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Amazon customer review humor
----- Forwarded message from Chris Trimble <[email protected]> -----
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 10:41:56 -0800
From: Chris Trimble <[email protected]>
Subject: Amazon customer review humor
Check out these customer reviews of Bill Keane's book, "Daddy's Cap is on
Backwards". You webgineers are probably way ahead of me on this but I
thought I'd forward it.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449148165/002-2193811-6544242
Excerpt...
A reader from Brooklyn, NY , February 26, 1999
"American Werther Sets Suburbia Aflame"
For decades the raw, plangent heart of the Sunday funnies, the familiar
circular frame of Keane's Family Circus has long served as the demon-lens
aimed straight into the increasingly decentralized and prurient soul of the
American suburban milieu, an aperture through which we can almost smell the
alcaloid, claustrophobic air of Lillian B. Rubin's "worlds of pain,"
described evocatively in her classic study of lower-middle-class
sociology. Nonetheless, the tragic mainstream apparatchiks casually and
systematically dismiss Keane's ur-comic as either a dangerous pastiche of
retrograde longing for a racialist, theocratic center, or, more often, as
an intolerable vestige of the kind of canned, sanitized, hopelessly
outdated kitsch found in the tiki-torch grottoes of of Eisenhower's
cold-war TV-land, inhabited by programmatic Audie Murphy horse operas and
the June Taylor dancers kicking in unison to Glenn Miller's televisionary
obsequies. Recently, an otherwise astute friend remarked with incredulity
and a hint of outrage that Family Circus continues to be syndicated
nationally. That flash of anger is the key to understanding Keane's
persistent trumping of the American booboisie. Undeniably, the Family
Circus strip is grindingly banal. Mommy's search for the dog-collar or
Jeffy's interminable perorations on the subject of pie are lethal enough to
paralyze a pouncing lynx. But to borrow a term from art critic Arthur
C. Danto, Family Circus is a premier example of "reflexive art"- our
reaction to it, and our desire to revise and even obliterate it, tells us
more about ourselves than of the author's formal intent. As is the case in
Noh, Keane's comic strip is animated by the familiar, predictable banality
of the office party, the PTA meeting, the repetitive ritual of our own
anxious endearments and the sex act itself. We are uncomfortable but we
cannot look away, so we continue to gaze at Family Circus like those
gathered around a car wreck gazing blankly at their own mortality, for
unlike "Prince Valiant" or "Snoopy," it has too-truthfully shown us our own
lives. "Daddy's Cap is on Backwards" takes Keane's guerilla-texts from the
sleepy woods of the Sunday paper to the streets, and it's as though a
drowsing 1000-foot serpent has uncoiled itself at last. Like all American
phenomena that begin in the vernacular and suddenly submerge the culture in
chaos--Presley's Sun recordings, Rauschenberg's furious collages, Welles'
"Touch of Evil" come to mind as lesser examples--"Daddy's Cap is on
Backwards" is a meta-event that offers a rare and genuine glimpse of the
cyclopic Logos, altering our landscape by organizing it around
itself. Debating its contents would be futile; no amount of critical
discourse can pacify its matterhorn of rage, or mitigate the visceral shock
it will exert on a nation huddling in the dawn of the angry red sun of
Y2K. Drop the scales from your eyes and read this book. You have it coming.
----- End forwarded message -----
--
Gregory S. Sutter If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.pobox.com/~gsutter/
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