By Joel Beers
Oh, he probably won’t be typing the word motherfucker 14 times, or drawing the ire of morally uptight, uh, upright government officials, or referencingbukkake and playwright Yasmina Reza in the same sentence, or nearly winning first place for theater criticism in something called the Alt Weekly awards for reviews with headlines like “Man Loves Goat,” and “Teenager Orgy Porn,” or winning first place for entertainment review/criticism/column for daily/weekly newspapers under 100,000 circulation in the Southern California Journalism Awards, a year that he so decimated the other rodents in the field that not a single one was even named a finalist! (But when, and I quote, one “writes lively and thoughtful theater reviews with a strong sense of authority and tone to match a variety of material,” everyone else should sit down and shut up!).
But that was a long time ago and he’s so much younger than that now.
But thanks to the kindly auspices of the OC Theatre Guild, that gaping hole in the heart of Orange County theater since the brutally fucked closing of OC Weekly the day before Thanksgiving, if not filled, at least has a tiny heartbeat left.
He’s writing previews for that organization, and here is the first one, and here is the second one, and here is the third one. Yes, Virginia, they pay–although he won’t be retiring any time soon–then again, what critic in the shit-for-brains era of social media when anyone with one decent working index finger can reach a million other braindead dolts with their opining, can hope for that? (Actually, that one’s pretty good; I won’t crucify your eyes by linking to a garbage site). No, that one’s pretty good as well. Just take my word for it, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. And while that may or may not be good for theater, it fucking sucks for those of us who could bank on a few extra dollars a month.
Yes, these previews are not filled with his genteel rancor or predilection for toilet humor and gratuitous blasphemy, but to label him a sell-out just shows how jealous you are. Besides, where else are you going to read brilliance such as this, in his review of “The Great Gatsby?”
“For those who had the leisure time and income to enjoy it, the window between the end of World War I and the Great Depression was America’s longest, largest and most extravagant party. The great consumer Republic had been born; advertising and the automobile were everywhere; women finally gained the right to vote, and with it came a loosening of constraining fashion and opening up of sexual liberty; prohibition made alcohol illegal – and all the more exciting to drink; technology promised nothing but convenience; the middle class was growing right along with a booming stock market fueled by wild-eyed speculation; and even if America was still a painfully segregated country in the midst of enacting its most draconian immigration laws, the jazz that streamed out of the clubs of Harlem became the soundtrack of an urbanized America that seemed younger and more vigorous than ever.
Fitzgerald captured much of that, but he also anticipated the devastating hangover that would clobber the country, and world, at decade’s end. Alongside the free-wheeling, libertine lifestyle and ritzy high living of its main characters, there is also poverty, criminality, deceit and despair and a sense, as Newell puts it, of “somehow capturing the innocence of an era that was at the same time losing it.”
Nowhere, that’s where.
So take the note from this peckerhead:
FERMENTED BEERS 