June 25–July 2, 1998

books|review

Kenny G. Sucks, and Other Big News

Joe Queenan's one of the more prolific freelance writers around, appearing in highbrow places like the Wall Street Journal and middlebrow magazines like TV Guide. He therefore elected to spend 1996-1997 sampling lowbrow American pop culture: "I would throw off the mask of the urbane sophisticate and plunge head first into the culture of the masses, setting aside the haughty pretensions and drowning myself in the hurly-burly world of the hoi polloi."

Queenan emerged from his year describing himself as "a survivor of the cultural equivalent of the Bataan Death March." Lowest common denominator entertainment, it turns out, was even lower than he anticipated.

His dispatches from the pop culture front make up the fitfully amusing Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon. The book's promotional material champions Queenan as a top contemporary satirist. Apparently, calling lousy pop culture "lousy" passes for savage political incorrectness these days. I'm reminded of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who when told that 90 percent of sci-fi writing was crud, replied with Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

Fittingly, only about 10 percent of Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon rises above cruddiness. Take his trip to the video store. Love Story? "I suspected Jimi Hendrix's death may have had something to do with watching this film on an empty stomach." The Cannonball Run II? "A perfect example of something I expected to be awful that unexpectedly turned out to be far worse than I could have ever envisioned in my wildest dreams."

He travels to Branson, MO (or, as he calls it, "Mulefuckers Mecca"), to watch the Osmonds and Bobby Vinton. He describes the polo shirt-wearing Branson tourists as "decent people. Likable people. People who hold the door for you. The kind of people you wouldn't mind being stuck in a foxhole or a lifeboat with. You just don't want to be stuck in a conversation with them." Clearly, these rubes aren't doing the important things, like writing smarmy pop culture articles for a living.

I don't begrudge Queenan his cynicism; an Irish Catholic upbringing and a lifelong devotion to the Phillies can make pessimists of the best of men. But is the public really clamoring for 194 pages breathlessly informing us that Cats is "pure pain… sheer torture… the worst thing on the entire planet" or that "Kenny G. sucks. Kenny Loggins sucks. Kenny Rogers sucks"? Is there anybody in the English-speaking world over the age of 20 who hasn't already reached these conclusions?

One of Queenan's best pieces ever, which appears in his compilation If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be In Trouble, was a point-by-point attack on Woody Allen's movies—an attack written long before the Soon-Yi affair, when critics still regarded Allen as the Messiah. That essay took talent and a certain amount of guts. Now, Queenan is reduced to reminding us that Renaissance Faires are "profoundly idiotic." Thanks, Joe, for clearing that up.

Joe Queenan reads from Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America (Hyperion, 194 p., $21.95) on Friday, June 26, 7:30 p.m., at Borders Book Shop, 1727 Walnut St., 568-7400.

-Andrew Milner