The Ever-Incredibly Depressing Jian Ghomeshi of CBC’s Q -- redux

Uuuuuhhhhh, people (now I'm chanelling Jian) -- I wrote one post on this blog, and then a followup; you can read both. Inasmuch as many people offered their colourful responses, Jian's handlers will look like Gordon Pinsent's croquet partners by the time they stop reading this. Told you once--check the date--in 2011--that I was all hacked off about the Ghomeshi show; told you twice in a brief aside--in 2012--that I was still upset but had said all I had to say; and I kept to my word; only in 2013 did I feel obligated by comments both positive and negative to come back on and reflect on comments I'd already made. What is it that people don't get? http://zorgreport.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-ever-incredibly-depressingjian.html

(Please read or scroll to the bottom to see the actual record of this thread!)

The Ever-Incredibly Depressing Jian Ghomeshi redux

Well, I already wrote another post.  This one I jotted and set aside.  But anyway. Jian is interviewing Eugene Levy, and throughout the whole “chat,” Jian is sucking and blowing and wheedling and whinging and desperately trying to out-Oprah Oprah, and he’s doing it with an intelligent person!!.  I mean, Levy must have slipped on his way out.  Towards the end, though, Jian built to his climax (I am sure it is available on cbc.ca/q, I’m sure), and he suckingly, blowingly, wheedlingly, desperately asked Eugene Levy if he felt that he, Levy, just hadn’t been recognized enough.  I mean, this is so totally beyond bizarre.  You’re talking to a guy who’s Order of Canada, writer, comedian, Academy Award nominee, actor, done his whole career completely on his own terms, and Jian, sucking and wheedling, is saying “d’you, djew, dju, djeeoo ever feel you didn’t get enough recognition?”  I mean, Christ.  This is so impalpable as to require a palimpsest.  What, in the world, was Eugene Levy supposed to say?  “Oh yeah, I always figured I should have been Gary Cooper, or Eastwood or Stallone.”  I mean, think about it.  You’re speaking with someone who has completely achieved his own success according to his own terms in pretty well every dimension of the industry, and, sucking and wheedlingly, you wonder if he thinks he didn’t get enough recognition?  I swear, I would have killed to be there to see Levy’s creepy crawly eyebrows for that one.  Again, pure Jian thinking only of himself, totally incapable of imagining the lives of others.

Probably about the next day or whatever, Jian had his massive FEATURE CHAT with Coldplay.  Anyway.  I’m dating myself now.  I do remember the first hit of Coldplay, that poxy guy trudging along the shore at dusk (maybe dawn) in a trenchcoat saying “it was all . . .yellow.”  Such poetry.  And that man just never ran out of beach.

If you weren’t there for it, I’ll remind you.  It went:

“It was all. . .

. . .yellow.”

Genius.

At the time I do remember thinking (hoo no, you are NOT going to get me to think what Jian was thinking), well, here’s a one-hit wonder.  Shows what I know. 

Anyway so I did hear some of Jian’s “feature chat” with Coldplay, and the astounding thing about it all was that, over the course of what surely must have been nearly an hour, there wasn’t one. . .single. . .thing. . .that had anything to do with anything.  Nothing about the songs, where they came from, the trajectory of their career(s) and the stops along the way, what they thought they were doing as pop artists—nothing.  Families, the industry, producers, travel, evolution of pop forms, crowds and places. . . .  Poof!  Nothing.  Just Jian sucking and wheedling and wondering, “oh, jeeeee, is it so haaaaard to be a popstar??” “Oh, jeeee, it must be so tough, when people say, like, you’re, like, so, like, like, famous.”  “Jeee.”   Linehan was sooooo deep.

Actually my tv was on the other day and CBC, relentlessly pressing the Persian, had Jian on the tv, and I was pleased to see him looking doughy and greasy and fat like a roadie for a Mexican blues band I’d see on the way out of town in an Econoline at Denny’s at 3 a.m..  He did not look like the mo-delle he’s always pitched as, and I kind of liked him for that.  He looked like an actual working man.  I do think Jian works hard.  He just isn’t very smart, and never learned to think of others during his upbringing.  Give me Jian at 2 in the afternoon, and he’s my eeezzylistenin’ compadre.  10 a.m. is too early for Oprah, anywhere in the world.  That’s “Price is Right” time.

It is just a tremendous pity that Jian can never escape himself, or think.  One of Jian’s signature phrases is: “I’m curious about. . .”.  And then he just says, “what it’s like to be so famous.”  Uh, no, Jian—that is not curiosity.  That is just shallow as a wading pool.  Being curious about your grade 7 pimply desires just doesn’t count as curious, but to know that, you’d have to have been exposed to thought, to be able to think of others not yourself.

Anyway, Jian will never be able to stop batting his lashes at himself; he just is what he is, and I won’t flog him anymore.  He does belong in the dreamy enclosed dusky afternoon of general hospitals and gossipy mean girls he can redeem with a wand.

Jian makes Brian Linehan look like Christopher Hitchens.  And with his hushy-gushy "I'm Leif Garrett and so can you!!" attitude, Jian bombs arts back to the margins they’ve always tried to escape from.  Jian’s frothy sucking and blowing insists upon the continued marginalization of the arts.  In Jian’s self-cradled mind, he probably feels he is doing the opposite.  Good for him.  The effects of his Coldplay “chat” are no doubt even still reverberating around the universe.  Late at night, Jian must think: “man, I really nailed that Coldplay chat.”  To what effect?  So Tories could tee off on it?  So people concerned about the arts could be perplexed?  Yes, Jian, you sucked and blowed with Coldplay, but what, other than personal satisfaction, did you achieve?  We sure didn't learn anything about Coldplay.  I'd read TeenBeat for that.

You can see, just by the dates of my posts, that I have tried _not_ to comment.  And I’ll keep trying not to comment.  If I comment again, maybe it’ll be a mockup interview (sorry, sorry, “chat”)—but really I’ll try to stay away.  You can see by the dates of my posts that I really have tuned out.

I really have been able to turn off Jian lately, and that's good, but it is hard to turn off a station you would like to tune to.

Ok, it’s Jian Ghomeshi interviewing Atom Egoyan.

JG:  Huh-eye.

AE: Hi

JG:  So let me see, you’ve been so famous, for so loooooong.

AE: Well. Probably not here, but….

JG:  I mean, you go around the world, and there’s all these people, and you’re like, so famous!!!

AE: Well, maybe it’s different, but. . . .

JG: It’s gotta be so haaaaaaarrrrrddd!  I mean, you’re so famous, and, it’s like, how can you, like, eat in a restaurant, and, it’s like, I’d find that so, like, haaaaarrrrd.

AE: Well, we lead a pretty normal—

JG: --but that’s just it, it’s gotta be so haaaaaarrrrrddd.

AE:  Well, we. . . .

JG: Haaaaarrrd.  But it’s like you say, it’s gotta be so haaaaarrrrrrdd.

AE: Sure, but you, . . .

JG: Find it so haaaaaaarrrrrrd.  I know.  I know.  It’s haaaaaarrrrrrrrd.  Oh man it’s haaaaaaaaaaaard.  I don’t know how you do it.  You must find it. . .

AE: We …

JG: so .haaaaaaaaaarrrrrrd.  Yeah.

Hey wait, Ato, Ato, listen, we’re going to have a feature chat with Scott Baio next Thursday, then we’ve got a world exclusive with Dolly Parton—she’s never been interviewed before in Canada—and Ron Popiel’s coming in, and—look out—we’ve got Suzanne Sommers back again to talk about all the amazing contributions she’s been making to the arts since we talked to her a few weeks ago.  She’ll have lots to say, for sure.  This is going to be the first time in Canada in three weeks Suzanne Sommers has done a feature chat with anyone!!  And then we’re gonna be in Gander for a feature chat with Vic Tayback, with special guests Codmen, and if you want to get tickets, you’ve got to get to our site by Thursday.  Uh, uuhhhh.

And now we get back to out feature chat with Atom Egoyan; hang on, Eggie, we’ve got Dorkbird live in studio today, singing her “I don’t know about art but I heard it on the subway” song!

JG:  Man.  That was great.  Nice stuff.  Dorkbird!!  Live on feature CBC world exclusive.

You'll be back in a minute.

 

JG: you were saying when you took off your glasses—why don’t you do that more often, man, it’s sexee!!  You’re like, so famous, and, I bet, damn those glasses—who’d you get them from anyway?

AE: Probably worn. . .

JG: My guy too!!  I saw this guy and he was like, no, you gotta have it!  Man.

AE: Mm.

JG: Movies—it’s like, you get famous with that, all the time, right?

AE: Well, I, uh. . .

JG: an it’s like so, so, cool to be famous, but what I bet a lot of people don’t realize is that, is that, it’s, like, so hard, to be famous.  Right?

AE: Well, not famous.

JG: That’s what I meeeeeaaaaan.  It’s sooo haaaaaarrrrrddd!  You know, you know, I’m curious.  I’m curious.  I’m just curious.  Curious about just just, just what it means to be so. . .famous?  What is that like, I mean, to be so so famous, like, I mean. . . .  Aw, man.

AE: Well,   

Always pullin’ for Jian, but despairing largely. Always pullin,’ yankin’ in a 3-foot depth.

--zr
{{4 years, 4 posts on this blog.

(I don't blame you for getting bored, but I've as much a right and a responsibility as anyone to be held to complete account for what I have written.)

The first post, the one that EVERYONE read:
The Ever-Incredibly Depressing Jian Ghomeshi of CBC’s Q -- 17/09/2011

The next and final post, that a few read.
The Ever-Incredibly Depressing Jian Ghomeshi of CBC’s Q -- redux 02/03/2012

3rd post (that a few more read):
My decision to at last address some of the so many comments I got about my *2* Ghomeshi posts (my antique internet attitude has always been that you can respond and say whatever you want to say, and I won't editorialize.  However, after many comments, I decided to take up a few of the most common ones).
The ever-incredibly depressing Jian Ghomeshi treedux -- 11/02/2013

The recent post, that a few have read, now that he's really famous (and a post that's already starting to look really antique, like the once-powerful "Copps-May-Shelaghlah Swoonferit Theory of General Sexual Moral Infallibility"):
50 Shades of Jian Ghomeshi: Parsing Jian’s Infinite Self-Regard -- 28/10/2014}}