Legendary Amazon mega-reviewer Harriet Klausner has passed away. I assume she’s leaving loved ones behind. My condolences.

She embodied everything wrong with criticism, both at the professional and amateur level (it’s unclear which class she belonged to). For people who mistrust online reviews, for people who assume it’s all just an incestuous, payola-greased web of marketing, cross-promotion and buddy-buddy backslapping, Harriet Klausner is Exhibit A. She is the smoking gun, with a complementary five star review on Amazon.

31,014 reviews, largely of romance novels. 99.7% of these reviews had four or five star ratings. She reviewed everything, and loved everything, but it’s clear that she didn’t read everything. Someone wrote a book that (strategically?) included a character called “Harriet Klausner”, but her obligatory glowing review made no mention of this. There’s also the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Her reviews had a nebulous, creepy quality, like they were written by a computer. She was the queen of vague adjectives, vapid cliches, and rewritten cover blurbs. Have you seen the video where rapper will.i.am has bullshits his way through an explanation of logos and branding? That video is Harriet Klausner’s entire life for the past fifteen years.

She was so prolific and so worthless that for years there were conspiracy theories about Klausner – that she didn’t exist, and was an account controlled by a shadowy cabal of publishers. In the end, it was confirmed that she was a real person, which is probably worse. At least a shadowy cabal could conceivably have the manpower to actually read the books. The truth is this (h/t to this guy’s sleuthing): she received large numbers of Advance Reader Copies from publishers. She didn’t disclose that she was getting ARCs (in breach of FTC disclosure rules, but nobody on Amazon cares about that) and she would then re-sell them via a third party (apparently legal, but frowned upon). Books got promoted, Klausner could pay her cat food bills, and everyone won except for the people reviews exist for in the first place.

With Amazon now taking steps to protect the integrity of their reviews, but you wonder if outright grifters are the problem here. The issue seems to be an economic one: reviewers want free shit, publishers and writers want favourable reviews. The actual consumer is very much an externality here – they don’t have a skin in the game, so they just have to hope and pray the reviewer has the integrity not to whore out their opinions to keep the majestic Free Shit River flowing in full flood.

I used to read a metal site called Teufel’s Tomb. While every other metal site had a chummy “support the scene, bro!” ethos, Teufel’s opinion was that 90% of bands, labels, and distros should just eat bullets and die. It was a refreshing attitude. You could trust their opinions.

Someone had the misfortune of interviewing Teufel. The guy was obviously drunk and spent most of the interview pushing the interviewer’s buttons, but he also says some interesting things about “objectivity” while staring down the barrel of payola. “Objectivity, in metal reviews, is to say as much about the music, without saying anything at all. All the bands and record labels want is for you to say things that will help them sell more records. They don’t want you to state an opinion, unless your opinion is positive. Really, objectivity in metal reviews is to simply drone on and on and on about “this is the lyrical subject matter, this is the band line-up, this is the style of music they play, they sound like these bands, you should buy this album if you like these bands.” […] I’ve been on all of the major metal label promo lists, and they all took me off after they actually read that I was stating opinions that some of their releases are just plain boring or sucked.”

Pauline Kael once said “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” To which Harriet Klausner and her spiritual descendants say “why not both?”

You know that guy at work who can burp the alphabet? And does so at length? That’s what this dipshit’s voice sounds like.

Dethklok is the fictional band on Adult Swim’s animated TV show Metalocalypse. As happens to all fictional bands (Spinal Tap, The Monkees, the Blues Brothers), eventually someone smashed the fourth wall with a Flying V and made them real. Obviously it’s possible to beat a joke into the ground through overuse and thereby make it not funny, except Metalocalypse avoids that problem by not being funny in the first place. I’ve watched a few episodes of the show. What am I missing?

It’s just The Big Bang Theory, except about heavy metal. Shallow, pandering references and cheap namedropping, without any effort at serious analysis or commentary. I remember seeing an episode where they’re at a burger joint called “Burzum’s Burgers”. Lest you miss their writers’ sparkling wit, there’s a metal band called “Burzum,” who’s name sounds a bit like “Burger”. Let me try: Underoath Underwear. Bathory Bathtowels. Great stuff. If only I an aisle to roll around laughing in.

Is there good music on this album? Fuck no! Why would there be good music? This is an album made for people who don’t really listen to heavy metal and have no way to tell good from bad – who only appreciate it as a kind of fashion accessory. It’s just crummy unoriginal dogshit from beginning to end. I hate even thinking about it.

The drums have zero reverb and sound sterile and fake. The guitars have no body, and seem half as loud as everything else, especially Brendon Small’s voice. This is bad news, as he should not be twice as loud as ANYTHING, including the repairman working on the power lines next door and the bird crapping on the roof. Words cannot describe how shit his voice is, how utterly devoid of emotion and intensity.

“Murmaider” merely sounds like Pantera with bad production up until he does that incredibly annoying “Knives, check, rope, check, dagger, check” part. Remember Metallica’s “frantic-tick-tick-tick-tick”? This guy apparently decided that was the future of metal. “Awaken” – tonelessly shouting the song title over and over again, awesome. “Bloodrocuted” actually has two or three good riffs, a stupid chorus, and then they self-consciously switch it out and bring in an equally stupid chorus. “Hatredcopter” got a laugh out of me. “Face-Fisted” is more senseless chugging on an album that conspicuously does not need more senseless chugging.

Even when there’s actual songwriting happening, the weak production and bad vocals just cut everything away at the knees. There’s no sense of brutality or heaviness, everything sounds like a fake plastic-like slab of processed sound. The overall tone is something like Slaughter of the Soul era At the Gates with the guitars turned down 9db at the mixing desk, songwriting c/o a troupe of monkeys, with awful burpy vocals. What a horrible, horrible album. If your imam catches you listening to this in the back streets of Riyadh, you richly deserve beheading.

Social groups can be compared to a hurricane – mildly interested folk at the edges, more dedicated followers towards the center, a tight group of fanatics near the middle…and dead center, someone who doesn’t really care that much.

Here’s an interesting article about Loose Change creator Dylan Avery. It’s sort of the equivalent of Rosie O’Donnell coming out of the closet – everyone knew it, but it’s nice to have it in the open.

Loose Change was originally conceived as a fictional film: a way for Avery to polish his filmmaking skills and get his name out there. I don’t think it ever stopped being a fictional film. This thing was huge in 2007, and Dylan became the unofficial spokesperson of the 9/11 Truth movement, but I always wondered if he really believed what his film says. Now he basically says that no, he didn’t.

“Loose Change happened because I wanted to make a film,” he said. “It was born out of the passion of wanting to be a filmmaker. And then Loose Change took over my life, and it’s almost like filmmaking is completely out of the question.” […] “Am I going to be 60 years old, still getting hate mail about a movie I made when I was 20? That’s not what I wanted for myself.”

That’s a strange thing to say if you believe you’ve uncovered proof of a conspiracy to kill 4,000 US citizens in a false flag attack. The biggest domestic scandal of the eternity and he’s bitching about his lost career and how he receives hate mail? It’s like if the Watergate guys had said to the press “hey, while we’ve got your attention, can you also run a piece about the Watergate hotel? Their room service was three-star at best, and my soap had a hair in it.”

Somehow, this unconcerned doofus became the 9/11 Truth leader…or the closest thing to one, because they never exactly had a leader. Its boosters say it doesn’t need leadership: it’s a grassroots organisation, the will of the people coalescing like iron flakes around a magnet. Some even think having any sort of leader is a drawback, that you’ve got to flow as water, etc.

I kind of think that leadership is impossible for such a movement – that the movement fundamentally doesn’t agree on anything beyond one or two talking points, and they can’t actually move in any one direction. Those who live by sharp thingies die by sharp thingies and those who prize ad-hoc networks die by ad-hoc networks.

The “9/11 should have been investigated better” crowd has a goal, but pushing for a better investigation is lost on the section that believes all levels of the US government is complicit in a conspiracy.

Personally, what killed me on the film was how it was obviously porn. Not literal porn, but conspiracy porn. You could see storywriting oozing from every pore: Loose Change was designed to be exciting, not truthful. You could postulate any number of conspiracies that are both a) more boring and b) more practical (like the US knew the attacks were coming and didn’t tell anyone, or they trained the terrorists, or whatever.) Instead you’ve got this convoluted Die Hard plotline with planes getting switched out and simulated with holograms or whatever. I’m surprised there isn’t a part where Hani Hanjour hijacks a plane by holding a gun sideways.

So that’s the sad truth of the 9/11 Conspiracy. It was actually a meta-level 9/11 Conspiracy Conspiracy, with Avery faking it like a Jewish wife in the bedroom in return for fame and riches (which he didn’t get). Although you never know. Maybe he really does believe in a conspiracy, and is now trying to rehabilitate his filmmaking career.