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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cherishing Dennis Cooper, July 8, 2010
This review is from: Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries (Paperback)
Cooper, Dennis. "Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback and Obituaries", Harper Perennial, 2010.
Cherishing Dennis Cooper
Amos Lassen
I have not always been kind to Dennis Cooper in my reviews so let me tell you that this is going to be a good one and in this book Cooper is completely redeemed in my mind. I have accused him, in the past, of being indulgent and over-the-top and he is but here it is necessary and greatly appreciated, Cooper does not hold his tongue and I imagine that he would be censored in less permissive societies. It is his boldness in his non-fiction that makes him so endearing and we should really appreciate him totally. Cooper's literature is risky and that is what makes it so good...and so valuable. He argues with morality like some of the great writers of the past and he is convincing. He is so convincing that I am going back to reread his output and try to figure out why I did not appreciate it on first reading.
In this work on non-fiction, Cooper tackles celebrity profiles (Courtney Love) and he exposes aspect of gay culture. He writes with a dark tone that is satirical like a knife as he wields his pen and writes about how we live. His prose floats across the page and it grabs the reader and does not let go. This is an anthology that contains Cooper's writings from various publications (Bookworm, Artforum, Interview, The Village Voice among others).We have his obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, William S. Burroughs and they provide incredible portraits of the personalities. Cooper's approach to issues of our society will long be an example for others and he looks at contemporary literature through his own eyes and gives us his own special observations on the state of literature today and he looks at the personalities today and tells us how he sees them. He is one of a kind who is not afraid to say what he thinks and we are the ones who benefit from that.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Smothered in Hugs - Dennis Cooper (Harper Perennial), August 10, 2010
This review is from: Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries (Paperback)
Dennis Cooper is many things - poet, essayist, critic and novelist - but through it all, he is insightful, cutting, personal and dark. As a critic for various magazines and alternative weekies, his work often mines the outer edges of popular culture, which is exactly what is collected in this new compilation from Harper Perennial, "Smothered In Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback and Obituaries."
In it, Cooper tackles such luminaries as Courtney Love, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and others who generally operate at the intersection of pop culture and the indy underground. Unlike his few alt-culture contemporaries (from the late Lester Bangs to Chuck Klosterman) Cooper's insights, while probative and insightful, remain dry and analytical; exposing irony above humor, the essence vs. the obvious exterior. His pull-no-punches style often questions popular adulation of those who have risen to the top of the indy-culture pile (Tarantino would not be so nearly revered as a director if only he had a dozen competitors in his sub-genre) while treading a fine line between getting inside his subjects mindset without quite pissing them off. Cooper's purview runs the gamut from art to music to film and literature due to his curriculum vitae as a writer for Artforum, Spin, the LA Weekly, Interview, Village Voice and similar others.
Along this decade-plus, sometimes drug-addled journey, Cooper's work covers a wide swath of writers, actors and artists like Nan Golden, Mike Kelley, Clive Barker, Christian Bale, Pavement's Steven Malkmus, DiCaprio, Fassbinder, a hilarious interview with Japan's Ryu Murakami and others and while Cooper's interviews and critiques are always incisive, the unfortunate lateness of this publication of decades old essays makes many of them simply less relevant today. (Do we really care that there were heroin hints in MTV videos when we observe a channel that now barely even plays music videos?)
The most valuable sections may be the obituaries, (Cobain, Wm. Burroughs, River Phoenix) as they still remain both poignant and timeless today. As a compendium of 90's indy subculture, `Hugs' (named after a Guided by Voices tune) makes for an interesting time capsule, but as a reference that could live in the present, many of these stories have either evolved over time or worse, have already been throughly exhausted elsewhere.
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