I Am Chuck Bass

Discussed: Terrence McKenna’s ‘Food Of The Gods’, Heart Attack On A Plate, Franchised Frozen Drinks Taste Better, Verbal Prowess Of The Chinook Indians, Wisely Using The Unabbreviated Name, Nielsen Schmielsen, Thompson Twins: Trailblazers, Drunk On Deified Politicians, They Never Get Taken Home To Meet Mom, Overrated Documentaries

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

Perhaps the CW was getting too greedy with their breakfast of hype smoothie, lunch of grilled critical buzz sandwich and dinner of fettuccine with drizzled delusions of ever expanding viewership.

But the release of Monday’s ratings came served as a 64oz Big Gulp of Ipecac for those same muckety mucks at the CW.

As the Huffington Post reported:

ABC Family’s “Secret Life of the American Teenager” smashed network rating records with its season premiere Monday night — and in the process, beat the CW’s similarly targeted “Gossip Girl” head to head at 8PM.

Last August, “Secret Life” topped ratings for the first season of “Gossip Girl,” but its impressive ratings victory Monday evening suggests trouble for the CW hit, which is heavily buzzed-about but has never been a breakout ratings hit.

Really? “Secret Life of the American Teenager”?! This surely must be a sign of the apocalypse, as the preview we saw for that show looked horrendous and hilarious, the latter ever unintentionally so. Are these dreamy days of Obama optimism so filled with radiant do goodery that Gossip GIrl has lost it’s bad boy/girl charm? Or is it simply a saturation of the GG market with episode after episode - a virtual never ending season peppered with willy nilly scattershot hiatuses complicating its formal narrative consumption? You be the judge; talk amongst yourselves, but these are dark days indeed.

XOXO

Discussed: Borderless Superhighways, NAFTA, The Council on Foreign Relations, Obama’s Bad Acting When Discussing These Things, Hilarious Comments On Youtube Promising Salvation Soon, End of Days

MAYBE.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the shiny Amero. Seen Lou Dobbs indignant of the forming of a North American Union. Or have a friend down with Ron Paul’s plan to take back the country.

Whatever the case may be, the theory that Canada, America and Mexico are to merge into one North American Union, ridding itself of individual currencies to be replaced by the Amero, all facilitated by this current engineered collapse of the economy – is a narrative so thrilling in its simultaneous absurdity and perfect plausibility, that it could have only come from the ingenious team behind Gossip Girl, who masterfully craft stories like this every week. I mean, the whole thing could almost pass as the plot outline for Season 7. And after all, these are the same people who included a Skull and Bones secret society storyline in the “New Haven Can Wait” episode – so we know they’re clued into the whole thing.

We offer up this irrefutable evidence to you our loyal readers – what’s your verdict?

To the comments box!

XOXO.

Discussed: “Updating Winston Churchill: ‘IACB.com is speechless, and it takes 642 words to express it’s speechlessness’”, Immanuel Kant’s ‘The Sublime’, Verbose Haters Too Lazy To Really Read, Texting and Tee-heeing Scientists (In Real Life), Shortcomings Of Current Trends and Tropes In Journalism, Will Someone From GG Please Email and Give Us Our Due, Constellations Centaurus and Musca, Great Faux Pas in Hairstyle History, Hot Sex, Gingko Increases Blood Flow, Ho Hum Actors, The Dandy Warhols Did Make A Good Album Once, Animals As Style Gurus

CHUCK IN ASCENSION, CHUCK IN WORLD DOMINATION

Well, well, well – what can we say? Sometimes things happen in life that are beyond words. While some could say we’re prone to excess hyperbole and hype, and some have levied the derogatory judgment on this site as “dense prose,” it doesn’t take a Gossip Girl-faithful nuclear physicist to attempt to tell you precisely how revelatory and amazing “Chuck In Real Life” was. This was next-level television, or the argument could be made, next level narrative entertainment. As C might say “game changing.”

Usually one can run through a recap of the episode noting certain witticisms (“Since You’ve Been Gone was your ring tone”) or improbably awesome happenings, (Chuck lobbing a Nair-tini), but last nights episode was effective, subtle, emotional manipulations of characters and story lines long in the making, not surprisingly, focusing on the most complex and arguably moral character, Chuck Bass. One needn’t even deconstruct the Gossip Girl “Womanizer” promo (borrowing heavily from this site’s content and M.O.) airing during the commercial break to see just to what extent he’s become the crux of the show.

Families, friendship, revenge, business, gentrification, trust and True Love were all on display this week, all filtered through the searing stare of Chuck and instead of offering trite answers written by adults and voiced through kids, we were mainly left with a number of questions: Was Chuck falling for Vanessa? Did the stereotypically soulful African-American bar owner truly invigorate his sense of justice? What toll does Bart’s family-as-business philosophy take? And his complexifying frustrated love for Blair… well, uhh, what of it? (…)

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Discussed: What’s To Come; Two Teenage Sexpots Cat Fighting; Blair & Serena’s Legs; Vote No On Prop 8 (In California); We’ll Give You A Hint; It’s Not Vincent Gallo; The Man In The Photo Above Is Going To Be The Next President, And I’m Not Talking About The Pedophile

YES!
Alright, let’s get into this.

First of all, a week of no Gossip Girl (see last two posts) has lead us to this post, where we’re discussing a bit more “gossip” than usual. But this is all Grade A GG Gossip, so it’ll do.

Above is the trailer for this week’s episode of GG. As you can see, Nate is back (and with a red-panted Chuck Bass), Serena is going to piss on Blair’s parade at Yale, and S&B get themselves in what looks to be a cat fight (see picture below).

“You did not just do that.”
Yes Serena. She just did that.

Another Gossip Girl blog, which shall go nameless, is hosting a poll called “Penn Badgley or Ed Westwick: Who Would You Rather…You Know.” And our boy Ed/Chuck is winning by a whopping 62% to 37%

But right now we need to get to work. There’s a lot more to come. The next couple weeks here at I AM CHUCK BASS are going to be jam-fucking-packed – we’ve got an Elements of Style, some hot gossip about Serena’s new boyfriend who may or may not be named after a very famous & pompous NYC downtown art star, what promises to be a very insightful edition of The Archibalds, and a breakdown of Blair & Serena that will shake the writers/creators of GG to their core.

So stay tuned, because looking at any other blog on the internet is frankly a complete waste of your hard-worked-for free time (or your not-worked-for-procrastination-at-work-time)

You Know You Love Us,
XOXO,
B&C

IN WHICH WE HAVE TO WAIT 7 MORE AGONIZINGLY LONG DAYS AND NIGHTS UNTIL A NEW GOSSIP GIRL AIRS

Discussed: Bez, The Greatest Band Member And Dancer Of All Time; Blind Faith; Further Fodder For Agnosticism; NYU Alumni Say He’s Not Nice; We Are Awesome; Flow Charts Sound Better With You, Harry Bridges

For those of us looking forward to the reestablishment of our faith in humanity that accompanies every new Monday and the verdant bounty of Gossip Girl goodness it brings, creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage have a message for all of us: “Fuck. Off.”

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Discussed: Two Bald Headed Macroeconomists, Men’s Magazines Being a Little Bit Behind The Curve, Print Media’s Shoddy Yet Over Publicized Coverage Of Gossip Girl, Berger’s ‘Ways Of Seeing’

Here at I Am Chuck Bass, we pride ourselves in our integrity and occasional journalistic wit. We aim to present The Modern Man’s Guide to Gossip Girl by using the show as an intellectual jumping off point for a wide range of topics. We strive to bring a unique view of the world, as seen through the looking glass of the best show on television. But we also strive to entertain, to be a place you can escape to, in between refreshing your iPhone Stocks app, and learning how to tie super-efficient noose knots.

On that note, the two best things we’ve seen this week (aside from Dan’s mean right hook)…

We all watch Gossip Girl for myriad reasons, be it Becks or Chuck, Little J or Eleanor. Many different things may lead us to become fans the show – a breakup, the writing, boredom – but the most important thing that we cannot ever loose touch with is what draws all to this show in the first place: These people are unbelievably good looking and sometimes they sleep with each other.

Discussed: Being Intensely Sorry for Two Days With No New Posts, Special Presents for You, Fish-Colored Clothing, Two Dark Spaces Full of Sex, The Art of The Modern Vampire, Bad LA Nightclubs You Go To Only When You’re Single, Making Out

We don’t usually post sneak previews on here, but this is a special occasion as I will personally retract my previous “letter to the creators” re: my fears about the direction the show was threatening to take in this week’s episode, if this clip is any indicator of what’s to come:

“I don’t think of you”, “Are you gay?”, “You’re lucky I’m bored” and the outfit? Jesus. All classic Chuck-Bassian lines. The only thing that could be better than this is the reaction it will draw from Serena to see Dan walking through some fashion week party in a salmon-colored suit, a bow tie, wing tips, and two girls on his arm, escorting them into the back of Chuck’s limo (and we all know what happens in that black box of passion).

Now if only we could get Nate & Dan to hang out, as they’d obviously really hit it off then we’d finally be able to kick it with all of our friends at once. You see, that’s the problem with the guys on GG. They’re like those friends you have that you really get along with, but they can’t stand to be around each other until you have a birthday one year, and they’re all forced to hang out. They get drunk and really hit it off, and then next thing you know they’re playing tennis every Sunday morning and their girlfriends get “really close”, and you haven’t seen either of them in three months. That’s what we call vampiring.

P.S. I went out to this place in Los Angeles last night called Teddy’s. It’s a really cheesy nightlife place (I say “nightlife place” because it’s too big to be a bar, and the music isn’t good enough to be a club). But at the end of the night they played that new Kanye West track, “Love Lockdown”. And suddenly everyone was singing and making out. The whole place turned into Chuck’s bedoom! B loves this track for some reason, but I am not as on board (having said that I’ve been listening to it on repeat as I write). I do like the drums. But we just wish someone else who is a better more confident singer had sung it. Jamie Lidell anyone?

Also, someone informed me this is the most downloaded single of all time on iTunes. I’ll admit the drums are great.

Also, let’s get some guesses as to how far into the season we’ll have to get before we’ll get a Kanye track on Gossip Girl. I believe B has a thing or two to say about their music supervision…(hint, hint, more to come!)

DISCUSSED: Career Catapulting 80s Cinema, The Ascent of the Modern Man, the Transgressive Powers of Polar Fleece, Strong Successful Women are Hot

R.I.P. MARGARET COLIN AS BEST ACTOR ON GOSSIP GIRL
ENTER WALLACE SHAWN, THE IDEAL MODERN MAN!

Lighting up the screen since ‘Pretty In Pink’ and now casually giving veritable master classes in classy television acting to Upper East Siders, Margaret Colin’s G.G. thespian reign has gone unchallenged, UNTIL NOW.

Word has it that NY stage star Wallace Shawn will be joining the cast of Gossip Girl as Serena’s new boyfriend’s (boooo!) dad.

“Inconceivable!” you might say.
“Fuck You!” we say.

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Two guys (B & C) blindsided by their love of Gossip Girl, bring you a slightly more masculine take on the Best Show On Television.