Okay I'm guilty here too but having copped to that I must say we truly are a nation of critics sniping from lazy boys at a few active individuals struggling to effect political change, make a movie, write a book, tell a joke, design a better faucet... Okay that guy is an asshole alright! The faucets are fine stop fucking with them alright! The ones in the airport are like science projects with electronic eyes and motion sensors. Faucet guy STOP IT!
Look, we used to keep this need to criticize bottled up in the art swamp where it caromed harmlessly off of giant soup cans, blank verse, and untalented exhibitionists smearing themsleves with chocolate and cramming yams up their ass. But now it's spilled over the media flood wall and into every activity of our lives. Sports, pet training, home repair, snow removal, you name it somewhere there's a cable show dedicated to ripping it. And I'm not saying there isn't a place for solid intelligent constructive criticism but when was the last time you read a review of something, a movie, a play, a book, that gave you a real feel or what the author was trying to say. Probably been a whil huh? Because nowadays you can only make a name for yourself as a critic if you pass out blow jobs like Madonna at the NBA all star game, or... or if you're a spiteful crank heaping scorn on everything he sees, the kind of poison tongued lard encased asshole who refuses to review anything he enjoys because his praise mechanism was broken when his father wouldn't buy him an easy bake oven for his tenth birthday(applause). Now I don't have any personal axe to grind here, bad reviews don't affect me that much. I'm not the kind of guy who names names, in fact I don't even know the name of the slimey fuckwad from Entertainment Weekly. I feel so cleansed.
The key thing to remember about all critics is that they remain dependent on the innovator, the person doing the real work of creating. And because they just sit on the sidelines of life, never the hunter, they are doomed to be forgotten. But it's not all their fault I mean, we give them their chance when we rely too much on critics to make our choices for us. We give them the power because the sheer speed of existence has rattled our already fragile confidence when it comes to things artistic. We think we need help sorting out artsy things, that somehow we don't have all the facts. But you know something, we don't need help. You like the Red Skelton painting, buy the Red Skelton painting alright. You like Home Improvement, tape it and go over it like the zabruder film(applause). It's your living room, it's your life, go nuts. Enjoy the world on your terms, follow your own heart and take what critics say with a fifty pound bag of salt because at best a critic is just another human being, like yourself, fumbling around in the dark trying to separate the artistic wheat from the wonderbread.
So the next time you see Roger Ebert sitting on his titanium reinforced love seat pissing off on the work of some you person who doesn't quite have it yet but might be on their way to having it some day, remember the time Roger decided to dive into the deep end of the creative pool. He wrote the Russ Meyer film "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." And, if you'll pardon me for putting on the critics hat for a second myself, I must tell you that was a huge repulsive, quasi radioactive, spectacularly inept, borderline trogloditic, pile of high density, low brow, can't get it our of your mind or off your shoe DOGSHIT!
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong, and the balcony is
now closed.
--DM
