It's all about the punctuation - the remarks about the Wire in general* and about Current 93 were contained within parentheses, clearly indicating that 'smugness personified' referred to what Carl Impostume called the 'punchable' Newsom.
K-punk, since you quote Carl Impostume's blog post -- where he describes musician Joanna Newsom's "slapability" and her "punchable" face, and says that he would
"have to kill her" were he actually to read the interview with Newsom in
Wire -- let't read the entire post:
from Impostume, Thursday, October, 2006, quoted by K-punk above . . .
http://theimpostume.blogspot.com/2006/10/couple-of-things-1-bloody-simon.html:
Carl Impostume: "2)
I’ve never heard Joanna Newsom but think I can assert without fear of contradiction from even the most staunchly loyal of her advocates that she has a profoundly irritating face. A degree of punchable winsomeness and self-satisfied artsy-slapability not seen since Bjork pig-tailed and boss-eyed her way into the public mind. Do these two share a missing chromosome? I suspect that if I actually read the interview then I’ll later have to kill her. This is why I should not buy The Wire."
In my world of colleagues, friends, and family, we have words for people who express such sentiments as those cited by Impostume, words which include: thug, sexist, coward, and intellectual fraud. I think that insecure male, vile, and
loser might also apply.
Though I have already made myself clear, I will again say that in my opinion, the utterly subjective procedure of deciding upon someone's "smugness," "self-satisfied artsy-slapability," "missing chromosomes," and the like, on the basis of
magazine photographs -- and then to base an expression of physical violence against a fellow human being for said imaginary traits -- belongs to a person who could only be described as an intellectual
zero.
Out of curiosity, K-punk, do you agree with Impostume's post in its entirety, since you quoted it?
It goes without saying that none of what I have said here has anything whasoever to do with the quality of Newsom's music, which is another issue entirely.