My most recent review for Green Man Review is up. It’s for an album called Some Company by pianist/singer Skott Freedman.
Untitled Post
I wrote a while back on the role of the critic, and my disbelief in “objectivity” whenever a critic writes a review. Specifically, I’ve always found tiresome the people who profess to simply being “objective” whenever they write a negative review. I used to get into lengthy debates with people on Usenet on this topic, people who genuinely thought that they were the arbiters of true greatness in art.
So I’m happy to see today that Roger Ebert agrees with me:
Subjectivity is the only possible approach to reviewing. What is a review but an opinion? Those who call for you to be objective are revealing that they have not given the matter a moment’s serious thought. Most times, those calling for objectivity are essentially saying they wish you had written a review that reflected their subjective opinion.
To paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, once again Mr. Ebert gets it exactly right.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Everyone likes to make fun of old drivers, and I am no exception. Two recent observations:
:: When I am out for my daily walk and I’m on a street that has no sidewalk, old drivers move out less than just about any other group of drivers I can think of. Even pickup-drivin’ rednecks with three rifles in the gun rack will move over for pedestrians and cyclists more than old people. And if I’m walking on a Sunday morning, and the old drivers happen to be on their way to church, I sometimes swear that they’re actually moving in the opposite direction just to show their displeasure at me doing anything other than sitting in a pew on that particular morning.
:: Old drivers are known to be slow drivers. It’s not uncommon to be speeding along some highway where the legal limit is 55 and encountering some fogey, usually in a white car (formerly an Oldsmobile, but since they’re not making those anymore the make of choice will change), and have to hit the brakes so as to avoid rear-ending this person driving between 36 and 42 mph. There is, though, one place where “Old driver equals slow driver” does not apply: parking lots. For some reason, old people turn into Leadfoot Larry or Agnes the Accelerator as soon as they’re in a parking lot. I can be backing out, slowly as can be, looking both ways at least four times, and yet as soon as the back end of my car extends out into the aisle more than four feet, LOOK OUT HERE COMES GRANNY!!
Oy.
(Yes, I know, this post is a bit snarky and age-ist. I’m genuinely sorry. But I’ve had encounters of both varieties in the last twenty-four hours, and I’m a bit annoyed at both. That, and the caffeine from my morning coffee is starting to kick in now.)
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Sometimes in blogging you just have to go with the most obvious quip available:
“I’m shocked! — shocked! — to find that gambling is going on here!”
Ah well…I do have to admit a certain amount of glee in seeing the latest entry in the Right Wing Hypocrite Parade, and Bennett’s a big one. This is the guy who has made a cottage industry out of preaching and generally being smug; the sheer tonnage of words he’s spilled on the subject of how he thinks people Democrats should live would, to use an Aaron Sorkin analogy, stop a team of oxen in its tracks. But as per usual, these folks seem to think that the Sword of Morality only has one edge — the left one.
(And for defenders of Bennett, I’d like to ask a question: positing the old canard that “Actions speak louder than words”, I’m wondering if Bennett’s charitable contributions to social welfare organizations over the years — you know, the “thousand points of light” that are a priori preferable and better than similar public programs — total significantly more than his gambling losses.)
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Time for Lazy Blogger’s Space-Taking Trick #7: Nifty pictures.
These are taken from a set of astronomy slide shows I found on MSN a while back. Enjoy.
Cassiopeia A, the remnant of an exploded star.
Jupiter and its four largest moons, sometimes collectively called “the Galilean Moons”. From top: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.
The Whirlpool Galaxy.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
I noticed today, while watching Toy Story with the kid, that one of the film’s screenwriters is Joss Whedon, the guy behind Buffy and Angel. I have no way of knowing for sure, but somehow I’m suspecting that Whedon’s contribution had a lot to do with the film’s entire “Sid and the mutant toys” subplot.
Share This Post
Untitled Post
Untitled Post
In terms of traffic, the just-concluded April was the best month yet for Byzantium’s Shores. This is almost entirely due to my April Fool’s Day post of “Even More Turgid Steven Den Beste”, which was noticed and linked by Matthew Yglesias. If my traffic pattern holds, I can expect to fall a bit in May and then rise again in June. (However, my April spike was so large that it might take a while to really rise up to that level again.)
There have been a couple of essays appearing in Blogistan the last few days about weblog promotion (Truth Laid Bear and Volokh, mainly). While I check my stats several times a day (yeah, that sounds nerdy, but it takes all of six seconds to do so; I spend more time than that each day just standing with the refridgerator door open trying to remember why the hell I went to the kitchen in the first place), I’ve generally shied away from “direct promotion” of what I do here. I’ve never sent any e-mails directly asking for links, although I have done the “Hey, I wrote a post in which I comment on what you said the other day, and here’s the link to that post” thing a couple of times. (It hasn’t worked, but then, on the handful of times I’ve tried this tactic it’s been with the “biggies” who probably get several dozen such messages each day.) I leave comments on other blogs, but judging by my referral history, that’s a lousy way to generate traffic, and I don’t leave comments in hopes of generating traffic, anyway.
So basically I operate on the “Just keep doing the best I can and hope people like it” style of promotion. I do wonder sometimes if my general subject matter doesn’t have enough wider appeal, and my political content — while more frequent these days — still isn’t my primary focus (nor, really, do I expect it to ever be, even if I’ve generally abandoned my former, strict “No politics here” policy). Generally I try to enhance what SDB calls the “stickiness” of Byzantium’s Shores.
That said, a few random traffic-related thoughts abound….
:: I recall reading, somewhere recently, that Saturdays generally see the most traffic on the Net. If that’s true, you sure can’t prove it by my traffic patterns. My hits always drop like a rock on Saturdays.
:: SDB also redid his blogroll this week. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t make the cut, since I’m not a Jacksonian. I’m an Arthurian. (King Arthur, not Chester Arthur.)
:: (Yes, I know that is the single worst joke I have inflicted upon my readers in all the time I’ve been doing this. But in Blogistan, nobody can hear you groan….)
:: Yeah, I know I said above that I never beg directly for permalinks. But you know, maybe all those people who link to William Burton could change that link to me, since (a) Burton hasn’t posted anything new in almost three months and (b) alphabetically, Byzantium’s Shores would fall in about the same place on those blogrolls. Come on, folks!
Share This Post
Untitled Post
It’s pretty obvious, by glancing at my blogroll, that my liberal instincts far outweigh my conservative ones. Sometimes I feel I should read more stuff by conservatives and libertarians; but then, I remind myself that I also think I should read more short fiction and poetry and Dostoevsky (ahem…) and Twain and Pynchon and Asimov and Dunsany and Wolfe and Wallace and Shakespeare and…you get the idea. In the long list of things I think I should read, those that I want to read get higher priority. So I pretty much confine myself to the handful of right-side thinkers I link here, and then I follow their links to other places that they recommend, pretty much on a specific citation basis.
And besides, I never know when someone with whom I disagree ninety percent of the time is going to say something I agree with one hundred and ten percent.
(This is also why it’s generally good policy not to flame people when you think they’re full of crap. Because when they do say something that you want desperately to applaud, to do so after telling that person how stupid they are doesn’t seem…possible.)
Share This Post
Untitled Post
A while back I selected Wonder Woman for my “Image of the Week”. Wouldn’t you know that today, by pure chance, I found an even better one.
Now, doesn’t that just beat the crap out of all those black-leather clad heroines with cropped hair who are so prevalent these days? The image comes from this collection of the 25 greatest comic-book covers, which in turn links to the worst comic-book covers. (Check out Chaplains At War, for mind-boggling goofiness. Note that the guy on the right looks a lot like President Bush.)