review everything

This year I realized I lack a lot of clarity about my own opinions. Mostly due to a lack of attention and effort. This year is also the year I started working to change that, mostly egged on by my Supreme No-Nonsense Editor (per usual).

It started with an interest in listening to more music. I don’t remember where it came from. I started to think a lot more about taste, and if I had any, and given I probably did not, how I could develop some. So I made a list of a bunch of albums - both from artists I knew I already liked and from checking out a couple “Best Albums Ever” lists and from random Twitter recommendations and asking friends and probably a couple other random places. The plan was to listen to one album at a time, notice what I did and didn’t like, and write a short review about it. “Short” was 3-5 sentences.

I did it for a few months, found I didn’t have that many interesting things to say, and gave up. I’m still slowly working through my listening list, but I haven’t written a music review in months. This first iteration was a failed project.

There were a few problems with how I approached it:

• For the most part I worked through my “to listen” list while I was at work, so I was multi-tasking and not giving the music my full attention. I only noticed I liked it if it really grabbed me or I was working on something boring. Not exactly a fair approach.

• I often forgot to write a review right after listening - I’d write it hours later. Most of what I could say at that point was whether or not I liked it, with very few additional details. 

• I gave up too quickly. Not having the words to describe particular things is pretty natural when you first start anything and I probably needed more time to build up a vocabulary for myself. Reading other people’s writing about music would have helped with this, too.

I haven’t gone back to the music reviews (yet) because it’s a big commitment to carve out time for a whole album on a regular basis. And at the moment I am (we are) carving out a lot of time for a new reviewing regime: movies. 

Until recently, my Supreme No-Nonsense Movie Skeptic didn’t want to watch movies. The excuses were things like attention span and the frustration of stepping into worlds and having to step back out of them again so soon. They required both too much and too little time. But that suddenly changed and my Supreme No-Nonsense Movie Critic set us on pace for 100 movies this year.

Which doesn’t mean just watching a lot of movies. For every movie we watch, I receive a little email packet with a personal review, a curated set of others’ reviews, video essays about the movie, podcasts. And then I respond with my own review. We’ve already learned a ton about how moviemakers approach a project, things we like or don’t, and we think much more about the stories. We’re divergent in how we approach the reviews - but I will write about (wrestle with) “how to review” another time.

Just this week, I decided if I’m doing this about movies, I should be thinking in the same way about all the books I read. And… basically everything.

Something finally clicked (though we’ll see if it lasts) that I recently read in Rick Rubin’s book on creativity: the way you react to things is one of the ways you can best express yourself. It’s a perfect place to start creatively because you don’t actually have to invent anything, you can just observe the way you are responding and observing that response will get you somewhere. This is turning out to be true and now I’m convinced.

And it’s not as trivial as it sounds. It’s easy to have a sense of understanding something, but once you have to actually explain it, concepts slip through your grasp. You realize you only had the sense of understanding, not the actual understanding. Most of the time I only have a sense of understanding myself and what I think of things. Explaining to an audience (imagined or real) is the only way to get to concrete.

Commitment to reviewing a movie (or anything) forces you to pay attention more, to think about what you might say about it as you watch. Once you learn the things you appreciate, you can appreciate them more directly, instead of letting them wash over you and provide a vague sense of enjoyment. On the rare occasions I go to art museums, I like to look at a full painting, but then walk up close to see the brushstrokes. Same idea.

The “Review Everything” phase intersects my transition from lurker to active participant. It’s been a slow process, kicked off by moving to Utah and joining some social groups we never would have joined back home. I emailed my first internet-famous person last weekend and we have been emailing back and forth since then. I’m trying to be a lot more active in decisions and discussions at work. I still lurk a lot in a lot of places, but I’m getting better. Now I feel like I’m actively contributing something in a lot of places and that feels good. 

[Edit: My Supreme No-Nonsense Editor would like me to admit that my reviews barely count as “active” since I am making no effort to share them broadly.]

All these things feel like “oh, I’m actually thinking about this.” Where before I was doing a lot more passive absorbing (and then letting it float through without sticking). Sometimes it feels nice to sit back and enjoy something without the review part, but I make more connections and have interesting thoughts with the reviewing regime. Still, I don’t have time to review literally everything, so I will continue to sit back and enjoy sometimes. The question of what I should/should not spend the time to review remains open.