Reading the newspaper often upsets me, normally because most news tends to be upsetting. I read this story this morning and it upset me for totally different reasons. First of all, I didn't understand where the story was. It is just a glowing profile of a spoiled 24 year old twat who lives in a $6,000 per month aparment in Chelsea and yet the writer a couple of time mentions his bohemian sensibility, at one point calls him a former punk (something I find more than doubtful). The first paragraphs already had me angry at the world. Check this out:
WITH his vintage blue-and-red rep tie, carefully tousled hair and old metal lapel pin reading "I {sheart} Grandpa," Loren Kreiss looks like a typical style-conscious 24-year-old. He collects cool things, like 2,194 "friends" on myspace.com, an antique Coke machine and 15,000 songs on his hard drive. His vintage wristwatch is a fashion accessory, not a tool.
"My watch and all my clocks are set to the wrong time," Mr. Kreiss said recently. "It's symbolic of me. I don't like to look at time."
But as the scion of Kreiss, his family's California-based furniture business, Mr. Kreiss (pronounced to rhyme with nice) sometimes has to work at being an iconoclast. He can barely contain his contradictions. For instance, his three-times-a-week maid often resets the clocks correctly, forcing Mr. Kreiss to reset them quirky again. (To avoid missing appointments, he consults his ever-present BlackBerry.)
I don't know why I am sharing this and I don't know why this article made me so mad, don't know why I even read it if I knew it would make me so mad, but it gets at so much that's wrong with everything, people of insane wealth appropriating hipness and cultural trends and somehow making it into a product or a commodity of wealth. It's the trying so hard, the affectation of hip that I cannot stand. This boy sounds so annoying. I want to punch him over and over again.
And then this bit here, I cannot decide what makes me want to vomit more, the fact that this 24 year old has someone illustrate his graphic novels and then gets them printed as wall panels hanging in his apartment, or if I want to vomit more because the writer takes time to explain what a graphic novel is (is there someone reading the Times that does not know; why not explain blogs too?), and in the smarmiest way possible:
He has pushed creative boundaries in his attempts to enlarge the family's market share. His most startling foray involves using excerpts from his own graphic novels — basically, long-form comic books with literary pretensions — as interior decoration.
And another aside, how are you going to write a graphic novel and not illustrate it yourself? What is it you are writing, a couple of lines of shitty dialogue? Fuck the world!
And so, for some reason, I decided to look at his Myspace page. And other news about him that I find really hard to believe, is what he claims his orientation to be. Yuck! Why are human beings so disgusting?
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