Customer Reviews

Karen Finley: Pooh Unplugged - An Unauthorized Memoir

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Don't get too serious, and you'll find a damned funny book. Pooh in leather - so hardcore silly. Eeyore as the depressive we've always known he is. S&M in the Hundred Acre Wood.

This book is plain funny. It's a brilliant satire of the Winnie the Pooh series. I am an artist, attend many gallery showings, regularly enjoy art books, but I also have a sense of humor. If you're a human being enjoying the full range of your emotions, you will enjoy this. If you have read other Karen Finley books, don't expect a serious commentary on art theory... and that's a good thing. She shouldn't be expected to be serious/detached/humorless all the time, and neither should we. Pay attention to the warning sticker on the cover, don't open the book expecting intellectualism or deconstructing of any kind. It's just supposed to make you laugh. If this seems troubling, it might be helpful to lock yourself in your bedroom, where none of your art school friends can see you and see how low-brow you can go.

Let me start by saying I'm a HUGE admirer of Karen Finley. I own most of her various books and CDs and have seen her perform numerous times. However, this book is a massive disappointment. It's so bad I will have to think twice about purchasing any of her future works. Supposedly the inspiration for the book was her daughter's fascination with Winnie the Pooh stories. Karen was bored with the stories so she made a version with all of Milne's characters having various sexual fetishes and psychoses. This concept could be interesting, but Karen Finley thinks that the concept alone is hilarious. She simply presents the characters as deviants and expects us to laugh. But it's not funny. It's lame and it's lazy. Winnie the Pooh with a whip - hahahaha! Roo as a faghag - stop!you're killing me! Christopher Robin giving an enema - uncle!uncle! From the quality of the writing and the illustrations, it seems as if she finished this book in a single afternoon. And then she has the nerve to charge so much for a book that's so damn short.

At a recent booksigning in Chicago, Karen read from her book and at the end of every page she laughed quite heartily and looked for the audience to do the same; we didn't. It was one of the most uncomfortable book readings I've ever been to. I wanted to laugh just to humor her, but I couldn't. I was appalled at how bad her book was. Karen Finley is one of the most important artists in America. She's better that this (at least she used to be better than this).

Karen said she recently moved to Los Angeles to live in a place that was very, very shallow. Evidently the move has had quite an effect on her.

Thanks to a series of successful books and videos, Winnie the Pooh and his playmates in the 100 Acre Wood have become some of the best-loved characters in children's entertainment. "Pooh Unplugged," by Karen Finley, is a merciless satire of these characters and their world. Pooh and company walking around with graphically portrayed penile erections, wearing bondage gear, and making sexual advances towards each other--this is typical of Finley's work in this book.

I have to admit, I found a few of the drawings briefly amusing. But on the whole, I found "Pooh Unplugged" to be a cheesy and crude undertaking. Finley's "satire" is, in my opinion, simplistic and uninspired.

I should note that I do defend Finley's right as an artist to make a parody of anything she wants to mock. But I don't see much of a point to this weak effort, whose main goal seems to be to merely shock.

I came across this book after being persuaded by Disney's The Tigger Movie that Tigger was gay. The author of this book seems to be on the same wavelength, though Tigger's homosexuality is unfortunately depicted very stereotypically and equated with conditions labelled 'psychoses': he sniffs amyl nitrate and gets turned on by Eeyore wearing kinky leg warmers and lacy undergarments. Piglet is a tough-guy sado-masochist who drives a hard bargain over his appearance in a spin-off, and Pooh is into food sex, exhibitionism, a very unLacanian mirror phase, and an inter-species relationship involving bees. Although rough and ready, the drawings are enough like the originals to make the joke work and the artist's lack of reverence for the Gospel According to Pooh makes a change from all the manuals on Management and Taoism based around Milne's polymorphous characters. The bit I didn't really get is where Pooh and Co. are supposed to be selling out to Disney. It's not as if they weren't clean cut before. In fact, in fleshing out the characters the films suggest some of the depth that Finley suggests their conversion to screen stars has neutralised. The book takes it as read that Disney films make everything they touch totally vanilla innocent. But there are other things going on in Disney films, Hercules being another good example. It's being allowed to 'out' the films' Easter eggs which is the problem. That's one possible reservation about the book, plus the price. You'd have to read it a lot of times and have hysterics for weeks to justify the price tag. Read it in the shop instead and you can do your bit against hypocrisy and hypercommercialism.

I thumbed through this book at Barnes and Noble and its not much more than wierd drawing. Finley is trying to cash in on her name