One summer day in 1996 my pal Nathan came home from a trip
to Madison with a stack of hard-to-find CDs, all-natural cigarettes and free
alternative newspapers. While we listened to the CDs in his parents’ living
room, I flipped through the papers. It was mostly the usual political ranting
and ponderous stabs at art that I’d come to expect from college-town
publications, but one paper grabbed my attention and wouldn’t let go. It was,
of course, The Onion.
I’d never seen anything like The Onion. It was satire so well-written and straight-faced that it
took me half an article to realize that it actually was satire. I spent the better part of the afternoon cracking the
hell up and quoting lines at an increasingly annoyed Nathan, who had already
read and had his own laugh at all of the articles.
Not long after that I started dating a girl who owned a huge
stash of Onion back issues, sent to
her by a friend at the University of Wisconsin. I started making a habit of
dropping by her house when I knew she had violin practice so I could head up to
her room and dig through the stack of homegrown comic genius uninterrupted.
Somewhere around the middle of that stack, I launched my love affair with The AV Club.
If you’ve only come to The
Onion in the internet age, let me explain the workings of the old print
edition. In its earliest days, the paper was available only on newsstands in
Madison, Wisconsin. (I believe it expanded to a number of metro regions and the
internet some time in the mid ‘90s.) The front half of the paper featured the
now-familiar satirical news articles and doctored photographs. The back end was
dedicated to comics like Red Meat and Pathetic
Geek Stories, Dan Savage’s “Savage Love” column and an assemblage of
pop-culture reviews, interviews and features known as The AV Club.
At first the sudden shift from the twisted comedy of The Onion to the funny but
straightforward arts journalism of The AV
Club was a bit jarring. Before long, though, the writing in The AV Club became every bit as
revelatory to me as that of its flashier counterpart. I was 18 and just
starting to think seriously about a future as a film critic. Up until this
point, my only real influence was Roger
Ebert. I read and re-read my local library’s scanty selection of Ebert’s film
essay collections until I could quote them as readily as I could the films he
wrote about. I learned scads about the craft of arts writing from those books,
but it wasn’t until I discovered The AV
Club that I saw film criticism as something I might actually be able to do.
The writing in The AV
Club was briefer, more sardonic and generally less self-referential than
Ebert’s. Ebert wrote thoughtful, passionate essays drawn from years of life
experience and an endless font of cinematic knowledge. I loved reading it, but
it was more than a little intimidating. The AV
Club, on the other hand, was almost as brilliant yet still felt like
something I could write myself.
Their reviews in particular struck me as utterly fearless.
Their Happy Gilmore review, for
instance, just read (and I’m paraphrasing) “Fuck golf, fuck Adam Sandler and
fuck this movie.” That type of dismissive scatology is par for the internet
course nowadays, but at the time I’d never seen anything of the sort. Likewise,
I can’t say for sure that the AV Club
writers coined the now ubiquitous practice of referring to all ill-conceived
movie sequels as “[Movie Title] 2: Electric Boogaloo,” but I know I first saw
it in their write-up of Lawnmower Man 2.
(The review itself was just a non-verbal jumble of letters, another brilliant
touch.)
I elevated the names of the regular AV Club contributors – Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Scott Tobias –
to my personal pantheon of writerly heroes. I’d even say their work played a
big role in emboldening me to go out and grab my first paid writing gig. A week
or two after graduating high school, I strolled into my local newspaper and
asked the editor for a weekly movie review column. To my surprise, he accepted
my demands, and my career was thus launched. In hindsight, my first reviews
were a shameless, shoddy pastiche of Roger Ebert and the AV Club house style, but a fair number of people in the greater
Sparta, Wisconsin area read them and liked them.
I’ve been writing about the arts professionally ever since –
film,
music,
books
and now theater – and I’ve never
let The AV Club out of my sights. It’s grown along with me, moving from an
afterthought for Onion fans to a
stand-alone site to something of a pop culture juggernaut. Stephen Thompson’s
expert editorial guidance gave the site its unique voice in the early years
before giving way to founding writer Keith Phipps. On Phipps’ watch, the Club quickly evolved beyond its
irreverent roots and became one of the web’s most dependable fonts of
thoughtful, readable cultural analysis. The staff too moved beyond that early
house style and developed distinctive voices. Nathan Rabin took a page from
Roger Ebert and started to blend personal essays into his reliably hilarious film analyses.
Noel Murray got even more personal as he used pop-culture as a jumping off
point for insightful
penetrations into American identity. Donna Bowman introduced a more
scholarly tone that ripped open familiar entertainments and exposed the complex,
fascinating inner workings that made them tick. (Her enthralling
analysis of all five seasons of NewsRadio
remains perhaps my favorite bit of pop culture writing ever.)
Heck, the AV Club
comments section even led me to a vast network of online friends, many of whom
I talk to nearly daily on Twitter and Facebook. Those interactions have
confirmed for me that the AV Club attracts
one of the wittiest, most intelligent fan bases on the web – in other words,
people like me (he said humbly). I can’t think of another community that would
have brought together so many people who can engage me in debates about the
best David Bowie album (It’s Diamond Dogs,
obviously), take my advice on what book to read next (some good Faulkner or
Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through
Slaughter) or actually derive mild amusement from my jokes about Robert
Altman’s Quintet.
Even though The AV
Club brought us together, there’s a sizable contingent of folks who have
drifted away from the site. There are a few who never miss a chance to
denigrate the direction it’s taken in recent years. The standard roster of
complaints holds that the writers spend too much time navel-gazing, that the
site leans too heavily on side projects like podcasts and videos, that
corporate sponsorships have tainted the arts coverage, and that the expansion
of the writing staff has watered down the overall quality of the journalism.
I suppose I can see where they’re coming from, but I mostly
chalk it up to the American tendency to attack greatness for not being perfection.
For one thing, I know how hard it is for anyone to make anything like a living
in the arts-writing world, and it makes me happy to see some of the good ones
pulling it off. For another thing, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the AV Club world over the past decade and a
half, but never anything that made me think the site was losing its luster.
When Keith Phipps announced last week that he was leaving
his editorial position with The AV Club,
it marked the undeniable end of an era for me, as it know it did to thousands
of other loyal readers. As both an editor and a writer, Phipps steered the site
smoothly through an era of unprecedented journalistic change, building it into
a thriving online enterprise while hundreds of similar publications crumpled
into obscurity. He leaves it in as strong a shape as it’s ever been in.
I don’t know what direction the site will take in Phipps’
absence, but I have faith that it’ll remain on the straight and narrow. Sure, not
everything they publish is to my tastes, nor should it be. But so long as they
keep producing inventories that guide me to previously undiscovered films and
music, so long as they provide thoughtful, thought-provoking analyses of the
artistic endeavors that color my world, so long as they run ridiculously
engaging features like Will Harris’ incomparable
“Random Roles” interviews, the AV
Club will have a home in my bookmarks.
Goodbye, Mr. Phipps, and thanks for all you’ve given me.
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