My favorite never-to-be-missed weekly podcast is called Keep It!
The title refers to a segment where hosts Ira Madison III and Louis Virtel say “keep it” (in other words, “absolutely not” “we don’t want it” “send it back”) to an event in the current pop culture zeitgeist. Their “keep it”s might refer to a problematic celebrity quote, the announcement of an unnecessary reboot, or an unproductive backlash on TikTok. Depending on the week, their hot takes are serious or silly. This week’s “keep it”s revolved around a Katy Perry Tesla pic and people repeating the same tired jokes about Ashanti’s 2002 chart toppers on Twitter.1
The podcast features interesting interviews and informative summaries of the biggest album/TV show/movie released each week but neither makes me look forward to Keep It!’s weekly Wednesday release. I come back time and again for the critiques. I don’t need the show to decide which are the best songs on Cowboy Carter or if I should like Taylor Swift’s new album, but I get a thrill hearing them debate it. Listening to the show’s discussions feels like gabbing with my best pop-culture-fiend friends over dinner.
At theater opening nights over the years, I’ve spotted plenty of celebrities. I nearly plowed into Mark Ruffalo at an opening at Second Stage and searched for my seat in the same aisle as Anna Wintour at Sweeney Todd. No matter how big the celebrity, I’ve never (of my own accord) initiated contact with anyone I recognized… EXCEPT writer and Keep It! host Ira Madison III.
I still can’t explain the rush of excitement that prompted me to say, “Hi. I’m such a fan!” It was instinctual. My feet carried me to his place in line at the theater bar before my brain could caution otherwise. As soon as I interrupted his night, I was mortified. I had no idea what to say. What I’d wanted to convey was…“I love Keep It! I not only love Keep It, I get it! I, too, am a cultural consumer with taste! I’ve quoted your takes to friends in the car, at the beach, and on the subway because I live for the conversation you’re leading!”
Of course, we were strangers, and I couldn’t say any of that without feeling like a psycho. Instead, I told him I’d been listening to the podcast for years, complimented his jacket, and ran away feeling like the most awkward woman in the world. Some people dream of meeting Taylor Swift. I’d be starstruck by thirty seconds with Richard Brody.
This tale about the dangers of parasocial podcaster-listener relationships is meant to show the best critics not only inform you - they make you feel in on their jokes. Just because anyone can be a critic, doesn’t mean everyone can do the medium justice.
This month I stumbled across two book reviews that stuck with me for weeks. The first was “Star Struck” by Ann Manov, which reviewed No Judgement by Lauren Oyler. No Judgement is a self-described “groundbreaking essay collection” about “the role of cultural criticism in our ever-changing world.” A critique of a book on cultural criticism is a delightfully layered endeavor in itself, but what makes Manov's review entertaining is her expertly crafted tear-down of Oyler’s persona. Manov writes:
“Of course, Oyler doesn’t want to be a writer of personal essays; she wants to be an erudite critic of the old school. But again and again, she drifts toward personal recriminations and eschews any sustained discussion of literature.”
Manov exposes the pretension, hypocrisy, and condescension throughout in Oyler’s unfounded arguments. For example, the author would have you believe her “high-brow,” Yale-educated intellect gives Oyler authority to dismiss anyone who’s ever given her a bad review on Goodreads.2 With a healthy dose of snark, Manov reveals the laziness in Oyler’s research, tracing her references back to the Wikipedia page for the word “Vulnerability.” With no prior knowledge of Oyler or her work, I found myself engrossed in Manov’s inditement of No Judgement and intrigued by the intellectual touchstones Manov uses to support her counterpoints.3 To read this essay is to be reminded of the purpose of negative criticism: exposing someone guilty of abusing their artform.
The other book review I discovered took the opposite approach to its subject. “The Warhol ‘Superstar’ Candy Darling and the Fight to Be Seen” by Hilton Als is as much a tribute to trans indie film and art sensation Candy Darling as a review of Cynthia Carr’s new biography on her. The article invites newbies (like me) to join the cult of Candy Darling, offering a taste of her glamorous, lonely, and enigmatic persona. With each word, Als fights valiantly to keep the reader’s attention and curiosity. You feel his determination to give Candy the recognition he’s certain she deserves and the praise she was often denied during her lifetime. Als explains:
“The point of Darling’s life—a point she insisted on with the few people she was close to—was that you can’t walk away from yourself, no matter how difficult it is to be who you are… it’s the story of how she became a self—or, more accurately, lived simultaneously in her real and her fantasy selves—that Carr tells in her book. “Candy Darling” is the first full-length biography of the trans star, and I can’t imagine a better or more honest writer for the task.”
Als’s also allows his passion to become personal. He opens the article with an anecdote about a fascination-at-first-sight encounter he experienced in the East Village in the 1980s. Placing us in this mindset allows us to look at Candy, not only as a trailblazer and cultural icon but also someone we dream of running into on a night out. It brings us closer to her. Rather than a feat of objectivity, the article is an achievement in persuasion. I finished the piece wishing I could stay in Candy’s world a little longer.
After all, a reviewer’s purpose isn’t to watch, read, or listen to media for you. It’s to lead you to the things they deem worth your time. Even the most scathing critiques, if they’re substantive, stem from a love of art and outrage at seeing it butchered. Jesse Green’s recent review of Cabaret in The New York Times is especially venomous. From the headline, “What Good Is Screaming Alone in Your Room?” it’s clear Green was sharpening his knives through every minute of the two-hour and forty-five-minute production. When describing the pre-show, made to transport theatergoers to 1930s Berlin, he writes:
“Along the way, greeters offer free shots of cherry schnapps that taste, I’m reliably told, like cough syrup cut with paint thinner.
Too often I thought the same of the show itself.”
Come on. It’s funny! Also a little mean, but if you read further, it’s clear Green’s rage stems from his belief that Rebecca Frecknall’s revival stripped the 1966 musical of its essential meaning. Whether he’s correct in his summation or unwilling to see the value in boundary-pushing staging, I can’t say. I’ve had my ticket for Cabaret for months, and this review has done nothing to lessen my excitement to see the show. My close friends loved it. My parents hated it. I can’t wait to have an opinion.
In an age when news, literature, and thought feel increasingly segregated by algorithms, it’s worth going out of your way for fleshed-out criticism. Not a two-hundred-word tweet, a four-picture Instagram slide, or a thirty-second TikTok. I’m talking about something you can sink your teeth into. Most of us outside academic institutions can roll merry along the rest of our lives never reading another critical essay. We will never again be faced with the mental gymnastics of following a classmate’s connection between anarchism in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The kind of convoluted textual analysis that occurs in a freshman seminar and makes you wonder, “What the hell? How’s that guy so much smarter than me?”
Those showy Law, History, and Culture majors who made us all look bad at eighteen often did us a favor. They set a higher bar. Just as the required classes I complained about did. “How can I write meaningful insights into a book that bored me to tears?4 What more can I say about a topic with its own library wing?” Two years out from academia, I miss the critical analysis and fast-paced exchange of ideas more than almost anything else. Working a full-time job leaves little time for leisurely salon-esque conversations about culture. It takes me a week to finish a three-hour movie,5 and it’s a herculean task to get to the theater.
Still, I keep discovering new intellectual conversations I not only want but need to be a part of. After fifteen years of Catholic school, I thought I’d done enough reading on Catholicism for a lifetime. I still identify as a non-practicing Catholic, but these days I devote little time to religious discourse and even less to educating myself on Catholic theory. Only recently have I realized what I’m missing by leaving myself out of the loop. In a recent piece in The New Yorker, Paul Elie reflects on the Vatican’s April 8th Statement “Dignitas Infinita,” which translates to "Infinite Dignity.”
Without any Catholic friends discussing the event, I would never have known the church officially renewed its opposition to “what it calls ‘sex change’ procedures” if not for Elie’s Daily Comment piece. The Vatican has grouped gender reassignment surgery with the horrors of “war, economic inequality, human trafficking,” shirking the opportunity to circulate complex, inclusive, and compassionate language regarding trans individuals. About the passage condemning gender fluidity, Elie writes:
“suddenly the reader is presented with a citation-free sketch of an abstract individual, as imagined by a curial official. This individual is not credited with any effort of reflection or discernment—not seen as striving to join the physical and social aspects of personhood to the inward person (which some trans people identify as the God-given person), or as seeking to reconcile body and soul, as Christian believers have always sought to do. This individual is simply said to be succumbing to the temptation “to make oneself God.” Thus gender identity, whose complexities call for a complex response informed by emerging currents of thought, is fit into the Vatican’s textbook critique of post-Enlightenment social movements, and reduced to one more iteration of individual self-determination run amok—the way the Vatican characterized gay life a generation ago.”
The church’s harmful rhetoric stems from bias rather than textual interpretation. It is not baked into the religion. It’d be easy to dismiss “Dignitas Infinita” as irrelevant to my present life and write off the Catholic institution as broken. The problems it presents are far from new and the church as an institution never ceases to disappoint. Still, fifteen years can’t be so easily shaken off. I wonder, “if people who disagree don’t take part in critiquing the church’s ideology, who will be left to provide an informed opinion?” If nothing else, Elie’s critique taught me I still want to be a part of the conversation. That’s only possible if I pay attention.
Far from gatekeeping culture, I believe criticism enriches it. We are better conversationalists from the tools critics offer us, not to mention their long memories of what’s come before. In his review of Rob Reiner’s documentary, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, Jason Diamond writes, “there are two sorts of people in this world: Comedy fans, and fans of comedy.” He sees “comedy fans” as active viewers with an interest in the craft that Brooks is so adept at. The rest are simply looking for a quick, thoughtless laugh.
I believe criticism produces the same two camps. One can approach a review as a shortcut to an opinion. A simple thumbs up or thumbs down.6 Alternatively, it can be a starting point. An invitation to participate in a thrilling intellectual exercise. In the conclusion of “Star Struck,” Ann Manov suggests:
“Since Montaigne, the best essays have been, as the French word suggests, trials, attempts. They entail the writer struggling toward greater knowledge through sustained research, painful introspection, and provocative inquiry. And they allow the reader to walk away with a freeing sense of the possibilities of life, the sensation that one can think more deeply and more bravely—that there is more outside one’s experience than one has thought, and perhaps more within it, too.”
I would take Manov’s musings a step further. The best kind of criticism not only makes you think more deeply. It elicits a vocal response. Sometimes in the form of “did you see what so-and-so said about such-and-such?” and a link texted to a friend. It improves our language and strengthens our analytical toolbox so the next time we judge, we do so with a sharper eye.
Because we will judge. We will review. We will keep coming up with our own cultural assessments. As I’ve said, critique is a conversation. It’s boring if we only listen to ourselves talk.
Quote of This Era:
Statler: “Do you believe in life after death?”
Waldorf: “Every time I leave this theater.”
Writing Updates for This Era:
A very cool magazine called 20 to Life is publishing one of my essays!!!
Check them out on Instagram and swing by the magazine’s release party TONIGHT at 6 pm at Early Yves Cafe in Brooklyn!
You can also read my first attempt at theater criticism published in Byline! It’s more “musical opening night antics” than a review, but I hope you enjoy it all the same!
Finally, I’m excited to announce I’ll be doing a reading on Wednesday, May 8th at Mary O’s on Avenue A! The reading starts at 7 pm, but I’ll probably go on later in the night. Come out and say hi!
Recommendations for This Era:
Mary Jane on Broadway7
“Down Bad” “Guilty as Sin?” “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” on The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift.
The score from Defending Your Life (1991) by Michael Gore
Broadcast News (1987) directed by James L. Brooks8
“The Ex-N.Y.P.D. Official Trying to Tame New York’s Trash” by Eric Lach9 - A fascinating glimpse at the future of our city’s trash and the proposed militarization of the sanitation department.
Knitting
Heat (1995) directed by Michael Mann
Reviews Referenced:
“Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department with Juliana Canfield” on Keep It!, Crooked Media, Apr. 24, 2024.
“Star Struck” by Ann Manov, Book Forum, Spring 2024.
“The Warhol ‘Superstar’ Candy Darling and the Fight to Be Seen” by Hilton Als, The New Yorker, Apr. 8, 2024.
“‘Cabaret’ Review: What Good Is Screaming Alone in Your Room?” by Jesse Green, The New York Times, Apr. 21 2024.
“The Vatican’s Statement on Gender Is Unsurprising and a Missed Opportunity” by Paul Elie, The New Yorker, Apr. 13 2024.
“The Albert Brooks Documentary Is Proof We Don’t Appreciate Comedy Enough” by Jason Diamond, GQ, Nov. 10, 2023.
Don’t make me call it X.
A popular book rating App and the most fun form of social media. The key is to not care about your yearly reading goal and only have 5 friends.
These include Gayatri Spivak’s “radical acceptance of vulnerability” and Carol Gilligan’s “feminist care ethics” to name a few.
In college, I had a blast writing an essay on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, but while I was reading it I dubbed it “the asleepening” because I could never stay awake for more than a chapter at a time.
Heat (1995) was worth the struggle though!
My small ode to film criticism icons Siskel and Ebert, who created true entertainment with their opposable thumbs.
Project managed by an incredible, stunning, valued friend of this newsletter Clare!!! The heartbreaking performances and automated set are a MUST SEE!
My favorite Albert Brooks movie thus far.
Can you tell I was recently gifted a subscription?