Posted on June 23rd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Literary Criticism.
I know some of you dislike Garrison Keillor very much. I've never been a huge Prairie Home Companion fan myself, though I like it well enough; I'm not a huge Lake Wobegon fan either, though I think it is widely misunderstood and that a critical and bitter thread running through it is pretty obvious if you aren't already sure of what you're going to be told.
As an essayist -- as a parodist and observer -- I love Keillor. I wish I'd seen his dismantling of Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo when it originally appeared in the New York Times in January, but I'm happy enough to see it now (via Making Light via Matthew Yglesias via Movering). It's the nearly transparent sort of criticism that exposes the fatuity of the work under review largely through summary and quotes, playing out length after length of rope:
In New Orleans, a young woman takes off her clothes on a balcony as young men throw Mardi Gras beads up at her. We learn that much of the city is below sea level. At the stock car race, Lévy senses that the spectators "both dread and hope for an accident." We learn that Los Angeles has no center and is one of the most polluted cities in the country. "Headed for Virginia, and for Norfolk, which is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the oldest towns in a state that was one of the original 13 in the union," Lévy writes. Yes, indeed. He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too.
Levy is full of received idiocy about America and Americans, blown up into caricature: for example Levy seems to have taken American intellectuals' own oatmeal-headed intonings about baseball as America's religion a bit too seriously:
"[T]his sport that contributes to establishing people's identities and that has truly become part of their civic and patriotic religion, which is baseball" [...] [W]hen, visiting Cooperstown ("this new Nazareth"), he finds out that Commissioner Bud Selig once laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, where Abner Doubleday is also buried, Lévy goes out of his mind. An event important only to Selig and his immediate family becomes, to Lévy, an official proclamation "before the eyes of America and the world" of Abner as "the pope of the national religion . . . that day not just the town but the entire United States joined in a celebration that had the twofold merit of associating the national pastime with the traditional rural values that Fenimore Cooper's town embodies and also with the patriotic grandeur that the name Doubleday bears." Uh, actually not. Negatory on "pope" and "national" and "entire" and "most" and "embodies" and "Doubleday."
When Levy isn't pondering ponderously about What America Means -- nothing new, evidently -- he's marveling at the freak show and collecting bumper stickers,
with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French.
To Keillor, Levy's writing is a series of overinflated balloons:
[G]ood Lord, the childlike love of paradox - America is magnificent but mad, greedy and modest, drunk with materialism and religiosity, puritan and outrageous, facing toward the future and yet obsessed with its memories. Americans' party loyalty is "very strong and very pliable, extremely tenacious and in the end somewhat empty." Existential and yet devoid of all content and direction. The partner-swapping club is both "libertine" and "conventional," "depraved" and "proper." And so the reader is fascinated and exhausted by Lévy's tedious and original thinking: "A strong bond holds America together, but a minimal one. An attachment of great force, but not fiercely resolute. A place of high - extremely high - symbolic tension, but a neutral one, a nearly empty one." And what's with the flurries of rhetorical questions? Is this how the French talk or is it something they save for books about America? "What is a Republican? What distinguishes a Republican in the America of today from a Democrat?" Lévy writes, like a student padding out a term paper. "What does this experience tell us?" he writes about the Mall of America. "What do we learn about American civilization from this mausoleum of merchandise, this funeral accumulation of false goods and nondesires in this end-of-the-world setting? What is the effect on the Americans of today of this confined space, this aquarium, where only a semblance of life seems to subsist?" And what is one to make of the series of questions - 20 in a row - about Hillary Clinton, in which Lévy implies she is seeking the White House to erase the shame of the Lewinsky affair? Was Lévy aware of the game 20 Questions, commonly played on long car trips in America? Are we to read this passage as a metaphor of American restlessness? Does he understand how irritating this is? Does he? Do you? May I stop now?
Yes, thanks. I'm sorry for quoting so much of this; I didn't know where to stop.
Posted on May 13th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Badness, Music Criticism.
Faithful readers will know that I adore flatulent prose, especially the kind that masquerades as rock criticism. Here is a stunningly wondrous example combining empty adjectival crit-speak with semiliteracy, from Mr. Shawn M. Haney at Allmusic:
Complex, awe-inspiring, and fresh with fretwork excitement, John Darnielle steps up to the mike with guitar in hand, revealing sentimental and emotionally charged acoustic gems. Leader of the Mountain Goats, Darnielle doesn't hide any sense of creativity while composing the material for this record. All Hail West Texas has juicy bits and pieces of melodic tapestry, with a forceful percussive background statement keeping the music afloat. Perhaps what most often reveal themselves during this lush and stylistically complex endeavor are the mature and naturally contemplative lyrics that Darnielle has been able to put together into his songs. Highlights such as "Riches and Wonders" and "Distant Stations" jump at the chance to grab the listener. Other tunes that break through indie-level barriers are the eclectic "Fall of the Star High School Running Back" and the original "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton." The textured feel of the variety of sounds and notes created by the Mountain Goats is appealing and gripping, a foray into sounds chilling and pristine. The delivery of the lyrics is wondrous and breathtaking during certain moments. The band's instrumental ability possesses dexterous flair, and the result is the charm of the record's immediacy and absorbing emotional impact. The tragic weakness of All Hail West Texas is perhaps its need for persistent listening in order to understand the direction of the music. However, maybe that just proves to be the magic key, and the route to further appreciation of this particular period of the Mountain Goats' music.
There's something hilariously awful about each sentence -- each clause -- and everyone will doubtless have their own favorite. I think mine is "a foray into sounds chilly and pristine," though "Darnielle doesn't hide any sense of creativity" is a fine head-scratcher.
Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Badness.
A friend who knows how much I love both Ethel Merman and musical abominations has loaned me The Ethel Merman Disco Album.
That's what I said.
Velma thinks I should upload a thirty-second snippet, but I think the imagination is sufficient.
Posted on January 26th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
Oh man this makes me happy. Oprah is having James Frey on today and is ripping him to pieces, ripping Nan Talese, ripping anyone who gets in her way. There is no doubt that she decided she -- and her readers -- were conned, and she is ticked:
Oprah opens the show by saying she's sorry; she also apologizes for calling Larry King to defend Frey. And then the kicker: Oprah says to Frey, "You betrayed millions of readers."
. . .
Frey says that he's struggled with the book, to which Oprah retorts, "No, the lie of it."
. . .
Talese says this "whole experience has been sad." Oprah snaps back, "It's not sad for me. It's embarrassing."
That last part is key. Be careful who you use.
Posted on January 12th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
I said that I expected most of Frey's celebrity fans to support and defend him. Oprah's the first:
Calling the controversy "much ado about nothing", Winfrey said the book "still resonates with me".
"Everyone has been asking me to release a statement, and I first wanted to hear what James had to say and I didn’t want that coloured by any personal conversation that I’ve had," said Winfrey, who makes her spring book selection on Monday.
"He’s said he’s had many conversations with my producers who do fully support him and obviously we support the book because we recognise that there have been thousands and hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been changed by this book."
Sure; hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives changed by L. Ron Hubbard, too.
Here's the liar himself:
"Memoir is within the genre of non-fiction. I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to say I've conned anyone. The book is 432 pages long. The total page count of disputed events [by which he means "specific incidents shown to be fabrications"] is 18, which is less than five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within the realm of what's appropriate for a memoir."
Never mind that the Smoking Gun casts serious doubt on his entire portrayal of himself, and that no one from any part of his life that he has described seems to agree with his history. The "disputed events" alone are the very heart of the book. Without those "disputed events" he is not a capital-C criminal, he did not do jail time, he was not an out-of-control hellion, he was not a big-time drug dealer, he is not wanted for anything anywhere. Without those "disputed events" he's just another well-off frat boy who drank and drove.
Credulous people and the easily impressed have given Frey lots of props for his honesty, for telling these terrible tales about himself bravely and forthrightly. But read the tone of his writing; read him in interviews. He's not being brave, he's bragging. A good redemption story needs a depraved hero. He knows no one is going to judge him for what he was, they're going to judge him by what he has become, and the worse he was, the better he is now (and, not incidentally, the more breathlessly tongues will hang out, vicariously thrilled by the depths of his depravity). I've known people who bragged about their dissolute past in this fashion; I'll bet you have too.
Posted on January 11th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness.
I am fascinated by the Smoking Gun's expose of James Frey's "non-fiction" bestseller A Million Little Pieces. Not just because he has achieved such massive success while the extent of his exaggerations and lies has gone unexposed until now, but at the willingness -- eagerness -- of people to swallow his tale of depravity and redemption, and the fervor with which people have made him an inspirational model, a hero. Not just because his tale is false, but because it rings false. There are so many implausibilities, so many questionable tale-telling embellishments, that he sounds, well, like one of those people who tell overblown stories about their lives in apparent ignorance of the incredulous eye-rolling they induce. And there was a certain amount of eye-rolling before the Smoking Gun blew the whole thing out of the water. As they note:
Since the book's 2003 publication . . . Frey has defended "A Million Little Pieces" against critic claims that parts of the book rang untrue. In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin mocked the author--a former alcoholic who has rejected the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous--for instead hewing to a cynical "memoirist's Twelve Step program." A few journalists, most notably Deborah Caulfield Rybak of Minneapolis's Star Tribune, have openly questioned the truthfulness of some book passages, especially segments dealing with Frey undergoing brutal root-canal surgery without the aid of anesthesia and an airplane trip during which an incapacitated Frey is bleeding, has a hole in his cheek, and is wearing clothes covered with "a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." And then there's the time in Paris (he's supposedly fled to Europe after jumping bail in Ohio) when, on his way to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, Frey stops into a church to have a good cry. There, a "Priest," while pretending to listen to Frey's description of his wrecked life, makes a lunge for Frey's crotch. "You must not resist God's will, my Son," says the priest. A vicious beatdown ensues, with Frey possibly killing the grasping cleric, whom the author kicked in the balls 15 times. Mon dieu!
And this stuff is trivial, this is just the stuff that's silly; it's not a patch on the meat of the book, which is creakily built on fabrication. Why did people believe this stuff? Like the popularity of urban legends even when ludicrously improabably, I think it has to do with the mind's desire for pattern -- in this case story, plot, and moral -- so a good story doesn't have to be true, because it's better than the truth, which is generally messy, irrational, and amoral. We want to believe a good story, even if it's ineptly told, full of false notes, like a bad movie:
The sheriff also dismissed the notion that a guard would order a retaliatory inmate assault--and pay for it with smokes. . . . When we commented that the assault-for-cigarettes equation seemed "cinematic" (especially coming from Frey, who has penned several screenplays), Thorp said, "Good choice of words."
I think the Smoking Gun's demolition of Frey's credibility is damning. But read it yourself. I have a prediction: Most of Frey's celebrity fans will defend him, and say that his "enemies" or "the establishment" are trying to tear down a real outsider's success story, because they're envious, because they can't handle it, because Frey is dangerous and a rare honest man who tells it like it really is. Any rationalization needed to maintain belief. Because we love a good story, but we hate to be conned.
Posted on November 20th, 2005 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Badness, Music Criticism.
I just can't get enough of the awfulness of Mackenzie Wilson. I think this one has something bad in every sentence:
"While their fourth album The Sword of God chafed at religious mainstream, Quasi is once again unapologetic for their own social criticisms with another set of indie rock fun. Hot Shit, the band's second for Touch and Go and fifth overall, is Quasi's soap box for ridiculing post-September 11 actions, mostly by those non-liberal leaders of the U.S. of A. Janet Weiss and Sam Coomes aren't outright harsh or rude; they're funny in that cunning sort of way. This time, the 11-song set is much more organized; the lush cinematic feel found on the last effort is replaced with a sparsely foliated atmosphere, and that's what makes Hot Shit's theme so important. Quasi makes an impression without being high-handed. Shared vocal duties from Coomes and Weiss is their finest glazed pop effort yet, their closest to sounding like the Flaming Lips at times ,and the album's slick title track and the piano-driven honky-tonk ballad "Seven Years Gone" find Quasi's pop/rock work-in-progress enjoyably funkadelic. Surf-rock energy of "Good Time Rock N Roll" is a reminder of why they do the thing they do -- Quasi aren't spokesmen, they just want to make music that's artistically modern and intellectually amusing. Hot Shit works in this mold and it works well. Hints of string arrangements loom in and around the album's rowdy rock sound. Once the quirky avant-garde/indie rock jaunt "White Devil's Dream" arrives, it's pretty obvious that Quasi doesn't particularly care for conservative ideals. Coomes pretty much gives America's right-wing rulers (John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell) the finger and calls Tony Blair a sellout in the process. Quasi's crass sense of humor is in full force, but throughout their witty criticisms Quasi are imaginative songwriters and conscious of their curiously cool indie rock style. Hot Shit does it again and does it better!"
She gets paid for this! Someone gets paid to "edit" her!
Posted on October 30th, 2005 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Badness.
Department of instant response:
So, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Reviews made this sound right up my alley. Boy do I not get it. It's well-crafted but unmemorable, the classic downfall of mediocre pop. Good harmonies but bland melodies.
Maybe it would grow on me, but there's one huge thing working against it: the unbearable lead vocalist. I like a lot of abrasive singers -- I mean, I listen to the Danielson Famile with pleasure -- but this guy has that piercing male whine combined with my least favorite affectation this side of melisma: he puts a little anguished choke or break of voice or agonised scratch into every fucking line. He's like a cross between Robert Smith and Gordon Gano. I want to smack him.