Who Writes This Crap?

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There’s a real danger in a show which amasses such an amusing assortment of publishing’s most egregious crimes: what starts as an amusing critique of PR speak could become a smug bitching session about commercial media. Luke Wright and Joel Stickley have one card stacked against them here: the pair are performance poets from the popular poetry collective, Aisle 16. Are we then to expect pernickety language élitists, cruelly savaging those less linguistically adept than themselves?

Fortunately, no. This pair avoid the trap with aplomb, picking a range of interesting targets rather than ridiculing individuals. Couched as a series of “lectures,” the pair veer between real world examples—in particular, the messianic press release for one popular indie band receives a well-deserved dressing down—and fantastical imaginings of what adverts really ought to say. Sure, some snippets are weaker than others and could be gainfully dropped, but the pair’s polished, turn-by-turn presentation style flies energetically through sticky spots. Monotony is adroitly avoided with a game of "Modernist Poetry or Spam?" For the record, this reviewer mis-credited to TS Eliot the bold work of Increase your Length & Girth, 2003.

But by far the show’s coup de grâce, however, is its recognition that such crimes against language are not restricted to the bored employees of ad agencies but—as selected readings from a 14-year-old Luke Wright’s diaries adequately prove—to anyone who puts pen to paper. In an unexpected twist, the imperfections, even misdirections of language, for Stickley and Wright, become less expressions of manipulation and limitation, but of human beings’ unflappable desire to communicate. Their critiques of the vacuous language we all use are scathing, but sympathetic. Who writes this crap? Well, people like me, really, and, tonight at least, I’m rather happy to do so.