Against All Odds, Frank Bruni Gets Worse
Frank Bruni is nice clean-cut fella and a talented writer who was a good restaurant critic but good lord in heaven is he a dispensable columnist. It's as if moving onto the opinion pages has magically rendered this once-capable journalist into a trite hack!
We thought Frank just got off to a rough start. He was still having inappropriate flashbacks to his restaurant-centric days. After using his invaluable New York Times column space to relate the most boring story ever told, we thought he'd hit bottom.
Whoops. Never call these things too soon.
IF you're just catching up on last week's news, I suggest you sit down. Fast. What you're about to learn is incredible. Unthinkable. If you drink, grab one. Certain shocks can't be borne without absorbers.
Kim Kardashian is getting divorced.
Oh. Oh. I know that Frank Bruni did not lead his Sunday New York Times column with the hackiest hackish hack move in the hack handbook (mock surprise over a predictable thing) in reference to Kim Kardashian's divorce, an event which occurred last Monday and was thoroughly chewed over in the direct, meta, and meta-meta senses by last Tuesday. Expressing mock surprise over the Kim Kardashian divorce and deploring the media's "overreaction" to it was already played out six days before this column was published. (And by the way, the media: you cannot simultaneously deplore the media overreaction to something and write about it in a national media outlet! Physicists tell us it is not possible!) What do you write for, Frank Bruni, a newspaper? Haha. Because that's how slow you are.
Were this just a stupid Kim Kardashian column, it would be bad enough. But no. Frank Bruni decided to turn his column into a poor, poor imitation of Frank Rich's "everything that happened this week tied together into a common theme" style.Which was fundamentally a bullshit parlor trick even when Frank Rich did it, but at least he did it with impeccable style. Not so, this new "Frank" character.
That's not all. There has been trouble with the Congressional super committee... As we kept up with Kardashian, kept tabs on a constipated Congress and beheld both the turmoil in Greece and the travails of Herman Cain... Last week there was horror at the heft and 24-carat shine of the golden parachute Jon Corzine had tried to arrange for himself... In a criminal court in Los Angeles, there was continued stupefaction at the unorthodox ministrations of Michael Jackson's doctor... Greece once again seemed to hold the world's financial health in its hands... Honest. Just. Such lofty adjectives all but demand a pivot back to Kardashian.
Frank Bruni went to Google News once per day last week and wrote down the top headline in his "Reporter's Moleskine." At the end of the week he put them all together in one column. Then he tied it all up with a bow made of Kim Kardashian. That's how you do this, right? Frank Bruni is still "figuring this stuff out a little." To the horror of us all.
