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A review by robertlashley
Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch
1.0
A 14 year got in a vicious accident. Instead of treatment, he got inhuman doses of morphine by a racist doctor and was thrown into the street like a slab of walking beef. Seeking a substitute, he turned to heroin.
These are the facts missing from this viciously phony biography of Charlie Parker, written by one of the most vicious con artists in the history of american literature. Instead of a believable biography of an artist, we get Stanley Crouch fitting his life into a "Hemingway/movable feast" formula, a tacky boys tale of fun, dope, and Crouch's sexual objectification/sneering of black women as vicious as the rappers he blames the black community's problems on. He got heaps of good press here, because people love a good dude-yarn and he kept his rages in check.
But only for the most part. When he gets to making jokes about prostitutes' vaginas, you are back in the gutter that critical readers of crouch are painfully familiar with; that same street he went to when he called Toni Morrison a racial and sexual slur in a review, termed Bell Hooks "a pit bull in a skirt", heckled Anita Hill's legs in an essay, and bragged about beating up a gay man because he didn't like his review. Stanley Crouch was a bridge troll, and this book was the most snidely trollish shit he's ever done.
These are the facts missing from this viciously phony biography of Charlie Parker, written by one of the most vicious con artists in the history of american literature. Instead of a believable biography of an artist, we get Stanley Crouch fitting his life into a "Hemingway/movable feast" formula, a tacky boys tale of fun, dope, and Crouch's sexual objectification/sneering of black women as vicious as the rappers he blames the black community's problems on. He got heaps of good press here, because people love a good dude-yarn and he kept his rages in check.
But only for the most part. When he gets to making jokes about prostitutes' vaginas, you are back in the gutter that critical readers of crouch are painfully familiar with; that same street he went to when he called Toni Morrison a racial and sexual slur in a review, termed Bell Hooks "a pit bull in a skirt", heckled Anita Hill's legs in an essay, and bragged about beating up a gay man because he didn't like his review. Stanley Crouch was a bridge troll, and this book was the most snidely trollish shit he's ever done.