Wilson, Cintra

views updated

WILSON, Cintra

PERSONAL:

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Playwright and performer. "Liquid Television," Winter Steele (animated series), for Music Television (MTV), creator and voice. Playwright and actress at New York Playwright's Lab, New York, NY, and Warrior Christs of Armageddon, New York, NY.

WRITINGS:

XXX Love Act (play), produced in San Francisco, CA, 1992, produced in Los Angeles, CA, 2000.

A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations, Viking (New York, NY), 2000.

Colors Insulting to Nature (novel), Fourth Estate (New York, NY), 2004.

Also author of plays titled Soul Hunt, The Bitsy La Fever's Kingdom of Passion Trilogy, Arbuckle, Dognite, Juvee, and Alien Soul. Contributor to Salon.com. Columnist for San Francisco Examiner, 1995-2000, Salon.com, 1995-2000, and San Francisco Paper, 1996.

SIDELIGHTS:

A columnist, avant-garde playwright, and popular contributor to Salon.com, Cintra Wilson is noted for her distinctly jaundiced take on the foibles and obsessions of the modern age. As John Grooms put it in Music Manic, she is "an absolute flamethrower and, when she's really on, a dizzyingly exciting cultural critic." While Wilson's articles have skewered conspiracy theorists, the explosion of antidepressants, and the forced jauntiness of women's magazines, she has a particular distaste for one of America's most ubiquitous phenomena: the worship of fame and celebrity.

In A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations, Wilson looks into mailboxes full of overwrought letters to boy bands and considers the peculiar sense of body image that forces Cher and Michael Jackson to constantly reconstruct themselves. "Wilson has a real way with words and a supreme disgust and hate that oozes from her every pore when the subject of celebrity comes up," noted Bookreporter.com contributor Jana Siciliano. Her disgust at the excess and the neediness of Madonna and Madonna-wannabes is matched by her contempt for the fans who keep the whole machine running, and long to be swept into it. Reviewer Rick McGinnis commented in Eye Weekly Online, "Her book is a polemic against a crippling psychosis that has rendered society and culture—pop, alternative, high, black, white, Latino, media, political, sports and every other permutation—into a furious freak show where fame itself, not talent or quality or morality or honesty, is the driving prerogative." At the same time, as Samantha Puckett explained in the St. Petersburg Times, "The Onion-reading skeptics among us will throw our hands in the air and shout: Hallelujah! But a slow, sinking feeling soon follows. After all, even those of us who adamantly agree with her have allowed these things to go on."

Wilson provides a fictional treatment of the fame machine in the 2004 novel Colors Insulting to Nature. The story centers on the minimally talented young actress Liza Normal and her ambitious stage mother, Peppy. As Peppy pushes Liza into such humiliating exhibitions as an unintentionally campy neighborhood production of the Sound of Music, Liza struggles with insecurity, drug addiction, and disastrous relationships with a washed-up boy band member and a flamboyant drug dealer. But, in the end, she triumphs with a Las Vegas act based on a slash fiction character she had invented and stuck with throughout her ordeals. For a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "Wilson's ambition to be a memorable satirist of pop culture is thwarted by her high-decibel prose." However, a Publishers Weekly reviewer reported that the author's "spirited sendup of celebrity worship is laugh-out-loud funny," and Library Journal contributor Prudence Peiffer called Colors Insulting to Nature "a giddy and poignant crash course in growing up."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Theatre, December, 2000, Lenora Inez Brown, review of XXX Love Act, p. 91.

Back Stage West, November 16, 2000, Brad Schreiber, review of XXX Love Act, p. 19.

Entertainment Weekly, August 8, 2000, Chris Nashawaty, review of A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations, p. 122.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2000, review of A Massive Swelling, p. 949; May 15, 2004, review of Colors Insulting to Nature, p. 470.

Library Journal, July, 2000, Mark Bay, review of A Massive Swelling, p. 124; May 15, 2004, Prudence Peiffer, review of Colors Insulting to Nature, p. 117.

Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000, review of A Massive Swelling, p. 78; May 31, 2004, review of Colors Insulting to Nature, p. 46.

St. Petersburg Times, July 23, 2000, Samantha Puckett, review of A Massive Swelling.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 6, 2000, Jules Verdone, review of A Massive Swelling.

Variety, May 25, 1992, Dennis Harvey, review of XXX Love Act, p. 63.