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Coverage in Philadelphia has been good, so I'm not complaining—they say that all press is good press, right?

And I understand that many journalists preview my work without actually being familiar with it at all—many are good at gleaning info from the web, so that it can be hard to tell they are totally in the dark...

...but once in a while a journalist writes something about my work that is so strange I can't let it pass without comment. From this preview blurb by A.D. Amorosi in Philadelphia's City Paper here:

Imagine if you will the on-point cultural reportage of Laurie Anderson minus all the overrehearsed tech-savvy sarcasm but plus the freneticism of Lewis Black, if only he were pinned behind a desk — and you wind up with monologuist Mike Daisey.

Laurie Anderson? Really? I'm nothing like Laurie Anderson. I mean, we're both mammals, so there's that.

But the writer knows he's off-base, so he adds a dash of Lewis Black (whom I am in the same universe as) and subtracts all of Laurie's...sarcasm. Except Laurie isn't sarcastic. But somehow this algebra leaves us with...me?

It gets weirder.

A big man with a big hurt, this NYC dweller sucker punches the newsy macabre in the face with each pretty-much-unrehearsed production.

WTF? What or who is the "newsy macabre" that I am, apparently, punching? Who the fuck talks this way? And what does it mean?

And what the fuck is "a big man with a big hurt"? That sounds good, like I'm a Dashiel Hammett mystery, but I don't actually know what that means.

It goes on like that, with commentary on monologues that writer has never seen and has no idea of their content or scope. The author never cops to the fact that they have no fucking idea what they're writing about.

For what it's worth, it is positive.

I suspect it is worth very little.