Elizabeth Wurtzel: Dud or DUD?

wow, this is unexpected
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=2972554&page=1

this woman is to blame for so much unreadable bad shit on the bookshelves. she's this generation's tom wolfe or something.

Hey, I graduate law school in 2008 and am about the same age. Maybe I'll have the chance to litigate against her someday. God, can you imagine Elizabeth Wurzel as your legal counsel? I'd buy tickets to court to see how she handles objections, cross-examination and closing arguments.

i still love 'more, now, again'.

Well... sense you ask.
Yeah, I do. Perhaps it's because I was in the hospital from 7 MAR 2002 to 13 MAR 2000 for major depression that was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar II.

That's some depression that can reverse the space-time continuum...

And there is no Santa Claus.

NED QUIT YR BLASPHEMING, RUDOLPH SEZ RECANT.

August 9, 2008

OPINION
The Internet Is Ruining America's Movies and Music

By ELIZABETH LEE WURTZEL
August 9, 2008; Page A11

Pete Yorn is a Los-Angeles based rock and roller with a gold-record career and Jesus of Nazareth good looks. His songs have appeared in "Spiderman" and "Me, Myself and Irene," and his album's have reached No. 18 on the Billboard charts.

If this were 1978, Mr. Yorn would be a multiplatinum artist living in a Malibu mansion with mountains of cocaine on every horizontal surface, lithe, hippie-ish blonde groupies with names like Veruschka and Christie lining the hallways, and ridiculous Larry Rivers paintings on the bathroom walls. But as it is, he has a cultishly loyal following, solid sales, a long-term recording contract, and a pretty darn good life -- as good as it gets in today's music industry.

The old-fashioned rock star has gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. Never again will we have another crazy-as-all-getout Axl Rose, another Jim Morrison who mistakes himself for a poet and has the hypnotic ability to convince a substantial audience it is so, or another Bob Dylan who changes the way a generation sees itself and the world.

Today's music industry is either moribund or dead, depending on whom you ask. Downloading has destroyed it, and no one in the business is smart enough to figure out how to fix it.

You may feel that this is no great loss. But these rock stars were fun, larger than life people with real talent -- and bad habits. Now all we've got left are the bad habits. All we've got left is Britney Spears.

In the era of the online music store -- even if you buy from iTunes rather than stealing from LimeWire, the problem is the same -- no one knows how to listen to a complete album anymore. Everything is slanted toward the hit single. This means that the music industry is oriented toward one-hit wonders rather than consummate musicians, and talent development is just not worth the trouble.

The one thing the United States exports with serious success is our popular culture. We have conquered the world not with our weaponry, but with our music and movies. If these industries suffer, so does our economy. We are already in trouble abroad as a producer of raw materials, light and heavy industry, and most manufacturing. But people still clamor for our imaginative inventions, our artistic output. Internationally, American culture outsells our aircraft, chemicals, food and motor vehicles.

In Italy, people still learn English by listening to Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde." Germans still discover our language through the subtitles in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather." In fact, 47% of our gross domestic product involves intellectual property (IP) transactions, and about 6% of our national worth -- $626.6 billion annually -- is from our copyright businesses. These are the segments of our economy that are suffering, or stand to do so, as a result of the Internet. The Internet, glorious as it is, should be thought of as the plague of postmodernity.

Entertainment is such a crucial part of the American way of life -- because of the jobs it generates, the fun it engenders, the goodwill it creates world-wide -- that the potential for its undoing is a national emergency that ought to at least merit a congressional panel or governmental alarm. The U.S. was meant to be a nation of commercial creativity. It is our birthright. It's what we do.

It's not just the music industry that has fallen apart. Hollywood's motion picture factory is also blundering.

We tend to think of Hollywood the way immigrants envision America -- as a place where the streets are paved in gold. Movie stars might continue to trip the life fantastic, and indeed there are plenty of Bentleys lining the parking lanes of Rodeo Drive. But a November 2007 report, published by the data analysis group Global Media Intelligence, informs us that: "Making movies -- as distinct from owning libraries of fully-amortized films that continue to throw off sizeable profits -- has gone from a modestly profitable activity to one that now generates . . . substantial losses over the initial release of films to all worldwide markets, a period of roughly five years."

It's hard to work up a lot of pity for the overpaid film world. But between Internet piracy, the fact that huge markets like China tend to disobey IP protocols, and a foolhardy tendency of studios to make unwise, profit-sharing deals with bankable talent, movies are not making money the way they used to or the way they should. And now that any old anybody with opposable thumbs can operate a digital camera, international markets have found they favor the locally produced fare over yet another sequel to "Rush Hour." Bombay prefers Bollywood to Hollywood.

Hegemony is over. The days when everybody rushed out to Sam Goody to buy the new Beatles album as soon as it came out, the days when lines formed around the block at New York's Ziegfeld Theater because the latest installment of Star Wars had opened -- the days when certain cultural moments captured everybody together as if we'd all been granted a brief furlough from the prison house of reality -- live on only in mild forms. That would be in crazy Harry Potter fans, in those of us who will still preorder a Bruce Springsteen album from Amazon.com1.

Today there is far more excitement at the introduction of a new Apple product -- look at how people flocked to get their iPhones! -- than over anything artistic. The one creative area hardly affected by the encroachments of technology, at least insofar as its market has not caved, are fine arts like painting and sculpture. At a Sotheby's auction in autumn 2007, Jeff Koons's nearly two-ton, nine-foot, hot-pink stainless steel sculpture, "Hanging Heart," fetched $23.6 million, a record for a work by a living artist. In November, Sotheby's and Christie's reported a return of $1.7 billion for that single month, up 24% from the previous November.

You cannot, after all, download a painting or a sculpture. The thingness of the thing itself -- all that stuff Heidegger talked about when you read him in college -- cannot be translated, even if an exhibit poster will do for poor college students and poverty-stricken bohemians looking for kitchen decorations. But the rich will still pay for the actual original.

This is antithetical to the American mission. I have nothing against all the great fine artists this country has produced, but they are a carryover from Europe. They are Old World. We'll never overwhelm the planet with brushes and clay and pencils the way we did with celluloid and vinyl and acetate. If our most original painter was Jackson Pollock, he was still no Picasso, and we all know it.

Our movies and music are America. And the day the music dies, the party's over.

Miss Wurtzel, an attorney, is the author of "Prozac Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121824228638426137.html

Wurtzel pinpoints 1995 anxieties shockah

hard hitting challops 4u

http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/still_fresh/liz.jpg
The Internet, glorious as it is, should be thought of as the plague of postmodernity

then again, maybe not

I don't know quite what it makes me feel that the chick in the picture above is also one of my friends on facebook.

because she looks like 100000 other chicks in nyc?

Is that why I don't know quite what it makes me feel? No. I don't live in nyc anyway, so alas don't get to see those 100000 other chicks very often.

I wish I did.

Same here. Meanwhile, the best memoirs of madness I've read are An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redlfield Jamison, who also co-wrote one of the leading nonfiction manuals, for professionals and laymen, on Manic Depressive Illness (think that's the exact title; been a while since Ive seen it, but very illuminating--she gave up her practice after coming out of the closet re her own manias, but has since written a book about interaction between creativity and mental illness, for instance); also The Eden Express, by Mark Vonnegut, about his schizophrenia; and Girl, Interrupted, by Susannah Kaysen (much better than the movie, but she's looking waaaay back, in comparison to the first two authors: Vonnegot's book came out in '75, but he's talking about the 60s and early 70s. But Kaysen's vignettes are plausibly vivid, it's just that she doesn't convey as much of an overview, of events and relationships before and after the Interruptions, as Jamison and Vonnegut)

Kay *Redfield* Jamison, that is.

how does stuff like that WSJ "essay" even get published? admittedly the standards for writing about popular music are pretty low but still...blargh bollox balls bullshit.

ugh this author

dated self-indulgent garbage

though to be fair my opinion might be colored by an ex-gf's abiding love for wurtzel and her work.

ha even for the wsj editorial page that's pretty bad. i'm trying to think of the tv show i saw recently where one of the characters had a copy of bitch on their bookshelf. i remember cracking up becuz the character was totally the type of character to have a copy of bitch on their bookshelf but i can't remember who or what it was. anyhow wurtzel seems more and more to be very very much the sort of thing it'd be impossible to even begin to explain to someone who wasn't there or even to yrself (how did anyone anyone ANYONE take this stuff seriously or even read more than three pages of it???) and more and more its becoming more and more thankfully apparent having to explain or think about or even read about the writing of wurtzel is something we aren't going to have to worry about.

lol at the weird sync w/ david brooks recent apple has destroyed the arts column though. god if those two ever bred...

guys "more, now, again" was pretty great

Question to which I don't expect to get a serious answer: would EW be as popular as she is if her self-medication had left her fat instead of photogenically thin?

My friend was her freshman year roommate OOH THE STORIES but they're actually less interesting than you would think.

tell us!

make some up if you must

Question to which I don't expect to get a serious answer: would EW be as popular as she is if her self-medication had left her fat instead of photogenically thin?

-- j.lu, Sunday, August 10, 2008 11:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

look this happened to her after prozac nation and after the coke addiction. apparently she gained a whole lot of weight and didnt know why. in one of her books, she goes on in detail about her rigorous exercise regime, her strict diet, how they didnt help her lose a pound, how her friends would tell her how fat she looked after seeing her on tv and how grateful she was to have such great friends that would tell her shes a fattey.

anyway, turns out to be the antidepressant she was on so she switched and dropped like 40 pounds in a month or something ridiculous like that and now she is thin again.

anyway, to answer your question: no.

another answer: No.

Miss Wurtzel, an attorney, is the drummer in Gay Dad.

Hahaha.

I read the words "Pete Yorn" and thought "Well, I can ignore this."

[no one knows how to listen to a complete album anymore. Everything is slanted toward the hit single]

how silly. it's not that difficult to listen to a record. even I can do it. it is too easy to be a loseable skill.

LizzieWurtzel Elizabeth Wurtzel
Great people work in finance, HATE it--& could've retired long ago on Marks and Francs. The time is NOW: quit and protest! #OccupyWallStreet
3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

wow! just wow. kinda belongs on the quiddities thread, but man oh man...

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/01/elizabeth-wurtzel-on-self-help.html

i'll be honest with you guys, i kinda like the way she writes. i like the breathless stream thing. i've written that way myself. i mean its effective. and compelling. the way she does it. WHAT she writes is another kettle of fish.

Meanwhile, most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.

word tho

thought this piece was great

i loved the warehouse/parking lot/etc thing.

I have never liked E Wurzel much but I liked this piece.

There's some good stuff in there, but it's drowning in her privileged adolescence. At least Bukowski, another adolescent writer with strikingly shallow views on the human condition, wasn't writing about his Birkin bag and getting bailed out by David Boies.

yeah i mean the hell of a basement apartment in chelsea is why i thought of the quiddities thread...

also, it goes without saying, being a fucked up loser doesn't usually include a yale law degree when you are 40.

I am a free spirit. I do not know any other way to be. No one else seems to live as I do. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.

Lost sympathy for her at:

I would call 911, but the police are not equipped to manage crazy women and could not understand why someone who was neither a rejected lover nor a cast-out roommate was behaving this way. They always sent pairs of very fat female cops. As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was hopeless.

here is all the amazing stuff i have done. also, i cry a lot.

(i mean the whole thing is kinda bloggy but like i said there is style there writing-wise and stuff that is totally worth stealing. a little editing might have helped. do they still make editors?)

Tablet Magazine’s pop music critic!

http://www.tabletmag.com/author/ewurtzel

obliviousness being the hallmark of the quiddity thing. the cornerstone if you will.

also love the genius legal advice: you should move.

tbf if i lived in a basement apartment anywhere i too would be miserable

but c'mon the line where she says "i, too, am in storage" or whatever was a brilliant kicker

laverne & shirley were totally happy!

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rLAup9Rwp6Y/TUwlnXKuHYI/AAAAAAAAADk/LG0iTJLJFQs/s1600/tumblr_kxifg55z3G1qzbqvao1_500_large.png

A parlor floor is not a basement, btw, it's the nicest level of a brownstone and it's at least half a story above street level.