I've been feeling uninspired lately with regard to this blog. Today, however, a clerk at the local Gourmet Garage inspired me - in a bad way - to ponder the list of unattractive celebrities that I've been compared to over the years.
I'm not the only person this happens to, and for that reason, I'd love to hear from anyone else who's got a list like mine.
I used to work as a teacher of ESL - to foreign students who are notoriously skilled insulters. A couple of the dudes on my list are actually comparisons made by ex students. By far the best insult/compliment I have ever heard was, unfortunately, not directed at me but at a female colleague who was told, in quite an upbeat tone, that she looked like Chelsea Clinton. My reaction was to tell the speaker that Chelsea Clinton was widely known to look like a Cabbage Patch doll and that they are generally thought of us pretty fugly.
The same student who accidentally insulted my colleague then went on to add that I looked just like Vincent Gallo. That confused me since Vincent Gallo has dark hair and, well...looks nothing like me. When I told this student that Gallo looked like a heroine addict and that I didn't think it was a comparison that he should vocalize, he responded, "but Vincent Gallo is cerebrity", as if simply being famous made it OK to be ugly.
Anyhow, here's my list, starting with the person the Gourmet Garage beeotch told me I looked like today:
1. Conan O'Brien
2. Vincent Gallo
3. Woody Harrelson
4. Doogie Howser, MD (this one came from an old Italian lady who actually wanted my autograph!)
5. Woody Harrelson (I mention him again because I get him the most and also find it to be quite annoying.)
Who is your favorite ugly celebrity look-alike?
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Gerty Goes Shopping
Gerty, like most women, loves to shop. However, Gerty is no ordinary shopper. You see...she's a compulsive purchaser of things that she can't afford. That in itself is not unusual. This is America and this country thrives on consumer overspending, does it not? Gerty, being a proud American patriot, does her part for her country in this respect, does she not? Yes and no. She does her patriotic overspending duty but part of what makes this ritual work for the US of A is that these thriftless wonders generally pay the bills they accumulate. Gerty don't play 'dat.
Gerty loves to buy very overpriced items - things that are as costly as they are useless - pretty much anything they sell on an infomercial. I once visited Gery's apartment to find that it was impossible to enter due the the volume of exercise equipment that she'd purchased from informercials she'd watched while "working" from home over a period of two months. She's the first to admit she has a bit of a struggle with her weight - especially around the mid section. So why not buy an Abdominizer? When it became clear that the Abdominizer was not as self-acting as the infomercial had depicted it to be, she realized that it would not work for her. I understand and I think we all can. After all, if you pay $500 dollars plus shipping and handling for a machine to melt your abs, the fat should melt off as soon as you turn over your credit card number, right? So when the Abdominizer failed to do what it claimed, she went for the Roller Abs. This promised to be easy. It was billed as not just "low impact" but "NO impact"! Who needs impact when they are trying to lose weight? One of the reasons we got overweight in the first place was because we're lazy and exercise equipment that actually requires movement or impact just doesn't work for people of our ilk. The trouble is...Gerty got this contraption with it's huge moving handles and extended foot pedals and it just was way too bulky. It looked much smaller on the sound stage in the infomercial. What the heck?
Next she decided to go smaller and get a couple of items that were not going to take up as much space: the Z-Abber and the "Ab Wheel". The Z-abber was Gerty's favorite because it required virtually no effort at all to use. Of course, it sent electric shocks through her body at a constant rate of 15 per minute, which may or may not have caused the benign tumor to grow to its current enormity within her tummy area, rendering the whole ab-shaping venture a complete waste of time. The Ab Wheel just hurt her knees, so that was that!
Were Gerty more entrepreneurial, she might have opened an ab studio in her living room, but that was not to happen. Instead, she just put all that crap in an air-conditioned storage unit in Westchester.
Gerty loves to buy very overpriced items - things that are as costly as they are useless - pretty much anything they sell on an infomercial. I once visited Gery's apartment to find that it was impossible to enter due the the volume of exercise equipment that she'd purchased from informercials she'd watched while "working" from home over a period of two months. She's the first to admit she has a bit of a struggle with her weight - especially around the mid section. So why not buy an Abdominizer? When it became clear that the Abdominizer was not as self-acting as the infomercial had depicted it to be, she realized that it would not work for her. I understand and I think we all can. After all, if you pay $500 dollars plus shipping and handling for a machine to melt your abs, the fat should melt off as soon as you turn over your credit card number, right? So when the Abdominizer failed to do what it claimed, she went for the Roller Abs. This promised to be easy. It was billed as not just "low impact" but "NO impact"! Who needs impact when they are trying to lose weight? One of the reasons we got overweight in the first place was because we're lazy and exercise equipment that actually requires movement or impact just doesn't work for people of our ilk. The trouble is...Gerty got this contraption with it's huge moving handles and extended foot pedals and it just was way too bulky. It looked much smaller on the sound stage in the infomercial. What the heck?
Next she decided to go smaller and get a couple of items that were not going to take up as much space: the Z-Abber and the "Ab Wheel". The Z-abber was Gerty's favorite because it required virtually no effort at all to use. Of course, it sent electric shocks through her body at a constant rate of 15 per minute, which may or may not have caused the benign tumor to grow to its current enormity within her tummy area, rendering the whole ab-shaping venture a complete waste of time. The Ab Wheel just hurt her knees, so that was that!
Were Gerty more entrepreneurial, she might have opened an ab studio in her living room, but that was not to happen. Instead, she just put all that crap in an air-conditioned storage unit in Westchester.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Artistic License Revoked
I consider myself to be somewhat of an artist. I know writing is not a performing art but that doesn't mean that I don't want an audience for my "art". Obviously, I want people to read most of what I write; however, I think it goes without saying that I don't want a mass audience to read my private texts or e-mails and I don't want anyone to read my private journal. There are things, like this blog, which are meant to be read by a wide audience. Keeping that in mind, I make an effort to entertain or to educate or at least to philosophize.
Perhaps I've been cursed with a very banal view of art. Maybe I'm dense and I don't understand more complex artistic expression, but I am just now in a state of expressive discombobulation because I just accidentally watched a documentary on one of those pot-smoker's movie channel's like Sundance or IFC...I really don't even know the difference sometimes. Anyway, I saw a documentary about a Japanese "dancer" named, Oguri. Apparently he got a whole film crew, co-dancers (or whatever they're called), and, perhaps most amazingly, an audience to schlep through the desert for several days, to enact some sort of spasmodic poky dance. I think it was edited down to about three minutes in the documentary, as that's all a TV audience could possibly bear - even while high. It seems that Mr. Oguri was interpreting the movement of the desert plant life via dance. Since desert plant life doesn't move very much, neither does he. Since desert plant life is dry and crusty, so is he.
My problem with the whole thing is two-fold. The first being that I am just annoyed that ten or so seemingly healthy human beings who could be out in the world doing some good by, you know, maybe working on a farm or tending to the sick, are plodding through the desert to perform an insipid dance for nearly no one (understandably) and spending at least a few dollars of someone's money to do this. Why? What's the point? The whole thing seems very self-indulgent. My other, perhaps bigger problem with this is that it frustrates me when I think that I've been writing plays and screenplays for years and no one has been willing to spend the money to help bring my work to life. I know it might not be perfect but at least I don't want to bring my audience out to the middle of nowhere and put their lives in danger just to listen and watch.
Maybe I'm just jealous.
Perhaps I've been cursed with a very banal view of art. Maybe I'm dense and I don't understand more complex artistic expression, but I am just now in a state of expressive discombobulation because I just accidentally watched a documentary on one of those pot-smoker's movie channel's like Sundance or IFC...I really don't even know the difference sometimes. Anyway, I saw a documentary about a Japanese "dancer" named, Oguri. Apparently he got a whole film crew, co-dancers (or whatever they're called), and, perhaps most amazingly, an audience to schlep through the desert for several days, to enact some sort of spasmodic poky dance. I think it was edited down to about three minutes in the documentary, as that's all a TV audience could possibly bear - even while high. It seems that Mr. Oguri was interpreting the movement of the desert plant life via dance. Since desert plant life doesn't move very much, neither does he. Since desert plant life is dry and crusty, so is he.
My problem with the whole thing is two-fold. The first being that I am just annoyed that ten or so seemingly healthy human beings who could be out in the world doing some good by, you know, maybe working on a farm or tending to the sick, are plodding through the desert to perform an insipid dance for nearly no one (understandably) and spending at least a few dollars of someone's money to do this. Why? What's the point? The whole thing seems very self-indulgent. My other, perhaps bigger problem with this is that it frustrates me when I think that I've been writing plays and screenplays for years and no one has been willing to spend the money to help bring my work to life. I know it might not be perfect but at least I don't want to bring my audience out to the middle of nowhere and put their lives in danger just to listen and watch.
Maybe I'm just jealous.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)