october 3 etc
I recently mentioned that I started reading Ashley Cardiff's Night Terrors: Sex, Dating, Puberty, and Other Alarming Things while we were on our little anniversary trip in Montreal.
Anyway I'm back in Toronto and still reading it bit by bit because I don't like to wolf books anymore. It's funny, smart, and well-written in parts but it's underbaked, doughy, and rambling in others. I like it, though. Whether I like it because of its imperfection, I'm not sure.
The best artworks are cohesive, coherent, and consistent. They're the product of a sustained, thoughtful vision, and ideally have the ability to reach many different people (and kinds of people) in many different kinds of ways.
Most people can't do that kind of thing, though. Are their products not worth consuming? Is their output not to be enjoyed and loved? Are people not supposed to put imperfect art into the world? Is the point of art to be perfect in the first place? Is any artwork actually, objectively perfect? Can it be?
I'm asking myself these kinds of questions because I'm sitting in bed battling a little cold and thinking about what makes art or media good while also thinking about the value of arts and media criticism.
If you are new here and don't know me, I was a music and arts critic for a long time. I also believe that every bit of professional work I've ever done (advertising, marketing, media, UX, teaching, etc) has been easier than writing about music and the arts.
Returning back to Night Terrors and liking artworks despite and because of their imperfections, I once wrote a review of a Cameron Esposito performance at Just For Laughs that I enjoyed specifically because I recognized that it was a messy work in progress created by an artist who was going through something difficult and awful. I recognized the value in it. I recognized how important it was that Esposito did this thing in just this way at the most important comedy festival in the world.
Cameron Esposito liked the review by the way.
Most days I don't care if the art I consume is clean and polished and packaged just right. I only care that it's real and that it has something to say to someone or to some demographic. What I'm saying is that bad art is sometimes good art and that good art is sometimes inaccessible, but what I'm actually saying is that I read some of the reviews of Night Terrors on Goodreads and a lot of these Goodreads folks are clearly more interested in being self-aggrandizing and mean-spirited than they are interested in interacting with art.
I get this, though, because I was like this for a while. I used to think a review was all about its writer and I worked hard to include witty rejoinders or zingers specifically to entertain myself, my friends, and people like me. TL;DR I was not good at my job at the beginning of my career. Eventually I got good, though. I am still proud of a lot of my work, including but not limited to this review of a Caridad Svich play.
To be clear, this blog post not a review of Night Terrors nor is it a diss track aimed at folks who review things on Goodreads or Letterboxd or wherever else. Rather, it's just a guy who used to make his money critiquing pieces of art asking everyone who consumes any work of art, popular art or otherwise, to remember that perfection isn't always the point, and that if it were, art wouldn't be nearly as interesting is it is.
On y va!
๐ค๐ If you read one thing today (besides this blog post), make it Joan Westenberg's If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, Youโre A Bad Parent because I share Westenberg's worries in re: what is happening to the human brain and am blown away by how many people seem content to just let it happen like it's inevitable that we will all end up like the folks on the Axiom in Wall-E. (The Index)
๐๐ If you read one thing other than this blog post and If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, Youโre A Bad Parent, I hope it's this Dorothy Thompson piece from 1941 โโ h/t to my boy Pat for sending it along. (Harpers)
๐ฆ๐บ๐ง Onion don't miss. (The Onion)
โพ๐ Last reminder of the week that this week's sports trivia questions are up over at my sports trivia blog. (oddball.blog)
๐ง ๐ Speaking of sports, I wonder if Travis Kelce laughs at stuff like this. (Twitter/grIgenius)
๐๐คฎ Speaking of Travis Kelce, his fiancรฉe Taylor Swift's new record got absolutely demolished by the London Evening Standard, whose critic wrote that "by the time her song Wood came on, I was beginning to wonder if I was accidentally listening to a parody album hallucinated by some porn-addled AI."
๐ฒ gonna
๐ผ go
๐ฑ touch
๐ณ grass
๐ท now
Be good to yourself and have a safe weekend. I'm out until Monday.
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