Lymond at Mac.com
(not tested on animals)
What is the Entertainment Weekly Review
and Why Do I Write It?
The Entertainment Weekly Review is a bit difficult to explain, but I shall try. It's a rather long story....
It all began in the autumn of 2003, when I had just finished the author review of my iLife book and had no other gigs in the offing. Having nothing to do, I was doing a lot of nothing: watching too much TV, browsing the Web, fidgeting irritably, and brooding darkly about whether I had made a horrible mistake giving up a regular paycheck just because the job that had provided it had been sucking my soul out of me faster than an army of vampires with xerostomia.
Right about that time, Apple offered a bonus to its .Mac subscribers in the form of a program for creating weblogs (or blogs) called iBlog. So, being at the loosest of loose ends, I thought I would try the program out with my .Mac account. If nothing else, it would give me something to do. In particular, it would give me an opportunity to write something - even if it wasn't something that was generating income. After all, to be a good - or, at least, competent - writer, one has to keep writing. And I was trying to think of myself as a writer (I didn't have a job, but, dammit, I did have a profession!). The question was, what would I write about?
"I didn't want to write the typical diary type of blog, because such blogs [are] as common as Dick Cheney's potty-mouth..." I didn't want to write the typical diary type of blog, because such blogs (besides being as common as Dick Cheney's potty-mouth) are usually of interest only to the writer and maybe to one or two acquaintances and relatives. Anyway, even if I wanted to write a diary-type blog, the whole reason that I was starting a blog in the first place was because nothing much was going on in my life at the time: a diary about an unemployed middle-aged man sitting around his apartment, watching too much TV, browsing the web, fidgeting irritably, and brooding darkly would be a very boring and depressing diary both to read and to write.
"Almost every week I found at least one or two things in the magazine that were ... so stupid, wrong-headed, or otherwise lame that I couldn't help but mutter some disparaging remark about them...." In addition to watching TV, browsing the Web, fidgeting, and brooding, I also wasted my time reading a lot of junk. One of the pieces of junk I would read to waste my time was the magazine Entertainment Weekly. I'd been subscribing to Entertainment Weekly since my Voyager days (at one time, EW used to review multimedia products, including some of Voyager's), and almost every week I found at least one or two things in the magazine that were remarkable: that is, they were so stupid, wrong-headed, or otherwise lame that I couldn't help but mutter some disparaging remark about them, either to myself or to the Digital Medievalist (or to myself and then to the Digital Medievalist).
It so happened that the week in which I downloaded iBlog from .Mac, EW had a particularly annoying issue: for starters, Britney Spears (as artificial a piece of entertainment sausage as was ever extruded by the American media machine) was the issue's cover story, and, to add to the "fun", there was an offensively fawning article about Wayne Newton (whom I'd always found creepier than a greased millipede crawling across one's eyeball).
Inspiration struck (well, it more or less crept up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and then ducked when I turned around, but you get the idea...) when, on my ceaseless Web browsing excursions, I happened upon a site called "Television Without Pity": TWoP recaps various popular TV shows, and it does it with a certain wry attitude (their motto is "Spare the snark, spoil the networks"). And this was the inspiration: to do to EW something similar to TWoP's treatment of series television, that is, to recap the magazine in the guise of a snotty and punctilious misanthrope (not unlike me in certain moods and moments). Doing so would help me learn how the iBlog software worked, it would give my blog a theme that wasn't yet another diary of yet another would-be writer's innermost thoughts and damp revelations, and it would allow me to vent excess spleen in a non-violent manner.
So I wrote up the Britney issue, and showed it to the Digital Medievalist. She told me that it was pretty funny, but that real blogs had to have links in them. I went back and added a few. And that was the first installment of the EW Review (which you can find in the EW Review archives).
"As time went on, the links became more and more central to the knot of oddness that was (and is) the EW Review." As time went on, the links became more and more central to the knot of oddness that was (and is) the EW Review. These days I use links to gloss some items, to undercut others, and to provide meta-commentary on still others, and sometimes I add one in just because I've run across something so bizarre that I have to use it somewhere. The number of links has gone from ten in that first review to about six times that number in the most recent installments. In a sense, the EW Review is a collaboration between me, the magazine, and Google.
Over time, the Review has developed some recurring themes. For example, there's the idea that EW's Mail page actually consists of coded messages from a deeply hidden conspiracy run by Time Warner (EW's parent company) and that the mail messages themselves are produced by sophisticated artificial intelligence software developed by the Time Warner conspirators (or, perhaps, by the real conspiracy of which the Time Warner conspiracy is actually a red herring). You can find the first notes of this theme sounded in the third review I wrote, the Streep-Pacino issue. In subsequent issues this theme has become more and more recondite and ridiculous (finding the links to "support" this theory is great fun, because there seemingly is no end to the number of conspiracy Web sites available to which I can link). There are other recurring themes as well....
"I can completely understand if the EW Review doesn't make much sense to you..." I can completely understand if the EW Review doesn't make much sense to you, especially if you came into it late in the series. But, taken as a whole, it does make sense...okay, it doesn't make sense, but it does more or less cohere in its own strange way. And, though the original impetus (lack of work and too much free time) has come and gone several times since I started producing it, I've kept at it just for the discipline of having a regular writing task that I must perform each and every week.
Besides, it makes the Digital Medievalist laugh, and that is really the whole point of the thing.
--Based on a letter to a friend,
4 July 2004