July 2010
12 posts
“Twitter would be so much better if there were no public (or private, even) follower count. These are silly, meaningless numbers that we, because humans are insecure by nature, have started to see as somehow a measure of our net worth. They have taken an informative, fun and constantly evolving new form of media, and turned it into a competition. Everyone should use Twitter like they have a million followers, or they have zero. Just do whatever you want, people. Twitter is not a contest. Lord knows life has enough of those already.”
—Me, just now.
“[Dave] Kindred leaves out a lot of things when you wish he’d just nail the full 95 theses to Mitch Albom’s head. He could’ve mentioned the time Albom crossed a picket line during the Detroit newspaper strike (which was perhaps the last stand of closed-shop newspapering; the unions lost in a rout). He could’ve mentioned all those overwrought “One night. One town. One bullet. One kid.” columns that Albom hands out every Christmas like a holiday fruitcake and that elevate ambulance chasing into a genre. He could’ve mentioned the Happy Meal theology of Albom’s books that would’ve made Jonathan Livingston Seagull want to fly into the nearest wind tower. He could’ve mentioned the craven Detroit Free Press editor who spiked an unfavorable review of Five People You Meet in Heaven lest it offend the petulant haircut a few offices over. He could’ve mentioned how Albom, as much as anyone not named Mike Lupica, turned sportswriting into something to be done in the spare moments when he wasn’t sitting in ESPN’s green room.”
—Ripping on Mitch Albom is like an old jazz standard, or The Aristocrats: It’s a standard, giddy trope that’s all about what the artist brings to the performance. Tommy Craggs is the John Coltrane, the Bob Saget of Albom buggering.
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It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.
And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we’re back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.
” —The wretched, end-of-days reviews for The Last Airbender reminded me of Ebert’s classic takedown of the ridiculous ending of The Village.
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