anyway I couldn't resist the opportunity to write a review of a review review so that is what I am trying to do, and i'm not using many capital letters or punctuation marks and typing in neat little blocks of semi-stream of consciousness style monologues, which is basically what he does so far as I can tell, although I think I'm relying on commas too much whereas his preferred technique seems to be to sneak in a question mark to break up the rambling run-on sentences and engage the reader like this, you know? i guess this is probably because he apparently writes his reviews on his blackberry jotting down thoughts as he has them, which gives the actually quite nice feeling that we're somehow privvy to someone's internal monologue
he's got that Chuck Palahniuk first person narrative thing going on, which is making me think as I'm reading it that it's really funny how writing in a non-conventional style can manipulate the way your readers see you as being, like, the way this guy writes at first makes him come across as a little bit dim but in a way that makes it quite obvious he's really pretty smart, you know? kind of a bit ditzy and naive, which is probably how he gets away with actually being quite mean on occasions, but whatever it works because he basically comes across as a razor sharp wit masquerading as a bit of a clueless dolt but in such a way as serves only to accentuate the fact that he clearly isn't a clueless dolt, which is a pretty good trick if you think about it
anyway the whole stream of consciousness/bitesize paragraphs of thought thing is cute and it means that he can spice up his blog posts by talking about other things that his train of thought carries him on to, while still under the vague umbrella heading of whatever he's talking about, which is stylistically nice, don't you think? and also adds to what i think is the most appealing thing about his blog, namely the fact that even though he's clearly addressing the vast and varied audience pool that the internet comprises of he somehow gives a sense of intimacy that is, well, kinda refreshing and closes the gap between the person on the keyboard and the person hiding somewhere on the other side of the screen so kudos to him for that
i'm sitting here staring at the screen trying to write something about this guy in the same way this guy would write it and i feel like it should be making me dizzy, like when you stand in between two mirrors in a lift and you can only see yourself stretching out and out forever but i guess this is actually the total opposite of that anyway, because there isn't an infinite chain of anybody, just a lot of reflections of nothing there in the first place, and i get the feeling that this guy is aware of the ironies of his own situation and yeah probably also of a lot of things which are going on online, fun quote:
"tonight i am DJing a party to celebrate the opening of this new communal workspace for internet startups in Williamsburg, and also to celebrate a new internet social media recommendation and interaction mechanism that is somehow connected with twitter, i am not sure i fully understand it. i wonder how many hours it would take to explain it to my grandma. maybe that could be like the new metric for measuring how conceptual/meta/post-modern whatever you’re doing is, for example like “yeah i’m writing this cloud-based internet application that is actually both a monetarily incentivized game and a social media tool and it also has a wiki-style user-updated database. as it stands i’m at 3 grandma-hours but if i integrate it with foursquare that’s gonna be another grandma-hour”" (quoted frm here)
anyway I guess I should probably actually get round to reviewing one of the pitchfork review reviews so here goes:
my review of the pitchfork review review (click here for the original review review)
1. so the review starts out talking about the pitchfork reviewer who wrote the original review which shows an impressive knowledge of his source material which is frankly lost on me as i am a casual (at best) reader of pitchfork, but luckily this isn't a problem as he quickly finds a tangent to explore. this tangent is about how sometimes when you're reading something you find yourself writing or thinking in the same style, which is funny because i was just thinking about this before whilst writing this post because while reading his blog i felt like David had probably read a lot of Palahniuk or Coupland or maybe deLillo or somebody like that, you know? except for all the 'you know' stuff which seems to be channelling the ghost of perezhilton's credibility, altho it does make for nice flavouring particles so on the whole I'm going to give this first part of his review review a 7.8/10.
this is because i like the fact that he not only uses his starting off point to start talking about some other stuff and write about some interesting thoughts that don't really have anything to do with what he was meant to be talking about, but he also crucially brings it all back together with a few well crafted and concise sentences which shine out like a beacon amongst his scatty, frayed paragraphs, and serve to show that none of his prose is irrelevant unless he chooses it to be. that's an impressive level of craftmanship
2. this is a review of a review about fairly uncomplicated dance music so far as i can gather, however rather than killing it this actually provides fuel for David to highlight the fact that a capable reviewer can, i guess, engage with the subject matter via different avenues when the most obvious ones seem to be blind alleys
he points out that
a lot of electronic music, especially music that Tom characterizes as “fun music, and it doesn’t have any big aim beyond that” is harder to write about than music with pointed lyrics and a clear mission, i guess, because it’s harder to extract concrete ideas to agree or disagree, beyond the idea that there are no bigger ideas, you know what i mean?and i think that's actually a really penetrating observation, and i like that he illustrates his own point pretty well and i like that ideas can grow up around even shadows of thoughts, and i guess i would even be tempted to say that i'm glad i live in a time when we have the chance to see our minds spilled onscreen before us because when we're sitting there, looking at our thoughts in digital code onscreen we can play with them. so maybe it doesn't matter if there are no bigger ideas out there because we can make our own. 7.5/10
3. sometimes when you read an online blog, even just a few sentences of it, you feel like you have a sense of what the guy who sat their at the keyboard and hammered it out is like. generally this is something that i try and refrain from thinking because it's hard enough to get to know most people in real life even when they're trying to show you, and on the internet you aren't even getting the clues from a real face, but just how that person wants to show their face, you know what i mean? it's like me asking you to describe me when you've only ever seen me at a halloween party (and i don't mean one of those sexy halloween parties where nobody wears much of anything i mean when i was wearing a proper mask, maybe freddy krueger or one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles) so even though i can safely say i know absolutely nothing about this guy, having read a few of his reviews and spent an hour or so trying to write the way he writes i can honestly say that i think i like his mask. 8/10.
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