Category Archives: Pop Culture

Crime pays, lol

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Okay, so the blogosphere is abuzz now with the revelation that James Frey’s best-selling A Million Little Pieces, billed as a “memoir,” is actually “made-up-oir.”

From Smoking Gun:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.

Am I the only one whose mind jumped associatively to the ruckus over Primary Colors?

Moral of the story: when you’re drafting that proposal for your non-fiction book, be sure to include a few ideas for some post-publication shell-games to titillate the media, embarrass at least one public figure, and keep that title o’ yours high up on the NYT bestseller flagpole ;-)

If you haven’t been getting your “messages”

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— the ones that come through when you play a rock song backwards, that is — you’re in luck.

Backmasking

In Behind the Music: Sleuths Seek Messages in Lyrical Backspin, today’s WSJ A-head (subscription required) reveals that there are now a number of websites that let you play digital music in reverse.

About time, I’d say! Who knows how many messages went unnoticed after most of us dumped our old turntables (that have been what, about 1989?)

Here’s one of the sites, if you’re expecting to be contacted:

Jeff Milner

“Intuitive Eating”

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My mom read a piece about this guy in her local paper and clipped it to show me when we gathered at my folks’ for Christmas.

He’s discovered, lo and behold, that if he doesn’t beat himself up about what he eats, he doesn’t gain weight.

If you don’t believe that I was the first one to have that idea, just ask Mom, she’ll tell you. It was in the 80s btw, predating this book by Evelyn Tribole: “Intuitive Eating”” by a decade, at least.

I’ve got it documented in any case. I wrote an essay about it that was published in this Chicken Soup for the Soul book about weight loss.

Only my version has a dog angle too, heh heh heh. I had a lively mixed breed at the time, named Brett, and I’d been coming to the realization that, with dogs, it’s better to reinforce what they’re doing right than play Obedience Commandante, chasing after them yelling no no no no no all the time.

It’s less stressful and, wonder of wonders, also makes for a better-behaved dog.

Next it occurred to me that if focusing on the positive worked for my dog, why not try it on myself? So I stopped punishing myself for eating “junk” and started noticing how nice it was to eat nutritious food that tastes good.

I’d “dieted” myself up to about 25 pounds over my ideal weight but it came off, slowly but surely, as soon as I committed to my new attitude.

I’m not necessarily in favor of the label “intuitive eating,” however. I know the concept of intuition is very trendy, but if you’re emotionally sensitive and even worse kinesthetically oriented, you end up with a lot of inner data to sort through, and I’ve never been able to isolate “intuition” from everything else.

In any case, you don’t need it. If you are worried about your weight, you need to de-charge the whole issue. Do that, and the rest will fall into place. Don’t do it, and you’ll keep proving your self-identity as “person with a weight problem.”

Or put another way, behavior follows intent — just like a dog’s behavior follows its trainer’s.