The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

It took over 13 hours for Joshua Alston to put up a review of the third episode of The Leftovers.

And HBO sent out screeners for the first 3 episodes.

He also reviewed Homeland and Quantico (Whatever that is), but it seems like a big-ticket HBO show should take priority over those.
    

Kayla. What's On Tonight. Fargo.

I'm gonna throw in Marah's unbelievably arrogant suggestion a while back that everyone who previously enjoyed Sun Kil Moon's music should now stop because she told us to. Sure, I'll do that once you throw out your Beatles albums, and your Led Zeppelin albums, and your Smiths albums, and your Michael Jackson albums, and anything produced by Phil Spector. Then you can start acting like the moral arbiter of musical taste.

Yup. That's why I love it in all its preposterous, easy-on-the-eyes glory.

Oh, wow. I didn't even know about that.

They literally could have just put up another article condemning the shitty stuff he said- like they did when he went after War On Drugs- while standing behind their original assessment of his music. That would have been easy and honest. But instead they had to take the weaselly way out.

Seems like people are taking one of two methods here: pretending that what Kozalek said is okay because they like his music, and hating his music far more than it warrants because they don't like him as a person. I absolutely understand having a harder time appreciating his music because of his personality, but revising a review like that (or acting like anyone who is still moved by his work agrees with the stuff he's done and said, as Marah implied) is wrong. I kinda don't think we're gonna get an unbiased analysis of his work until he's dead.

Bit of a tangent here, but I've been trying to figure out a way to articulate this for a while: I always feel a bit better about shitty things said by artists I like when I can try and figure out why they said those things. It doesn't excuse it, but it makes it make sense, and if I can relate it to something in my life it gives me hope that they might grow out of it or at the very least realize it was wrong. Kozalek reminds me of a guy I knew who descended so far into depression and self-loathing that he lost his ability to figure out what a proportional response was. He was one of the nicest and most sensitive people I knew when he was above water, but there would be months at a time where he would say incredibly cruel things in response to minor slights. Made it really hard to be around him. People have expressed confusion as to how Kozalek could write such sensitive, empathetic lyrics and be such an awful person in real life and, well, that's my take on it. "Garden of Lavender" is all the sadder to me because the gentle guy who wrote it is regularly swallowed up by the rage-filled jackass who flings misogynistic comments at journalists and insults other bands for the sin of performing at the same time as him. People are complicated in unpleasant ways. Depression is not romantic.

At this point, Wilkins reviewing Doctor Who is a strong contender: two straight As for episodes which even seasoned fans are having trouble with (and which I thought were appallingly bad, but that's secondary).

Sure, subjectivity of opinion etc. But the A is supposed to be a rare gift for exceptional works.

It's interesting, in a roundabout discussion way, the limits people have when it comes to great art produced by assholish people.

Not that I think there is any right answer nor do I think a one-size-fits-all approach works to said dickish artists (if we junk all art made by loathsome people, we'd be missing out on quite a bit). I'm currently listing to 'Be My Baby,' and we all know Phil Spector was a bad human being. Extraordinarily talented, but just an awful guy. 

Anyway, the debate on TOC about John Lennon sounds like something you would see daily on Jezebel. 

I’m skeptical of the talentless failures’ saintliness, too—in my experience judgey people tend to be pretty blind to their own failings, which can be significant.

And this opinion is based on my experience on people judging others’ big life choices, not what music they decide to listen to. It’s just incredibly petty, and when it flares up on the AVC it strikes me more as some kind of simian dominance ritual, like which commenters best occupy the moral high-ground. It’s not an insignificant reason for why my commenting has dropped off.

There was no mention of Polanski, thankfully, and Woody Allen was conspicuous by his absence. Lennon seems to be the 'purer' target for these people nowadays: sang about peace/was violent. The fact that he might've sang about peace because he was violent kind of floats above their heads, just out of reach.

Had precisely this happen to me last week.

And it's not as if the fucking sites look much better on tablet: TOC actually looks worse.

Funnily enough, I was just running through the DW reviews last night and I actually thought phipps was actually pretty liberal with his use of high grades as well. Wilkins actually kept the grades in check for Tennant's run. But it feels like Matt smith's is a bit too forgiving. And I like Matt Smith, he was what got me into DW.

The sidebar’s hit me. It totally destroys the site on my version of Firefox and has essentially been the death blow to this whole “Jean-Luc visiting the AVClub” thing.

As someone who used to do freelance web work I think what we're probably seeing is the move to responsive/mobile-tablet first design really exposing the hacks who don't know what the fuck they're doing. Particularly the "taught it to myself while not really caring about learning standards/good practices lazymode" types.

Edit: and you'd be surprised how many of those hacks have managed to get positions at leading companies during the "we need anyone who can sort of do this" phase and still turn out garbage projects or even more frequently sites that look pretty but are total non functional kludge under a smooth gloss.