Lee Siegel, noted cultural critic and sock puppet, is in his mid-50s. What luck! By fate of birth, when he was younger, pop culture's sexy side was "perfectly calibrated" and "morally potent." Sadly, as Lee Siegel has aged, the songs on the radio have become "coarse" and "vulgar."
To our dismay, unrepentant sock puppet Lee Siegel's column today about the preposterous fallacy of some imaginary golden age of sex is quite good, except when he refers to his own penis. Imagine: a sock puppet penis. Imagine it. [NYO]
In your sultry Wednesday media column: Anna Wintour's PR man retires, Lee Siegel bitches and bitches, and the oil spill is the only thing on TV, but nobody will watch if Larry King's the one talking about it.
In your magnificent Monday media column: our good friend Sprezzatura joins the NYO, a sexual harassment suit at NY1, Keith Olbermann is arguing on the Twitter, and a blind J-school student teaches us all a valuable lesson.
Former Gawker editor Emily Gould has a new article in MIT's Technology Review asking everyone to try turning off the internet (basically) and maybe keep it off until their lives are profoundly altered. Her piece suggests, as an experiment, that the reader "cease to log in to your instant messenger for a week... Delete…
Lee Siegel, who was suspended from the New Republic for posting anonymous Web comments to defend his own writing, has elaborated on why he has no shame about having pretended to be someone called "sprezzatura." Count the excuses! His cruel, greedy editors were at fault, because they would not delete offensive…
"My Blackberry is hooked up to my heart with wires, and to my testicles. I'm on Amazon all the time, and when my [book sale] numbers go down, I get palpitations. When they go up, I get an erection." So began a very therapeutic evening at the New York Public Library with cantankerous author and "cultural critic" Lee…
"They're toads," Tony Kornheiser recently said about bloggers on a radio show for which he is paid good money. "They're little toads. Actually, they're pimples on the behind of the greater body politic in this country and in this city. And because, because they have access to airwaves and three or four people read…
Writer and "cultural critic" Lee Siegel went on the Daily Show to promote his "I hates teh Internets" book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. Lee is also known for the little anonymous-commenting stunt he pulled on his own essays for the New Republic. He thinks we are just spending way…
This is an occasional column by one of the authors of The Underminer, Or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. The Underminer is brave, brilliant, and wittier than you will ever be.
Much like bloggers, Stalin "rewrote history, made anonymous accusations, hired and elevated hacks and phonies, ruined reputations at will, and airbrushed suddenly unwanted associates out of documents and photographs," explains New Republic editor Lee Siegel. And that's only one choice bit from the Times' review of his…
"There needs to be a [late, influential New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael of the Internet. People need to write critically about this thing," says New Republic editor Lee Siegel. (As you might remember, he was once suspended for a little stunt where he commented anonymously on his own essays, via the Internet).…
New York Sun art critic Lee Siegel is also in love with the young art stars of Paper Monument, the most important art journal of our time! He likes them because they are unafraid of our horrible world, in which there are "new, and unanswerable, questions about the status of art at a time when the borders of truth…
Salon film critic Stephanie Zacharek is married to former Salon film critic Charles Taylor, who was fired by editor-in-chief and president-for-life Joan Walsh a week after she took the job in 2005. (Walsh insisted that Taylor had been "laid off" for budgetary reasons; he, somewhat famously, scoffed at those allegations
New Republic art critic Bad Lee Siegel, having come to terms with what a horrible place the Internet is and all the horrible things it made him do, now plans to ride that train as far as it will go. And he wants you to come too! Atrios forwards this listmail from Siegel:
Disgraced Internet cowboy Lee Siegel, philosophizes on the motives of anonymous internet critics: "At least for those who practice incessant character assassination, which represents a good portion of the blogosphere, they vent out of the pain of being unacknowledged." It's a pain Siegel should know well, having…
• Blogs: worse than the sixties. [NYT]
• Walter Scott, Walt Whitman also guilty of "sock puppetry." [NYT]
• Joe Hagan throws pretty much everything but the revelation that Bill Keller loves "The Wire" into this profile. [NYM]
• New magazine to battle Portfolio for that all-important douchebag demographic. [NYT]
•…
This is really cowboy territory, with very few boundaries. I think now that it was wrong. I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn't want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level.
You're a fraud, and a liar. And a wincingly pretentious writer. You couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces.
From The Nation's review of Sean Wilsey's Oh the Glory of It All:
