Craptasmagoria

Reviews! Late-night reviewz…with a “z,” they’re so stupid!

Three minutes of the Adam Samberg movie Hot Rod
Oh my god, what an unfunny piece of crap. And there are actors in it I recognized from other movies that were actually funny. And was that Isla Fisher in the “romance” scene who says she wants to join Samberg’s race team and he tells her there’s an initiation and when she asks what it is, he pours some soda on her shoe? Seriously. It’s like a 7-year-old wrote that movie.

The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles
Really thought I would like this book. Overall, I did not. Ok, maybe half of it was ok, but that is generous.

They somehow got award-winning author Colson Whitehead, who wrote the awesome The Intuitionist, to contribute one of the few satisfying essays in this collection, which was about his loathing for all desserts after scooping ice cream on Long Island for a couple of summers in his youth. But strangely, some of the writers in this relatively slim volume write stories only peripherally related to having a shit job. It’s not only irritating but perplexing, because we all know people who have awesome stories about terrible jobs they’ve had, yet The Customer Is Always Wrong saw fit to include, for example, an essay by a whimsical performance artist who once watched a gift shop for a weekend while couple friends left town for a convention. Her big trauma is that some guy stole a clock on her watch (derrr hurrr) and she broke a wall sconce the couple warned her not to break. Big deal, lady.

Even more annoying, the editor, Jeff Martin, let many of the writers include these unnecessary and distancing explanations that they are really Writers, and these jobs were just odious and traumatic detours before they got that big book deal. I just hate reading something that makes me scream “no shit!!” so loudly and so often.

In addition to being annoying, some of the editing was actually appalling: In one story, the same phrase, about “checking out cute boys at Sbarro’s at the mall” appears in two consecutive paragraphs. To geek out further, I will tell you that I was miffed that it was apparent that no one editing this book had any grasp of proper comma usage whatsoever.

In one story, I thought a graf on page 3 should have been the start of a story; other parts stood out as totally extraneous…my impression is that these writers are friends of Martin’s and he didn’t want to alienate them by editing their prose (or fixing their comma gaffes…?). But he should have.

Dave bought this book for me (and agrees with my assessment wholeheartedly, so this won’t hurt his feelings) because I read a positive review of it in The Onion. I suspect the reviewer hadn’t read the book. As someone who has written countless DVD synopses of movies she has never seen, I can relate to this situation. But I’m still a little irritated about being mislead that this book is the awesome.

Interestingly, the book’s publisher, Soft Skull Press, lists writers on its own website page for the title that didn’t end up being included. Like Po Bronson, T Cooper and Trisha Thompson. Not there. I wonder why.

Jim DeRogatis, author of Let It Blurt, wrote a story for this that totally SUCKS. Seriously. It has nothing to do with having a fucking job, it’s about the music shop where he started buying drum supplies when he was learning to play. I guess it’s supposed to be about Al, the proprietor of Al Rocky’s Music Store in Jersey, but DeRogatis admits that he doesn’t have much feeling for Al. While a colorful slice-of-life type thing, if he has some point about his youthful apathy toward Al Rocky, he doesn’t make it very effectively. And at any rate, it belongs in a book about learning to play instruments or growing up in Jersey and not here, since DeRotatis didn’t even ever fucking work at Al’s.

Since I’ve bagged on it so much, I want to mention the writers whose stories I really enjoyed: Randall Osborne’s “How Swede It Was,” about the Midwest pancake house his parents owned for a time in the ’70s, had me guffawing and was probably my favorite, and Victor Gischler’s “Ear Man,” about his time selling hearing aids door to door, was excellent.

And although it appears to be completely made up, I enjoyed Wendy Spero’s essay about selling knives. Clay Allen’s story about working the overnight shift at a sex shop was also one of the better ones.

Perhaps surprisingly, I wouldn’t dissaude anyone from buying this book. Just don’t get too excited about overzealous reviews and expect greatness. And if you want to avoid getting seriously fucking annoyed, skip Timothy Bracy’s story “Klaus,” which reminds of this idea I had in my early 20s where I thought that it’d be great to make a movie that made no sense at all and had no resolution whatsoever and would be called Annoying Movie. Bracy beat me to it, in essay form.