What is a review? What are they doing, and what makes a good one?
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Okay, so our first night in California, Edgar’s sisters insisted on putting on Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, which is a uniquely bad film.
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World builders can diverge from reality quite a bit, and for fantastical stories, this is compulsory, whether something as restrained as Hav by Jan Morris or as outre and surreal as the work of Leonora Carrington. However, not all divergences from reality are created equal, and they should all be to roughly the same degree in the same work — most importantly, the writer should understand what the big asks from their work is and implies.
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We attempt to communicate something, to elicit some feeling, from the people who perceive our art, and we, perceiving, respond somehow — or don’t, which suggests that perhaps that artwork does not speak to us or for us or in our language. (This will come back to haunt us.)
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Part of this has to do with a thunderous absence in the contemporary period, something that has been present for so long and no longer exists in the context of our time: where is counterculture? It’s entirely possible that I have simply been passed by, that I’m no longer plugged in to the same networks that I was at one time. However, it definitely seems to me that there is a decided and somewhat worrying absence of a unified counterculture at this point in time. It feels like the moment at the top of a roller coaster when you can no longer hear the chain clanking along, but just before the drop happens — the mechanism isn’t involved any more and the mechanics have taken over.
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