So I’m talking with someone the other night that reads the blog, but only has read entries that date back to June or so. Nothing neither here nor there about it, except I myself know that’s not the whole story of the site. I mean, back in zee olden days, say, October 2002, I was primarily focused on making this whole web endeavor the best of Entertainment Weekly, Maxim, and Rolling Stone, with pictures of myself to satisfy the Playgirl quotient so desperately needed. All about the demographics, baby.
So I read those magazines, would scour the daily web updates of similar trade papers, and give my entirely unoriginal take on what was going on in the world of popular culture. Not to say I plagiarized any material, far from it. It’s just that there only so many ways to mock Jennifer Lopez’s ass. Scott Adams, who writes “Dilbert”, defines originality as “Theft+lack of talent+time”. Hey, works for me. These people must know what’s hip and what’s newsworthy; after all, why else would they be hired?
It’s a great way to learn how to write: just do what everyone else is doing. After all, if you’re a med student, you practice brain surgery the way others have done it. You don’t reinvent the wheel and say, “OK, I see where you’re going with this…but I think salad tongs would be an interesting approach.” Eventually, you figure out slight improvements on existing methods, but you need the training (wheels) at the outset, lest you drive into traffic at get hit by a hemi-powered car.
(OK, this whole hemi-fascination has to end. Quickly. Sorry for the sidebar. No one cares. And if you care, I still don’t want it explained to me. Ditto on the importance of rims. I understand these things mean a lot to certain people. Well, so do ritualistic sacrifices of newborns to Agnar, God of Fruticakes. Doesn’t mean I want any insight into the psychology therein. Moving on.)
Anyways, as the eight long-time readers will know, around the time of my singlehood in late March, that whole focus started to change. The writing became, for lack of a better word, “personal”. More about the internal than the external. Lots of sentence fragments containing binary opposites with a “than the” connecting them. You know, that old song and dance.
Anywho, for a while I fancied myself as taking this bold new narrative leap. No longer would I be talking about unimportant things: now I’m be talking about me, and damnit, that was wicked important and stuff. I’d shed light on the ills of my generation. I’d bring planets into alignment. I’d end the cola wars. I’d let “Lord of the Rings” fans interact with “Star Wars” fans in a peaceful manner on the Internet. It was gonna be fantastic.
Of course, the binary “external” versus “internal” is all a bunch of bollocks. The beauty of writing a not-for-profit blog is not the not-for-profit part. That’s on the best of days a non-factor, on the worst a “now why am I giving away this all for free?” type of feeling. It’s not easy like Sunday morning. Sometimes, I can’t fight this feeling anymore. I mean, I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for.
I’ve also forgotten the point of all this. Oh yeah. Now I remember.
The beauty lies in the fact that I can write about whatever it is I find interesting on that particular day. Therefore, it is, for better or worse, all about me. The only real difference lies in the focus, in the perspective. To wit, it in a way doesn’t matter whether I’m giving an opinion about a movie or my current dating life. It’s still my opinion. The topic at hand could be external or internal, that much is true. But at the end of the day, what we’re really talking about is three things: me, myself, and I.
The Commander sent me a link to a great article a few weeks ago about the dichotomy of “reviewer” versus “critic” by Steven Grant. In very few instances would I ever classify myself as a critic. In just about everything I write, at least by Grant’s definitions, I’m a reviewer. He writes,
“The first priority of a review is entertainment. The first priority of criticism is illumination. Which isn't to say criticism can't be entertaining – entertainment is in the eye of the beholder – or reviews can't be illuminating. I'm not suggesting the two disciplines never overlap; they overlap all the time. I'm not suggesting that "reviewers" are second class citizens, or "critics" exist on some elevated intellectual plane. It's just a simple fact: reviews and criticism aren't the same beast, even though we often like to pretend they are.”
That’s just one of the best analyses I’ve ever seen, and it makes me mad to have not been able to have expressed it so succinctly beforehand. On my good days, I’m a reviewer with some critic mixed in for flavor. But in everything I write, I strive to be entertaining. I could honestly care if you agree. That’s not really the point. In criticism, matters of agreement are tantamount. In that case, disagreement has consequence and consequence I should defend to the marrow of my bone. But if you don’t agree with my review, that’s like, cool. It’s all a bit silly to me, and doesn’t often make the person attempting a critical discourse look any the wiser for their dispute. I can’t convince anyone to like “The Fellowship of the Ring” anymore than they can convince me NOT to like it.
Put simply: I don’t want you to agree with my review, but I very much want you to like how I’ve reviewed it.
After all, the reviewer should not be placed upon a pedestal, and quite often doesn’t even place themselves upon one. They believe their opinion has value, to be sure, but as one in a sea of many reviews about a topic they feel the urge to talk about. The energy of a review, especially in a forum such as not-for-profit blogging, lies in the energy of the review. In the fact that you know this writer felt so strongly about a particular topic, either in a good or bad way, that they felt compelled to share that opinion with everyone. And people who read reviewers such as these usually don’t care what the actual opinion is so much as how it’s delivered, which is another of Grant’s points:
“The way the reviewer gets and keeps an audience is by dressing this three-word-max up with as clever (or pithy, if it's clever-pithy) a song and dance as possible, so that, ideally, even if you never agree with the reviewer's conclusions, you still return each review for the sheer enjoyment of watching the reviewer dance the steps. Reviewers are expected to at least marginally know what they're talking about, sure, but mainly they're expected to be entertainers.”
I “marginally” know a lot, so I never really run out of topics here. However, there are of course limits. I don’t talk about engine parts, or bird watching, or the Swiss dairy industry, because I don’t have that marginal knowledge thing going for me in these areas. I don’t even know if Switzerland has cows. So I stick with what I know, and I know a little about a lot, and only a lot about a little, and most of you don’t wanna hear my takedown on Buffy’s fourth season, so I hold that to myself.
Blogging in and of itself is one of the most democratic platforms for reviewing ever devised. It’s taken the power out of the traditional hierarchy of reviewing by illuminating the ease with which one can now express an opinion heard by many people. People often associate those with voices in traditional print and video media as “critics”, where in fact they are just reviewers with a bigger audience than the 10 people we try to convince on a Friday night that “Kill Bill” was a killer movie.
One thing that drives me nuts about Amazon is when you select a piece of merchandise, it automatically lets you know what other people who bought said piece also bought. The implication here of course is, “If you like Product X, you’ll like Product Y, because other people did as well.” Maybe I’m the exception here, but I love The White Stripes and can’t freakin’ stand The Strokes. Tastes are so specific that any type of extrapolation is going to fail. So, in the end, I can only worry about me, taste-wise. But I worry about each and every one of you, writing-wise.
Because here’s the thing: I’m not here to sell you a book. Not here to sell you a movie. Not typing away to sell you a CD. Nope, I’m here to sell you me. Plain and simple. Same as all bloggers, really. What we have to sell is nothing less than ourselves.
I want you to buy the concept of me. I want you to tune in everyday to see what I’m going to review next. It could be the latest DVD release, it could be a family gathering, it could be my next first date. It could be sardonic, self-destructive, or alliterative. Could be prose, poetry, or both. You don’t know, and I don’t know. Each and every blog offers its own unique perspective. Some are critics, and they’re all well and good. But give me a good reviewer instead any day. They don’t give me theory, they don’t give me painstakingly researched data, they don’t give me Foucault…they give me themselves, and that’s a far more precious commodity.
Those three things: me, myself and I…well, that’s all I have to give as well. I’ve given that since day one, even if I kept that hidden even from myself for the majority of those months. Figured it was a topic no one would want to read about, and it certainly wasn’t something I was prepared to write about, either. But it’s what I was doing all along, and what I’ll continue to do just that. If you like that, great.
And if you don’t like it, hopefully you’ll be at least entertained. That works for me.
Posted by Ryan McGee at December 13, 2003 11:31 PM