ROTFLMAO!

-- Anonymous, January 12, 2003

Who is Michael Moore?

-- Anonymous, January 12, 2003


Aw gawd, do you have a couple of days, lol!!! Best thing is to do a search on the name, using google.com. He was the guy who started 'way, 'way back, doing a documentary on one of the big automaker CEOs. Was it Chrysler or Ford? Damned if I can remember. Now he SLAMS the President. Recently, he said the people on the 9/11 planes were white wimps. . .

-- Anonymous, January 13, 2003

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