Reviewing stuff, as you may or may not have noticed, is a big part of my life... a big, fat, exhausting aspect of my daily existence. I was thinking the other day about how much work being a reviewer is, how much pressure there is to write honest commentary, as well as how much responsibility there is when your words are representing someone else's creative work. As I was going to bed the other night, a little frustrated after a small dose of writer's block, I wished I could just write reviews like, well, how the worst of them do: chumming completely up to the source (making for great -if ambiguous and meaningless- pull quotes like "you won't believe your eyes" or "what a thrill ride") or providing unsubstantiated opinions like "it's crap" or "this is awesome".
I was recently provided a copy of the first issue of a comic book, Cemetery Blues, by its artist, Thomas Boatwright, given the simple request of "When you have the time, please give it a read, and if you feel so inclined post a review." There's a part of me that feels, regardless of quality, that I have to praise a book when it's provided to me by a writer or an artist (or a publisher), like I have a responsibility to bolster the work just because they've taken the time and effort to give it to me. Though I do get over that initial impulse, when you're asked by creators to review their work the responsibility is even greater to ensure that the review is as honest as possible, and moreover constructive. I quite liked Cemetery Blues (and said so in my review) but it's not without its failings (and said so in my review). In writing a review, I could easily have said only good things, but I think it's just as important to the audience as to the creators that I tell them what I didn't like (and more importantly why). As a reviewer, I'm serving an audience of many, not of one, and not of myself.
Thomas responded to my review stating: "I love creative criticism that stems from actually having read the book. Too many sound bites in this day and age based on knee jerk reactions." Me too. I call that kind of reviewing the "Larry King effect" and it's one of the most irksome aspects of the internet and the rise of blogging. Everyone's got opinions, and now everyone has a forum to speak their mind. But it's how people speak their minds, and their approach to reviewing that makes reading it worthwhile. It's taken me a long time to be a conscientious reviewer and to be comfortable with the work that I'm putting out to the public, but where did it all start for me...and why?
I was recently provided a copy of the first issue of a comic book, Cemetery Blues, by its artist, Thomas Boatwright, given the simple request of "When you have the time, please give it a read, and if you feel so inclined post a review." There's a part of me that feels, regardless of quality, that I have to praise a book when it's provided to me by a writer or an artist (or a publisher), like I have a responsibility to bolster the work just because they've taken the time and effort to give it to me. Though I do get over that initial impulse, when you're asked by creators to review their work the responsibility is even greater to ensure that the review is as honest as possible, and moreover constructive. I quite liked Cemetery Blues (and said so in my review) but it's not without its failings (and said so in my review). In writing a review, I could easily have said only good things, but I think it's just as important to the audience as to the creators that I tell them what I didn't like (and more importantly why). As a reviewer, I'm serving an audience of many, not of one, and not of myself.
Thomas responded to my review stating: "I love creative criticism that stems from actually having read the book. Too many sound bites in this day and age based on knee jerk reactions." Me too. I call that kind of reviewing the "Larry King effect" and it's one of the most irksome aspects of the internet and the rise of blogging. Everyone's got opinions, and now everyone has a forum to speak their mind. But it's how people speak their minds, and their approach to reviewing that makes reading it worthwhile. It's taken me a long time to be a conscientious reviewer and to be comfortable with the work that I'm putting out to the public, but where did it all start for me...and why?
back to the past, Samurai Jack
Throughout high school my focus was art, moreover comic book illustration. My utter and only desire in life was to be a comic book illustrator, with nothing else even coming a close second. By the end of my Grade 11 year I felt I had a pretty firm grasp on the whole illustration thing but somehow, despite my desires, I knew I just wasn't cut out for it. I loved drawing, moreover, I loved drawing comic book-type stuff, but I wasn't dedicated, and I wasn't willing to go the extra mile to be the best I could be at my craft. When I made a decision to take a slew of business courses in my Grade 12 year, that was me coming up with a back-up plan for the failure I knew I would achieve as an artist. I didn't give up on drawing, far from it, but in my OAC year (standing for "Ontario Academic Credit", a replacement for Grade 13, both of which now no longer exist in this province) I discovered my love of writing through a creative writing course.
It was in this course that I scripted and drew and entire comic book, Scalpel #1 (which I hereby copyright with this reference), churning out the script rather rapidly compared to the months of tedious illustration. I drew the final fifteen pages in the span of a week, setting myself at the drawing table with all the free time I had to spare outside of work and school to get them done, handing the teacher, Mr. Frigeri, the script and the art boards together, only to have them returned the next week with him stating "I'm disappointed in you. I was expecting a finished product." He gave me a week extension to finish the book, meaning I had to photocopy and reduce each page, ink them, add word balloons (and my penmanship is atrocious), color the cover and bind it. I did it and I hated dong it. I realized I loved the speed at which writing stories came together, and realized the tedium of illustrating stories was not for me.
This liberation from the drawing table suddenly freed my mind up. Mr. Frigeri introduced the concept of journals at the beginning of the school year, something which I still use to this day (although blogging has been more a steady companion in recent years). It was in my journals that I found a love of exploring thoughts and ideas, and here that I recorded notes on film and television, comics and music. It was through the act of recording what I watched, and noting my opinion that my reviewing tendencies gestated.
The first entry I made which seemed to indicate so predilection towards reviewing things can be seen in the scan to the right where I express my outrage (and ignorance) at the 2005 Academy Awards. Funny thing is the very next entry is a review of Tank Girl from March 31, 2005, and that without a doubt, was my first (and it's terrible: "Any doubts I had about this movie were laid to rest when the 'roos showed up. Seriously, these characters are some of the best I've seen in any movie"). My rating system at the time ranked out of 5 each on artistic merit and entertainment value, and Tank Girl got an "Art - 4, Ent. - 4.5". I still like the movie to this day, but wow.
The idea of an empirical rating system transformed over the months and months of early journalling, starting off primarily with a whole gamut of regularly maintained lists of favourites in which new entrants would jockey for position. At one point I was just listing out things I had watched or read or heard and simply assigned a rating to them, with no further commentary, but later realized without any sort of commentary, the rating was pretty useless (I have a movie called "Pleasure" written down with an artistic and entertainment rating each of 3 but I don't even recall the film). To see hash marks beside a movie title tells me nothing except either I liked the movie very much, or hated it, or perhaps wasn't sure either way.
libranian
I don't exactly know when I realized it, but if I didn't then I should have... my memory sucks. I've explained to people before (my wife.. my boss... someone else) that my brain works referentially. If I read a news story that interests me, I don't remember the interesting parts of the news story, I remember where I read it. If someone tells me something semi-important, I don't often remember it specifically, I just remember the vague details and who told me. This boils down to, basically, if I have an opinion on a movie, I better write it down, otherwise I'm going to have to watch the movie again to remember it. Reviewing formally started for me as a way of recording my thoughts and opinions down so that they'd be there to refer to later. It's not that I'm dumb, it's just my brain don't work so good.
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Heading into university (Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, mind you, not venturing too far away from home), a great new landscape where less people knew my more timid, bashful, awkward self thus allowing me to redefine my identity as someone creative, intelligent, confident and good looking. Well, 3 out of 4 ain't bad (I'll let you choose the three). I was searching for friends, which I made easily, and I was searching for a creative outlet which I found in the Argus, the student newspaper.
I was welcomed in by Patrick (Paddy O'Laddy), the editor-in-chief and a friend of my sister's boyfriend at the time. I saw their clubhouse atmosphere and marveled at their much less than serious take on campus affairs. It was more National Lampoon than Globe and Mail and I wanted in. I met the gang and was welcomed with open arms, and I submitted contributions week after week, yet it was only the first week that they published anything. I felt rejected and wondered if I wasn't good enough. I kept submitting for a few more weeks yet nothing appeared in print. Darn. It was months later when, running into Patrick again, he wondered why I hadn't been submitting. I told him about how I did without results, and it turned out I had been submitting incorrectly and my articles were getting lost.
Paddy brought me back to the clubhouse, re-introduced me to the gang, where I was told to drop things off in person, and to just come up and hang out when I felt like it. Soon, the Argus became my home away from class, and often I was just sit there in awe of the camaraderie. I wanted in. The paper had a number of paying positions, including 4 section editors. I ran for "Entertainment Editor" in 1997 and won the role. The following year it a dream come true. I got paid (not much, about $100 a month), but I loved every minute of it. I went full gear into reviewing movies and comics, scoring interviews with Scott Thompson and Greg Keelor and netting a dearth of free cds that would be shipped to the paper by studios looking for campus-friendly press.
I was told that we should be sending clippings of the reviews back to the press agents but at that time I didn't do very much of that. I wasn't all that comfortable with the quality of what I had written back then. I had opinions, but I wasn't very sure of them, just as I wasn't very sure of myself. It was a confidence thing, and exposing my opinions to the campus of peers was one thing but exposing them to the professional community was something else. The fact that the bulk of writers for the paper were using pseudonyms or nickname (I was using my pen name "Gray-Go" at the time) only furthers the point. This same type of juvenile mentality can be seen across many of the internet's review sites today, people refusing to put their name on their criticism (and in most professionals eyes, immediately invalidating the review).
It wasn't long into this editorship that people began to challenge me on my reviews and for the first time I realized that one can't just have an opinion, but one must also be able to substantiate it. Having an opinion is easy, backing it up isn't. I would combat rebuttals or criticisms where I felt comfortable in my stance, and I would ignore those which pointed out my shortfalls. Whether this meant I was wrong or if it just meant I wasn't fully confident in my statements I can't say, but this short sighted, insular doubt of mine would plague my writing for some time.
I stayed with the Argus throughout my university careers, from Entertainment Editor in 1996-97, to Editor-In-Chief in '97-'98 (where controversy was intentionally generated but simultaneously haunted me) and '98-'99 as the Graphics Editor (where I tried my hand reaffirming my artistic ability and failed pretty miserably). I loved almost every minute of it and look back upon it fondly, even the threatened lawsuits and the angry volleyballers, but I know now I wasn't very good at any of it... I just wasn't a smart enough writer at the time. I was more concerned with entertaining myself (and the gang) with what we did, having a good time, more than putting out a quality product. Recently going through my bound 3-year editorial stint with my wife, most of it is wince inducing and brings back a lot of awkward memories, rather than the grand, high-spiritedness I like to recall.
Saints be praised, here come de Internets
As the Editor-In-Chief role meant a lot more work editing and doing paste up (back in the early days of digital printing, we were still putting together paper proofs and shooting to negatives for printing), and my beloved entertainment section had been passed along to more entertaining hands. No longer could I dominate those pages with my thoughts on pop culture, and instead turned to the internet to be my new publishing friend.
Oh, remember those days of simple HTML, where webpages had to be crafted individually, seconds-long .wav files with TV sound bites were the most downloading at 7K/sec could handle, and an animated .gif file was the visual peak of cutting edge websites? Yeah, well, things are better now.
Gary and Marko announced over the Christmas holidays of 1996 that they bought their own web server (I didn't really understand what a web server was quite yet and thought it meant we'd be getting free internet), and during party time were searching for a domain name. "Chewbacca," I screamed, repeatedly, to the point of annoyance. Weeks (days?) later the sauna, taking pride in Gary and Marko's Finnish heritage, was born, and I was bestowed with the handle of Chewbacca.
A stab or two at some kind of proper page was made prior to the launch of the sauna, but those were ported over (resting mid-'98, having given up on webpages for a time, looking like this - woah), but the general gist of what the pages covered was my interests: art, comics, music, and movies. I had developed fanboy webpages devoted to comic book artists Phil Jimenez and JH Williams (before they were stars!), rappers De La Soul and a tribute page to illustrator Mike Parobeck, none of which were ever all that complete or with much factual information (but each contained sort-of reviews of the talent's works). Also, pre-blogging time, lots of links to webpages I like or had lots of information to parse through. The web was such a simpler, if archaic, time.
But in 1998 I took a very concerted stab at doing reviews and created "NEXTpage" (the gestation of the title I can't remember), a subsection of /chewbacca/ strictly for pop culture commentary. I had a section for movies, cds, comics, and "other" (for live performances, tv shows, books etc). The results I thought were fabulous, but then the internet was something else at the time. My first movie review for the site was for a November 11, 1997 viewing of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, followed by a review of Bean (the Mr. Bean movie) and Starship Troopers (all viewed on the same day, because I did stuff like that back then, watching three films in a day... and judging by the date I was paying homage to the troops with my cinematic venturing...yeah).
For almost a full year, I reviewed every movie I saw (101), commented on comics I felt passionate about (one way or the other, to the tune of 56 reviews), rambled on ignorantly about music (sharing space with Gary who always did have a stronger musical disposition than I did) and a few miscellaneous. It was a lot of work, and I can't say for certain what drove me to do it, and yet, it's not something I've ever fully let go of.
It was just after I stopped reviewing things on NEXTpage that I had my first encounter with a creator. I had written a review of Lenore #1 and didn't like it very much. Being a reactionary reviewer at the time (and also without the aid of a very resourceful internet) the review wasn't very good (the general quality of most of them in those days) and I accused creator Roman Dirge of ripping off Johnny The Homicidal Maniac creator (and Dirge's fiend) Jhonen Vasquez. Since it was the only on-line review and one of few Excite search engine links to the "Lenore" at the time, I was found out, and didn't take very kindly to the assumption, writing: "at the very least, you could attempt to get your facts slightly straight. You pretty much accused me of ripping off one of my best friends (Jhonen). The problem here lies in that all the art from issue #1 is all re-prints from various magazines like "Black Market" and "Xenophobe" from 1992. Considering that JTHM didn't come out until a couple years after that, then I must be quite the gifted psychic."
Dirge and I had a pleasant exchange whereby I promised to correct the review, but, as mentioned previously, this was after I had stopped maintaining NEXTpage. A few weeks later I still hadn't gotten around to correcting it and received a pretty messy email from the future Invader Zim DVD cover-model: "I thought we discussed this. I did that issue of Lenore YEARS before the first issue of Jhonny was ever drawn. It was a reprint! There is published proof of that fact. I don't honestly see how you can stand behind such inaccurate fucking shite. Hey, write the shittiest review of my books and I wouldn't bat an eye (too busy negotiating the rights to Lenore with a major movie company), but when it's pointed out that it's factually incorrect, how can you just let that sit there?" I responded by pulling the review altogether until I could fix it up and defensively and apologetically let Roman know that I just didn't get to it very promptly, to which he humourously replied "I apologize for sounding all psycho about it. I came home drunk and saw that and had a spazzy. Buds, Dirge." A few drunken rants aside, Dirge proved himself a good guy, and he's made good books and other entertainment sundries since those early Lenore things I didn't like. But the whole affair was a lesson in journalistic responsibility. If you're going to write something that's stated as a fact then you need to back it up. I've gotten trapped in this a few times (usually by reading one thing and interpreting it as something else) but it's made me better reviewer, if it just means writing reviews takes a little longer now.
NEXTpage ended unceremoniously (who was actually reading it anyway, I wondered?), and Gary and I tried to set up an actual, honest-to-gosh, on-line magazine called Eggnogeggnog, which met with reuslts typical of our collaborations over the years, meaning it stagnated pretty much as soon as it started. We had the design all worked out and our plan of action all formulated, and it was going to be great, but time just wouldn't be our friend in this venture and it fell apart if only because we had no energy for it.
WIth school over in mid-1999, and life calling, I was taken away from home for the first time. I had to find work, and establish myself in a new city within a relationship I was soon to be utterly unhappy in. The internet and reviews weren't very key figures in my life, and wouldn't be again for some time.
(end part 1. when we return, 2002 and blogs!)