Jen Girdish

The last things I’ll say about Klosterman and tUnE-yArDs. Definitely, maybe.

One positive thing to emerge from this whole Klosterman guffaw, is that it got me to spell tUnE-yArDs as the way Merrill intended. I think we owe her that much. I’m still working on whokill.

Other things that it has done include making the internet, or a certain part of it, hysterical. A good thing, I think. Both sides of the gender aisle are talking about what his piece means and doesn’t mean about music criticsm. Here are my favorite takes on Klosterman’s take on tUnE-yArDs:

• Sydney Brownstone at L Magazine
• Maura Johnston at the Village Voice
• My husband’s
• Rob Mitchum’s Tweets

 Somehow, I forgot that Klosterman did write about Andy Rooney:

“He’d open a can of mixed nuts on 60 Minutes and separate the various nuts by type, and then he’d count how many of each nut were in the can. What made this so interesting (at least to me) was not the metaphor this act represented; what was interesting was that there was no metaphor at all. It wasn’t a veiled sociological commentary or a criticism of advertising or a meditation on consumerism. It wasn’t about anything, except the contents of the can. This, I suspect, is why Rooney’s seemingly banal essays were so infuriating to a certain kind of person: We have come to assume that whenever a media personality talks about something basic, he or she is actually trying to explain something complex. The idea that someone on television would just sit at his desk and complain about mixed nuts and have it only be about the ostensive subject — without a larger meaning and without a defined purpose — seemed facile and ridiculous. ”