"I love the Gen Z’s. I love their attitude. They think the world is in a bad place and that we’ve got to make it better."

"That’s their thing. They’re into making things better. I’m a Gen Z, too. I moved to New York from Detroit at 24, and I’m still 24 in my head, so they’re my people. The Gen Z’s only like talking to people their own age, and since they can tell I’m like them, they talk to me. If someone looks over 30, I don’t even interview them.... I never know who these people are. I don’t read the newspaper or follow the news. I cry when I read the news, so why would I? But I don’t get star-struck. Back in the 1970s, I met every celebrity there ever was at Studio 54, where I was a house photographer, so I don’t get star-struck."

Said Judi Jupiter, quoted in "Judi Jupiter, a 76-Year-Old Social Media Star, Is Gen Z at Heart/In the 1970s, she photographed Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry on wild nights at Studio 54. Now she’s chronicling a new generation" (NYT)(that's a gift link, because there are a lot of photos).

And here's her Instagram, so you can check out the videography.

That one quote really struck me: "I don’t read the newspaper or follow the news. I cry when I read the news, so why would I?" It's a good question. You do not have to read the news. You can abstain.

And by the way, you don't have to answer when people prod you to reveal your politics.

People have been pushing me to listen to this or that episode of Joe Rogan — usually about vaccines — but I've felt resistant. Just wasn't up for it.

But then I saw the new episode was Carrot Top and I eagerly clicked and listened:

How can I explain my mood? I'm tired of hearing details about coronavirus and, more generally, pop culture debate about science topics that I'm not going to study with any expertise. And Carrot Top seemed like the perfect contrast to all that. A random celebrity that I knew but didn't care about. Is it just lockdown fatigue? Yeah, I'm tired of talking about it and hearing people angst about it. It's part of nature, so it's like talking about the weather. And it's been 2 years.

I love that Joe and Carrot Top talked about how Carrot Top has long been abused as a sort of punchline as if everyone understands him to be a bad comedian. No one knows what it's like to be hated — to be fated — to telling only prop jokes:

 

"It's like Nickelback...."

"That sounds absurd, but, if Trump is our President, and our Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is posing with a sheet of cash, who’s to say that [Gene] Simmons isn’t coursing through the body politic?"

"The book’s top Amazon review, at present, calls it a 'raw dose of reality.' And it does reflect a hard truth: that Simmons and his ilk have succeeded in yoking the nihilism of the rock age to a policing, rapacious conservatism. 'I made a living spitting blood, sticking my tongue out, and being as grotesque and horrifying as possible,' he brags. Were it written in the present tense, it would be the truest sentence in the book."

From "How to Get Power (and Banned from Fox News), According to Gene Simmons" by Dan Piepenbring in The New Yorker.

The book is "On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can Get More Power" — published last November. That's also when the New Yorker article was published, but for some reason the New Yorker is promoting it on Facebook this morning.

Since we're already talking about psychopaths this morning, let me quote this too:

In its most confounding passage, “On Power” finds a model in Frank Underwood, from “House of Cards.” True, Underwood is a murderer, but he exemplifies a kind of can-do psychopathy that Simmons admires. “If you find psychopaths terrifying, it’s likely because they are the most effective at the evil they do,” he writes. “So I would ask you to seize this power for yourself. . . . Be a psychopath with a conscience.” There is no such thing, of course, just as there is no such person as Underwood; there’s only Kevin Spacey, whose abuses of power have left him in disgrace.