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sticky
Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Offer
by Rax King
193 pages. Old Books. Paper, $15.95.
Chuck Klosterman in his book “The nineties,” He argues that that decade was the last that really felt like a decade, with its own unwavering values, fashions, and ideas. We have seemed to have lived ever since, he said, in a “perpetual now period.”
I’m roughly in Klosterman’s age group (eight years older), and this comment seems valid to me. Yet young people with a rising tide are here to take our place and they have to feel otherwise.
For example, in Rax King’s exuberant book Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We have to Offer, he comes to portray the late experience as the most vivid, tangible, and ecstatic moment to hit puberty since time-lapse. mind.
King’s book is a finely tuned celebration of “bad” taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, “Jersey Beach,” The Cheesecake Factory, the movie “Josie and the Pussycats”, and (in this book’s silkiest essay) Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist.
It’s part of King’s success that he writes about these things without even appearing to crouch once while speaking of Sontag, Updike, Penelope, and Odysseus.
She wears her literacy like a nose stud. For example, if a DJ refers to Creed as “testosterone rockers from Tallahassee,” King comments on the phrase: cellar door”
It’s hardly an avant-garde position to drive hard-to-defend discarded cultural remnants. “When we championed the garbage culture, we had no idea it was going to be the only culture,” Pauline Kael said long ago. Magazines, Barry Manilow and Ashlee Simpson, mullet, pro wrestling and curly fries at Arby’s etc. A million freelance writers would be out of work if he outlawed the nostalgic, self-effacing, vague tastes about him.
It’s not new to immerse memories in wonton-style cultural criticism, as King did. What feels new – what’s always new when you find it – is the brilliance, misery, joy and certainty of King’s writings. It is against distance and irony; You take him seriously because he is so against the project of being taken seriously.
King writes about himself the way Martha Graham teaches her dancers to move on stage: She leads with her groin. According to her description, she has an incandescent libido strong enough to light up a city’s electrical grid.
One episode of “Tacky” is about “Sex and the City,” particularly the character Samantha, where King learns to whet his own appetite and appreciate life being taken over: “I didn’t need a boyfriend just for sex. . Sex was all around me!” The guys are never the right guy (someone’s called Viper), except they are. Like Samantha, King looks like he just stepped out of a Christmas cracker.
“It was always my destiny to be consumable,” he writes. “I was never going to be a man who commands respect. And that’s fine. Some days are even preferred. I’m chowing down on men’s lives like the taste of cherry Kirsch syrup. What would I do if I was something meaty and substantial? Grow old with someone I met in high school, as I once believed? Did you miss all this? I would have missed the sun earlier.”
King knew stickiness was for him when he was a kid, and his mother used the term to stigmatize what she thought was great. “I wanted to be great myself,” he writes, “and the answer was tacky.” He became “the kind of guy who gets a little too crazy with a cigarette during a talk about Puddle of Mudd.”
King draws a line between tacky and worthless. The second is “closed and unattractive. This is not pleasant. If stickiness is about being with joy, the worthlessness has already happened, and there is not a single joyful thing about what it becomes.” That’s in the long run, unless you’re Dolly Parton, which is a tough fence to get over.
“Sticky” was released last fall. I’m writing now because a) the women I’m closest to have been exchanging underlined copies for weeks, b) The Times hasn’t reviewed it, and c) I’m late to discover that it reads like sequential shots. Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey.
King has unlimited access to his mind at the age of 14 or 15. “Hot Ode to Vanilla Sugar” is in league with Nora Ephron’s “A Few Words About the Breasts”, just like its adult essays.
“What I do know is that you are the scent of a scared maiden waving at the edge of the cliff. change“The king writes. “You were the ideal pheromone for us because we didn’t know how to smell like ourselves yet.” Experiment only gets better from there.
like Katie RoipheThe King comes to praise messy lives. Like Toni Morrison in “Song of Solomon,” she advises: “Do you have a life? Law! Law [expletive] life!” One of the maxims in this book is from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The other is from Nicole Polizzi, also known as Snooki: “Do every sin you can, you know? Have sex with an old man, steal a plant, and get arrested.”
All this can be noisy. “I think every chattery mouth of a girl is strategic,” King writes. “For a girl, screaming is a powerful field correction that can’t be claimed in any other way. Everyone wants to be around a pretty young girl as long as she doesn’t scream.”
The writing on “Sticky” is so compelling that there is often no other word for it than classy.
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