Ladies and Gentlemen: Eddie Pepitone

Those of you who know me know I like comedy, even though I'm not funny. It's not really a paradox, but it's close.

Eddie Pepitone sort of works outside the mold of the typical alternative comic, who is usually hip and articulate, even though they pretend to be neither of those things. Pepitone comes off as a blue-collar, Brooklyn guy with little education, but the motherfucker speaks the truth. His punch lines aren't chiseled in stone. He's got the guts of a Bill Hicks and... well, no, I think that's pretty much all he's working with: guts.

Here he is talking about auditioning for a laundry detergent commercial. Enjoy.

The Continuing Violation of All Things Beautiful

This may already seem like a distant memory, but it wasn't long ago that the Internet was ad-free. It was a sanctuary of sorts. You could find any and all sorts of information without first having to wade through miles of horseshit. The Internet was Eden in binary.

Today, you can't check your e-mail without being sold. The new, improved Yahoo accounts come with a two-inch sidebar of ads that you cannot close for more than 30 seconds at a time without paying Yahoo for an advanced membership. "Don't like ads? Pay me, cocksucker." Gmail does it more subtly than Yahoo, with a single line of text above your inbox, but that's not necessarily a good thing, as subtlety is the marketer's best friend.

Youtube has also given in to various forms of advertising. Right now, this instant, Youtube's homepage features a trailer for "The Social Network," thus making their homepage an ironic form of meta-media infinite regression. "Come pay $10 to a multi-media giant [Sony] to show your support for the little guy standing up to the 'man,' man."

Featured videos on Youtube play after an ad, and often, the result is an astonishing debasement of the content. If you want to watch Louis CK's comedic monologue in which he provides an edgy, thoughtful analysis of whether using the word "faggot" is necessarily wrong, you first have to sit through a 15-second ad for All State in which a horribly misogynistic portrait of a teenage girl is painted by a male actor texting while driving a giant hot-pink SUV and running into "your" car in a parking lot. If you want to get to the message "Maybe we're too up-tight about language," you have to sit through "Women are awful." (Here's Louis C.K.'s bit, as it appears when it is a "featured video:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-otAJrtY-w&feature=fvst)

If we had free rein to enjoy interesting content made for us by us, we might actually grow, intellectually and emotionally. We might evolve. Instead of being literally barked at by desperate saleswhores in 30-second sound bites that only interrupt programming that is also designed to sell us products under the thin veil of product placement, we might learn to play the harmonica from a really sincere guy who had some knowledge, a little spare time, a camcorder and a wi-fi connection. (And here he is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osiKSXjkJS8)

More could be said about Facebook's nauseatingly specific target advertising through your "likes," or Twitter's sponsored trending topics, or Google's sponsored results or Chris Hardwick's recent rationalizing of his decision to help pay for his super-hip blog, Nerdist.com, with money from CapitalOne ads. However, out of consideration for you, I will refrain.

The moral of the story is that advertising will take anything beautiful and loved by the masses and find a way to elbow their way into the equation. They do this to interrupt your consideration of ideas that could enhance your life and potentially convince you that you don't need their bullshit products to survive, and that you may actually live longer and happier lives without them.

Why

Because I need a place to spin my webs of conspiracy so they won't infect my more serious writing. This will probably not work, as it will in all likelihood further imprint my obsession with mass culture on my every thought and action.

The focus of this thing probably won't be as specific as my title suggests. I'm creating this so I can obsess and vent in a semi-organized, constructive way. Posts may be comprised of rants, musings, contemplations, links to the awful shit that exists only to make you question yourself and the people you love, or alternatives to thinking about said awful shit.

I feel conflicted starting this thing up, because I imagine many people just ignore mass culture and live happy lives doing so. But as I currently find myself unable to do that, I'm going to spare my friends, family, bandmates, roommates, new acquaintances and pets from (some of) my frenzied monologues by exorcising a few of those demons here.