SOTC On the Media: An Interview with ASSME's Aaron Gell

Do not attempt to attend this party.

ASSME, sometimes known as the American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites, is a newly launched organization for purposes unclear, or not quite known, or just for drinking--again, unclear. Last week, the organization hosted a party with an open bar and everything, its own kind of achievement in an otherwise pathetic media climate. I went, then nearly passed out due to the insane sickness I was battling at the time. So uh--it might have been fun?

ASSME founder and former Radar editor Aaron Gell did, however, make good on his website's offer to "discourse on the state of the media business for a gloom-and-doom trend piece or cable news segment." I never wrote the trend piece but Gell and I did discourse, briefly, and so in the spirit of media pieces that never quite spread their wings and flew, SOTC offers this transcript of our conversation.

What exactly is ASSME? I can't quite tell if it's a prank, a one-night only thing, a charity drive, etc. All of the above?

Good question. ASSME started out as a joke, the sort of dumb idea you have occasionally but don't act on because, when you're working, who has any time? I guess that's the silver lining of unemployment. I was talking to a friend from Radar about it, our photo editor Greg Garry, who's also a great party promoter, and we decided to throw a party and basically curse the darkness out there in the media world.

So the basic answer, for now is, it's a party, a website, and a way of life. The response has been pretty great, so there's a lot of talk about turning it into something real down the road. We'll see. Another party, for sure.

One funny thing about actually delivering on ASSME in real life is that it casts you as a kind of pied-piper of all these unemployed media elites. You're the ringleader now. Do you think people will end up with any work out of this?

Didn't the Pied Piper lead a bunch of children off a cliff or something? So I don't know if that analogy is apt, or I hope not! And I wouldn't want to overstate anything...We're offering people free booze, so their allegiance may well stop when the p.i.n.k. vodka runs out.

But at the same time, idle hands are the devil's plaything and there are a ton of idle hands around now and so maybe I can be the devil. It would be great to find a way to make use of some of the talent out there and help us all avoid law school. I've had a lot of people approach me with ideas. Without giving too much away, I'd say that between getting a lot of people sloppy drunk and completely reinventing the media there's a lot of wide open space, and we'll probably wind up in there somewhere.