The Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian pens “the worst remembrance of Whitney Houston on the Internet”
Snarky site Gawker has called a column by Toronto Star critic Richard Ouzounian “the worst remembrance of Whitney Houston on the Internet.” (To be fair, it’s really, really bad.) In the piece, Ouzounian labours to wrench some poignancy out of two fleeting encounters with Houston when they were both on the same four-day Caribbean cruise back in March 2000. A flimsy concept to start with (the closest he got was passing Houston in the hallway once, and seeing her reprimand her daughter at the beach), made worse by flowered prose:
When I think of Whitney Houston, I remember the largest sunglasses in the world and a voice that should have been lifted in song, raised instead in anger.
And:
The cruise finally ended, we all went our separate ways to our separate destinies and, apart from using it as an anecdote on occasions, I never thought about it until Houston’s death on Saturday night. Then I recalled it all in vivid detail, especially the moment when her anger towards her child darkened the tropical landscape.
We knew not every Whitney Houston tribute could be as pitch-perfect as Jennifer Hudson’s Grammy performance, but trotting out some lame, decade-old vacation memories? That’s just embarrassing.
• Whitney Houston saw rough waters on shared cruise: Ouzounian [Toronto Star]
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