On the TV front, Simmons spent a few years proudly reminding people of his refusal to watch shows like House, The Wire or Arrested Development. Creating a culture site when you essentially have no interest in an entire medium and celebrate your willful blindness to acclaimed work from other media means it can only operate if the intent is actually to be bad at it. In one sense, Jack Kevorkian is an incredibly flawed doctor, but if you approach him from a different frame of reference, he's a specialist with an incomparable track record. Similarly, Simmons so regularly mauls subtlety and complexity with ham-fisted prose and wads multi-faceted concepts into gut-level inanity that maybe his purpose here really is to reduce culture to a kind of gray-lighted broadcast accompanied by a undifferentiated white-noise frat obscenity — like a rocky seashore whose breaking surf gives off the soothing noise of a constant fart.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
A DISNEY COMPANY FRONTING A MASTER CRAFTSMAN OF MIDDLEBROW RETREADS OF HIS OWN MIDDLEBROW ANALYSIS TO A MASS MIDDLEBROW AUDIENCE: Y'know, I was going to slam Bill Simmons for not discussing the Lakers' classless exit beyond a single, content-free tweet -- ignored on his two NBA podcasts this week, and no column either -- but then an anonymous blogger so raised the bar on Simmons criticism as to make my offerings irrelevant:
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That's a lot of words to waste on a mediocre website.
ReplyDeleteThat's a lot of words spent on a mediocre website.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I was more interested in that article's take on Chuck Klosterman (about halfway down) and his tortured analogies.
ReplyDeleteWhich isn't even in final form yet. But still.
ReplyDeleteI don't necessarily agree with the writer, but DAMN, that's some scathing wordage. Hats off!
ReplyDeleteI've decided this must be a parody, because it contains all the hallmarks of the classic knocks on Simmons. It's written as if motivated by some deeply personal slight; it's a too long, unfocused article that simply compiles all of the various threads of various forms of conventional wisdom about Simmons (and Gladwell and Klosterman); despite including few statements that couldn't have been found in the comments to a run-of-the-mill Deadspin post on Simmons at any point in the last four years, it's written as if it is daringly breaking new ground; and it occasionally assigns motives and private thoughts without any substantive basis in the service of a strangely specious screed against something that hasn't happened (the not-yet-really-launched website), and, when you actually dig out the two data points about the website being written about (the two articles that have been published), the author actually thinks one of them is pretty great.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's a lot of words spent on a mediocre article about a mediocre webiste created partially by a mediocre internet personality who I haven't enjoyed much for years.
What's so frustrating for me is that the Sunday incident is one of those times when Simmons actually might have something useful to say, and I'm assuming his desire for access has forced him to bite his tongue. (During his podcast this week with Mike Lupica, he mentioned that he had lunch once with Phil Jackson.)
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, Adam, I hadn't thought about it as an access issue, and it would be disappointing if it was. I didn't hear about the lunch with Jackson, but there is no force in the universe strong enough to get me to listen to Mike Lupica on a podcast that didn't have the express purpose of trying to make him cry.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really understand a lot of the post, but it used words like "dialectic" and "quotidian," so I guess the writer is really smart.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to attack Simmons, that paragraph is a pretty good angle to take. He has these gaping cultural blindspots, but either he doesn't know he has them or he's taken a totally dismissive attitude to justify it. He has proudly said he doesn't watch any network comedies, which is fine, save for, I don't know, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, Community, the ABC shows, HIMYM before it got terrible, etc. (And he's never seen Arrested.) I also remember him making fun of JackO for watching Deadwood, which is just, AGGGH. He's written that he liked sports growing up, not Star Wars, so he has a blanket dismissal of everything in the Buffy realm, but thinks that watching LOST gives him some sort of geek street cred. I think it's admirable when people have a strong grasp of what they don't know and why they don't know it, and Simmons is the opposite of that.
ReplyDeleteHe also doesn't know jack about college football, and every time he attempts to talk about it I cringe.
See, I don't care. First of all, this writer is anonymous (I realize I am, too, but that's because no one has asked... probably because I haven't written scathing articles to pre-empt a site that doesn't exist yet.). It's not brave to write behind the shadow of anonymity, no matter what you have to say. But my bigger point is that I don't care. I like to read Simmons. I liked his book. I think what he has to say is interesting, and I agree that he has been veering toward disappearing up his own a-hole a little. I'm not going to give up on reading him because he doesn't write about the NBA and NFL enough for me anymore and is moving to more podcasts and chatting with his famous friends. I'm sad that Joe Posnanski (a much better writer) doesn't write about the Royals as often anymore. But that doesn't mean I don't read him. I'm sad that Deadspin largely is terrible now (with some exceptions), but all that means is it's fallen to second on my sports blog visits. Sure, all those things said about Simmons may have a lick of truth to it. But so what? This isn't South Park taking down Family Guy, it's one guy complaining about another guy's writing style. It doesn't bother me that much.
ReplyDeleteI agree that his weird cultural blindspots (which always seemed to like an echo of his prior discounting of advanced baseball statistics; maybe part of his seemingly innate populist worldview) always irked. That said, the thing that often causes me to wince the most is his occasional casual sexism.
ReplyDelete