fran lebowitz

Wow, I've never heard of Fran Lebowitz before tonight, but she's talking on NPR right now, and she's freaking amazing.

I looked around the NPR and KQED site for a link to archives of City Arts and Lectures so I could recommend it to you guys, but I can't for the life of me find it on their crappy sites. Sorry. But if you can find a copy of her talk, definitely listen to it.

She's a hardcore angry leftist, but here's the amazing part, she's not stupid and pious and pigheaded about it like most of them. She's great! I've listened to her for the last hour completely lampoon so many things that I hate about the right, and the left, and smoking bans, and bad parents, and animal rights.. you don't hear people talk like this anymore. She has zero interest in political correctness, she screams and yells about what she thinks is the absolute truth without any regard for other people's feelings at all, which I respect above all things. And I agree with her about much of what she's saying. She's completely dismissive of really popular liberal issues for really logical reasons, that either a) they don't matter at all (smoking bans, prayer in school, animal rights), or b) they galvanize the right so much that it's basically counterproductive to pursue them (gay marriage). You can just FEEL the uncomfortable laughter in the room. She says things that most people know deep down are true, but have been trained to not say aloud, and feel guilty for even thinking.

She's a satirist who was apparently pretty big in the 70's for writing two books (which I just ordered), and has suffered from writer's block ever since. Not a single book, she just tries to write books, and goes around and talks. And man can she talk. Her statements weren't prepared, she was able to answer audience questions with wit and cleverness, without ever annoying me, and that's pretty goddamn tough.

Oh, her talk just ended. That's too bad. I'm going to poke around and see what else she's written that I can find.