Dear Kilby, a weblog in letters signed Nat Foster

Archive for September 2008

Friends

23 September 2008

Dear Friends,

I have worked CSS magic and added a column for links way, way down at the foot of the page. If you’d like a strip of that prime real estate, leave a comment and I’ll hook you up.

Just don’t peek at the source. It’s ug.

-Nat

P.S. How does one indent in Wordpress’s Theme Editor anyway? Tab is useless.

4 comments

Roger Ebert

20 September 2008

Dear Roger Ebert,

I just finished reading your latest journal entry, “Critic” is a four-letter word, in which you dedicate not just the first paragraph, but the first two (plus the epigraph!) to compiling the Internet’s most exhaustive collection of anti-critic sentiments:

A critic at a performance is like a eunuch at a harem. He sees it done nightly, but is unable to perform it himself.
–Brendan Behan

A lot of people don’t know what “critic” means. They think it means, “a person who criticizes.” They don’t like people who do that. It seems an impotent profession. Critics are nasty, jealous, jaded and bitter. They think it’s all about them. They’re know-it-alls. They want to appear superior to everyone else. They’re impossible to please. They don’t understand the tastes of ordinary people. They love to tear down other people’s hard work. Those who can do it, do it. Those who can’t do it, criticize. What gives them the right to have an opinion? We’d be better off without them.

Criticism is a destructive activity. If I like something and the critics didn’t, they can’t see what’s right there before their eyes because they’re in love with some theory. They don’t have feelings; they have systems. They think they know better than creators. They praise what they would have done, instead of what an artist has done. They use foreign words to show off. They’re terrified of being exposed as the empty poseurs they are. They are leeches on the skin of art.

You then launch your defense of critics using a quotation from Anton Ego, the archetypal pompous critic in Ratatouille:

As I read I’m thinking is this guy applying for a position as his enemies’ hero? Leeches on the skin of art? Dang, I’ll have to remember that one the next time some hack disses my favorite band, book, movie, or sports team. (Do book critics even write negative reviews?) But–you crafty writer you–once you’ve finished loading the rifles of your firing squad, you tie each of the barrels in a knot by pointing out three important roles of the critic:

1. to write, as Anton puts it, “in the discovery and defense of the new.” You cite the first films by Scorsese, Leigh and Nava as examples of the new. You write, “A critic can defend it, publicize it, encourage it. Those are worth doing.”
2. To encourage readers to spend their money and time on better things. “We are all allotted an unknown but finite number of hours of consciousness. Maybe a critic can help you spend them more meaningfully.”
3. To teach critical thinking by example. “Too many simply absorb,” you write. A critic can teach audiences of art how to explain their reactions to it, how to have opinions and back them up.

Role #1 is a gimme. Who wouldn’t appreciate a critic for championing innovative, worthy art? As for #2, Renee and I would be twenty dollars richer and forty net IQ points smarter had we listened to you about National Treasure: Book of Secrets. so I’ll grant you that one as well, but #3, while perhaps the most crucial role of the critic, also presents a danger. You publish reviews with the risk that moviegoers will use your criticism–not evidence from the art itself–to explain why they didn’t like it. I’ve encountered that tendency in myself. When Renee and I exit the theater with opposite reactions to a movie, after arguing the whole drive home, I’ll go straight to my computer, log on to rottentomatoes, and shout something juvenile like: “Hah! 64% of critics and 79% of Top Critics agree with me!” But she’ll stick to her initial opinion, and the professional reviews do nothing to sway her confidence in it. She’s a natural critic. The rest of us, while we need the guidance, can’t go relying on your ideas. Or worse: passing them off as our own.

Sincerely,

Nat Foster

2 comments

Okkervil River

14 September 2008

Dear Okkervil River,

I found you guys back in 2002 on Audiogalaxy, a music sharing site whose death you probably mourn harder than any of us. Will wrote my favorite reviews there, and hey, check it out, they still got the old page up! I clicked on the free mp3 links at the bottom of the page, liked them enough to pirate the rest of Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See, and then burned a disc that would outlast even OK Computer’s record first stay in my car stereo. Those three clicks ended up changing my life.

You released Down the River of Golden Dreams in September of ‘03. I was living in DC that fall, interning for the Senate (I don’t know why) and lovesick (as always) over some giggly girl back in Utah. You hadn’t grown big enough yet for even half an inch on the record store shelves, at least not in Georgetown, so I ordered it online. I remember the weeks after it arrived wrapped in cardboard, I would jog up the Metro escalator at Foggy Bottom and walk home through the GWU campus at a speedier pace just so I could listen again to “Seas Too Far to Reach” or “The War Criminal Rises and Speaks” or whichever of your tunes I had stuck in my head all day.

March 6, 2004… my friends and I caught you opening for John Vanderslice at Kilby Court, a tiny club with walls of concrete and corrugated aluminum, christmas lights strung, and a trash can fire blazing in the courtyard. While we waited for you to come on, a beautful girl with sparkly eye makeup and long hair artificially curled, wearing a fleece blanket for a jacket, turned to my friends and I and asked us for the time. I watched her all during your set, and after when Pete said to me, “Either you go talk to her, or I will,” I defied my usual way of acting toward a girl I liked, and went. We leaned against the plywood sound booth and, no offense to John Vanderslice, listened to each other instead of the music.

From the stage you asked if anyone in the crowd had a few open couches for the band to crash on. Pete’s parents were out of town, so we offered up his house forty-five minutes south, which happened to be the direction you were headed and had garage space for your tour van. I wonder if you remember the night you spent talking music with three weird Mormon kids, passing around a Hefty bag of popcorn they rescued from a theater dumpster. The night, for me, was huge. I got to hang out with my favorite band, and I had Renee’s number in my notebook.

I married her in December.

What if I was never a fan of yours? How much worse off would I be? I suppose everyone in love asks these terrifying what ifs.

I graduated alongside her a year later, bummed around the UK, got into grad school. Black Sheep Boy came out sometime in there, and we agreed it was your best stuff so far. Was it me or was it also your darkest? I can’t say. Probably my life had just gotten brighter.

This past Tuesday I stopped by Borders and picked up your new album, The Stand Ins. They had four or five copies on the shelving cart. Like last year’s The Stage Names, it’s got a lot on it about a “mid-level band” struggling to make it. Sounds like it sometimes gets rough. You have my thanks for working at it, touring so hard, and releasing a great album year after year.

I sound like one of those annoying fans bragging that he liked the band before they were big, I know, but I’m pleased with your success, and I hope you find even more with this new album. You deserve it all.

Your fan,

Nat Foster

Lost Coastlines

2 comments