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Kardashi-trash

I read (and I'm not ashamed to say, enjoyed) Kourtney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian's roman à clef, Dollhouse, for work. My review is here (the headline is, obviously, all my doing) and it explains why I was seduced by its trashy charm (er, charmlessness). Also, now that everyone hates them, I kind of love them? Predictable, but there you go.

Anyway, I thought I'd present some of my favorite sentences/passages as a supplement to my praise. They're below the cut. I'm not saying that you need to run out and buy Dollhouse, but I am saying that there are far worse ways to liquefy your brain.

Weekly reader

My still-new day job (at The Daily) is taking up a lot of the brain space I've devoted to this blog, particularly because I can basically write about whatever I want within pop culture (which is what I've always done here). Since it's sometimes hard to track down stuff from The Daily, I'm going to start to post regular link roundups of some of my stuff. I usually tweet that stuff, but that's so ephemeral, too. The idea of self-promotion has always made me feel ill at ease, but the idea of coming off as less active makes me feel worse. The former wins out.

Here are some things I've written since starting a few weeks ago:

On music

Justin Bieber Under the Mistletoe album review
Bai Ling "Rehab" single review
Mary J. Blige featuring Drake "Mr. Wrong" single review
David Lynch Crazy Clown Time album review

On movies

Paranormal Activity 3 review

On TV

Horror TV essay (Walking Dead, American Horror Story, etc.)
Fairy tale TV essay (Once Upon a Time vs. Grimm)

On books

Chuck Palahniuk video Q&A (this is heavily condensed, which is unfortunate since we talked about Judy Blume, among things that were excised, but whatever -- editing me shorter is best left to others)

I'll do these about once a week. Hope they don't make you puke!

Starting Over again

This weekend, my review of La Toya Jackson's second memoir, Starting Over, ran in The Daily. I didn't write the headline, so at first I freaked out a little, since much of the book is about her trying to correct misconceptions about her mistakes of the past. But then I thought about it and it's ultimately true: she's not sorry. She voices regret and points a lot of fingers (only on rare occasions at herself), but the weird thing is that she is unapologetic. I don't think she should be (there's nothing wrong with Playboy!), but she acts like she should be? She's pulling a Linda Lovelace and it's weird. I really didn't like Linda Lovelace (her memoir is such a crock of shit!) and I don't want to not like La Toya!

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Starting Over for many of the same reasons that I loved her first book. La Toya Jackson is adorably clueless. There's no recognition, for example, that we have no reason to trust her after she basically admits to deceiving us in her first book (Jack Gordon, her dead scumbag of an ex-husband, was the guiding hand behind the salacious allegations against her family members, supposedly). Who's to say that in 20 years' time, she won't come out with another book that said that Jeffré Phillips and his overemphasized syllable didn't force her to fabricate much of Starting Over?

Anyway, all of the abuse stuff aside (which is awful and harrowing if not gratuitous, as it stretches on for about 150 pages), Starting Over is fun and funny! I recommend it! Just a few more points/lines that I couldn't fit into my review, but still think are worth another chuckle:

You should read Wifey

When I was a child devouring Judy Blume's catalog, I remember seeing Wifey on my mom's bookshelf and being forbidden from reading it when I expressed completist interest in it. I vowed one day to read it and promptly forgot about that for years and years until recently. (Similarly, I still haven't seen the explicit strip club scene of Flashdance -- despite having seen that movie dozens of times, all my viewings took place in the early days of VHS while accompanied by an adult, who'd promptly cover my eyes whenever the...well, whenever whatever happened happened. I can't be sure because, again, I haven't seen it.)

Anyway, I did finally read Wifey and I urge anyone who's looking for a trashy beach read this summer to do the same. You will read it in five minutes and laugh the entire way through. Sexually unsatisfied yuppies in the suburbs say the darnest things! Blume wisely keeps the most outlandish bits confined to her character's dialogue (no-fault omniscience sometimes feels like a cheat, but here it just feels like the best way to tell a story about ridiculous people). She also doesn't let anyone off easy for their poor judgment. I love the way she writes with giant spaces for you to fill in (the fact that she doesn't get bogged down in description influenced me profoundly, for better or worse). It's so easy to read and never feels condescending. Also, the book is about a housewife who gets turned out after seeing a guy jump off a motorcycle in front of her house and jerk off (to completion!). (A starred-and-striped helmet is involved!) What's not to love?

Anyway, the best way I can advocate for picking this up without giving too much away is to list you some of my favorite sentences (and in some irresistible cases, my favorite sentence pairs). Here is your warning: they are naughty...or at least, that's the idea. This book is a product of a time when women talking about and being proactive in their search for sexual satisfaction could still be shocking. I know that things aren't perfect now, but girl talk about sex is now a channel in the cable box of our pop culture. That is to say that this book is largely divorced from the context that made it happen/shocking (/important?), and so taking sentences even further out of context only seems right.

Things I learned from Hot Stuff

Alice Echols' Hot Stuff, recently out in paperback, is maybe my favorite music book ever. Instead of being a straight history of disco, it examines the genre in the various ways it reflected and helped mold '70s culture. There is something I didn't know on virtually every page (and I love disco enough to have already done a ton of research on it). Below is a list of the things that sent my pen underlining. I don't have much to add to a lot of these items because they are fascinating on their own. Book report time!

Little Jackson lost

"The word normal was never used to describe me," Janet Jackson claims in her new...erm, nonfiction book, True You. Perhaps this is true, but True You should cause at least a few to label her boring and pointless. If no one has yet, I'm happy to be the first. I had no idea what True You was before I read it, and after reading it, I still have no idea what it is.

Tiger Mother: What a character!

The most meaningful time Amy Chua (the much reviled and read "Tiger Mother" of recent controversy to the tune of over 7,000 comments on her book's first published excerpt) makes a person cry in her latest book, it is not either of her daughters being raised by Chua's iron fist who are spilling the tears. It's a stranger at a party, who leaves after hearing Chua tell a story about calling one of her daughters "garbage." After seeing that reaction and otherwise receiving information on how offensive her behavior can come off (she hurts other mothers' feelings repeatedly as she denies invitations for playdates on behalf of her girls), I have no doubt that she knew that Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was the book she had to write. With dark humor and Ann Coulter-like provocation, Chua plays up her own ghoulishness on every page. In addition to the countless things that by Western eyes look like terrible things to say to one's child, she informs us that she knows how to use a chainsaw (a product of obeying her father strictly!) and probably caused the death of a pair of rabbits her husband bought her daughters that she never had interest in caring for ("Eventually, the rabbits mysteriously escaped," is how she ominously concludes that story). She describes her intonation as vicious and herself as "compulsively cruel" in a book whose surface objective is to defend her take on the "Chinese way" of parenting (readers should obviously beware of any cultural study that limits itself to one subject). For someone who claims that she's "not very good at enjoying life," she sounds like she's having a blast.

Brother's keeper

Do you know how you tell if a Jackson’s lying? Their lips are moving! Or, in the case of La Toya Jackson, her pen was moving. Er, make that her ghostwriter's pen was moving. It zipped along to the deliriously tall tales that fill her 1991 memoir La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family. Now that the Jacksons are something to obsess about all over again (are you sick of them yet? I'm not!), La Toya is the deliciously trashy beach reading that comes along but once a summer. There's something morbidly telling about the fact that up until June 25, this shit went for pennies on eBay (my boyfriend bought it for me a few years ago for literally $0.01) and it now starts at almost $50 in Amazon's Marketplace. I'm not judging: it wasn't until this summer that I finally cracked the spine. And I'm so glad that I did.

La Toya's fascinated me for a while now. She's a three-legged dog in a family of champion racers. She is runty in sight, sound and intellect. She's so desperate for attention that, even today, all it takes is some charity advocacy to wind her into a frenzy (scroll down). That's pure camera-driven adrenalin right there. It's tragic, the lengths she's gone to and the ears she's damaged in search of even Jermaine-level success. The only thing sadder than watching her is not watching, since she's so needy for attention.

Desperate enough to be a telling reflection of its "author" (even if it's by way of fun-house mirror), La Toya is appropriately full of lies. It climaxes with a series of her own family's attempts to kidnap her after she finally left their Encino compound Hayvenhurst at around age 30. Reading this section, I was like, "Toy, no one likes you enough to put that much effort into being near you. Stop flattering yourself by way of creating a plot point!" There are pages on end devoted to exonerating her then-husband Jack Gordon, who was accused of bribing feds for the approval of some slot-like gambling machine. Reading page upon page of obviously planted defense, my eyes glazed over but not so much that they kept me from scrawling in the margin, "WHO FUCKING CARES?" I wanted to get back to the dirt about Jermaine's bitch-assness (he was so jealous, he pronounced Thriller a flop upon pre-release listens) and Janet's anti-Semitism and Michael's introspection inspired by (what else?) The Twilight Zone ("...He was sitting in front of the TV asking himself, 'Who am I? Am I really real?'") or La Toya's own delusions of grandeur ("['Wanna Be Startin' Something' is] not about Michael at all, it's about the friction between me and my sisters-in-law"). Who knows what in there is true? (Somehow I just can't picture Janet as a Jew-hater.) Who's gonna let it stop them from being entertained by the possibilities?

To La Toya's credit, she did blow the lid off of how severely fucked-up the Jackson clan is. I'm inclined to believe virtually everything she says about Joe Jackson's abuse (it definitely is a buzz-kill in the scheme of the book, but not enough to make the entire thing a downer -- all else is just too ridiculous). Last week, in going over my archived footage for this post, I found and posted a Phil Donahue Show clip from '89, in which he raves about how scandal- and drug-free all the Jacksons were and how Joseph and Katherine are to be praised. I know he's an asshole, but the fact that anyone could say that with a straight face is pretty amazing considering all that's transpired in the past two decades. And La Toya, for better or worse, wielded the lightning rod as though it were a baton in a parade.

And people were pissed! Check out this clip from a different Donahue appearance (from '91), in which the crowd is livid that she'd be telling her family's secrets. I mean, they are in so many words accusing her of opportunism, which: fair enough. I love that she is both belligerent and completely air-headed in response. Either response wouldn't have helped her cause, but the two together makes this thing full-on farce:

So yeah, the point is that she's kinda sad, really desperate, a little fun and totally hilarious. A sampling of my favorite quotes from her memoir is below. Watch out though: read them and you're gonna get rocked!

Terrorist sympathy

Some books are about language; Chuck Palahniuk's recent Pygmy is about second language (or third or fourth or...). It has a reputation for being difficult, thanks to the stilted English of its foreign narrator referred to as "Pygmy," an "exchange student" from somewhere in some Middle American town who's actually a terrorist with a culture-obliterating objective. To those who aren't able to get through it: try harder. Pygmy is the novelization of the joy resulting from the unwitting wordplay of non-native tongues. (And I say that in good-natured admiration, not derision -- anyone who's butchering a second language is doing better than I am. I don't even own a cleaver.) All the bluntness and literalism of Pygmy's English is also present in his interpretation of American culture, which means that the book is full of gems like this rant against school choir:

"All must sing nonsense or no allowed college, no advanced physics and training. Force compelled to sing how yearning for location on top arched spectrum of light wavelengths created by precipitate. Exact song expressed Judy Garland, woeful martyr, slaughtered pawn of capitalist entertainment machine combined pharmaceutical complex.”

Because I think discussion is a more worthy medium than recommendation, I don't tend to endorse things as my sole response, but I'm telling you now: if ESL-humor is something you enjoy, read this fucking book. I enjoyed every word of it. I got a little teary, even, when it was done, not because of the content (even though the end is kind of a bummer in its upbeat way) but because I'm going to miss Pygmy's world view. Among his offerings, I will miss:

• His rumbling about pop music ("insane garbage lyrics...musical corn syrup")
• His backhanded salutations to his elders ("Venerate ancestor, much respected soon to be rotting corpse")
• His open disdain for organized religion (he refers to a priest as "crafty stooge of superstition," and "licking viper of evil")
• His morbidly detached flashes of insight ("Perhaps true profound affection defined by no entering vagina without consent")
• His cultural criticism ("Punish for sodomy by place operative me imprisoned full lifetime accompanied numerous sodomites. Such the absurdity American legal justice")
• And his funny way of referring to the most banal elements of American life ("evil puppet maid of parking meters," "Pig of Guinea").

I'll also miss Palahniuk's skewering of things like spelling bees and stealing office supplies and permanently zonked, oversexed parents, again all taken to delightfully absurd lengths (the son in Pygmy's host family bought his dad a subscription to a porn site for Christmas because "at least this ways we know they’re home...and not out looking for trouble”). It's a cynical book, but it never seems quite as mean as other stuff I've read by Palahniuk or by others who go bam-slam with vulgarity and satire in an attempt to critique American culture. The targets may be easy, but the lighthearted tone makes it all feel a lot less obvious.

There's also, I think, such a human message ultimately about people being people, no matter how aggressively they're programmed, no matter how terroristic their objectives. (Not to mention the hypocrisy of attacking a culture you find heinous by acting heinous, as terrorists often do.) At its most profound, the book is a dance between beauty and offense and I realized that early on. It was after an anal rape that I fell in love:

"Electric-bolt eyes of bully bleeding water. Blue star of fighting anus leak blood into thin stripes down white legs. Everywhere patriotic. Here so great American nation."

Pygmy's (male bully) rape victim goes on to fall in love with him, and once he expresses this, Pygmy explains to him that he's suffering from Stockholm syndrome, and that he's bonded with his aggressor because he's unable to accept his powerlessness and helplessness (this is, of course, explained in much choppier language). I could relate to that victim: with descriptions so vividly ironic and darkly hilarious filling Pygmy, it's hard to resist equating violence with love.

Making sense of Kanye

I wish I could quit Kanye, but the fact of the matter is that his whims and tantrums will never not be fascinating to me. Even if I'm gagging with distaste, I'm still paying attention, and so, like a kicking and screaming child, Kanye wins. I had many issues with the words he spoke in the February cover story of Vibe, and instead of doing my usual complaining-about-Kanye rant, I decided a different approach. I know the writer of the piece, Sean Fennessey, so I got on the phone for a discussion about the piece -- an interview on the interview, if you will -- as well as the man himself. "Rappers just never unravel, ever," says Sean on Kanye's...specialness. For better or worse, I'm captivated for the same reason.

[I know that the posting of this could have been a bit more timely, as the interview's been out for a while, but whatever, I was sick last week and napping was always a more attractive alternative to transcribing. Regardless, I still feel like this stuff is relevant. It's not like Kanye or his immaturity are going anywhere, you know?]