Largely forgettable.
New York City woman-about-town’s memoir about her life-as-performance-art quest to be fashionably “uncool.”
Inspired by her experiences as a Bloomingdale’s Christmas elf, art-school grad and downtown NYC scenester Rev Jen (Live Nude Elf, 2009) began carefully forming her uncool identity in the early ’90s by wearing Spock-like elf-ear attachments. Recalling her days as a young Lower East Side denizen in the mid-’90s, Jen describes her tame arty antics as grand, anarchic gestures of rebellion against the fusty establishment. She became known for her reactionary Anti-Slam poetry night, which fostered an environment of cuddly uncritical acceptance for wannabe slam-poets with a strict set of rules against any kind of harassment from the audience. Her promotion of art-damaged egalitarianism extended to her creation of an all-admission clique called the “Art Stars,” which turned out to be little more than an alcoholic support group for directionless art-scene dregs. In between her persistently meaningless nightlife activities, she drifted from one low-paying job to the next, drank a lot, had sex with men who treated her badly, and experimented with LSD, all while managing to pay rent on her LES apartment. Rev Jen is perpetually obsessed with what’s “cool” and what’s “uncool,” and her actions always end up blurring the line between the two. Although she styled herself as an outcast rebelling against the prevailing highbrow culture of the day, the author seemed ultimately reluctant to mix with truly unhip people: like, say, her schoolmates who listened to Phil Collins and the Republican rednecks who frightened her at a Charlie Daniels concert. Naturally, as she attained local celeb status for being a kitsch-loving contrarian, she finally got to frolic among extremely “cool” people: namely, transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd and hyper-confessional author Jonathan Ames, among others.
Largely forgettable.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3166-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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