Subliminal White Trash is the satirical spawn of Kevin C. Pearce, emanating from the great city of Burlington, Ont. Pearce follows the stripped-down style of most bloggers to deliver his stories, comedy skits, dialogues and observational humour with, as he states, a “satirical edge.” His blog entries are all lit pieces rather than the usual daily rants one finds in blogs. The writing itself is hit or miss and more comedic than satirical. The pieces aren’t really subversive; they just seem to search for the next bizarre tangent to take. His May 18 entry of self-published magazine titles is a good example. Titles such as “Orgasm Death Gimmick,” “Forget Hell” or “Pain Junky” are actually pretty funny but never really hit the vicious sting of satire. He comes close to this mark with an entry about having a portrait drawn of him that is so wonderful he goes on a robbery spree, dropping copies of the image on the way so that the beautiful piece is printed on every morning newspaper. The observational humour is a running piece through the blog which features very brief ideas, quips and, you guessed it, observations. Because he seems to work better in smaller doses, these sections stand out from the rest. Entries like “evil never dies, it just gets really bad hangovers sometimes” or “it takes a special kind of girl to get away with a sweaty ass” are funny little comments you’d expect to find with this kind of blog. But given the spoken-word background of Pearce, it seems the problem that this runs into is that you can never enunciate the text. His comedic pieces play on word-associations and taking sharp tangents from the norm, but with an obvious tone that never really translates when one reads it online. It’s too bad, because loading this up in the right personality could work well. But this is a good start to a relatively young blog, so I hope that Pearce begins to work in more of those observational gems to erupt some good angry satire. (James King)
www.subliminalwhitetrash.blogspot.com