{"id":2620,"date":"2005-02-03T07:25:32","date_gmt":"2005-02-03T12:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/03\/2620.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:48:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:48:05","slug":"harsh-but-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/02\/03\/harsh-but-fair\/","title":{"rendered":"Harsh, but fair?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger has often complained about reviews that are more about the wit of the reviewer than about the thing being reviewed. It&#8217;s the curse of Dorothy Parker; her stuff is clearly about her, but then she is actually more entertaining than many of the books she reviewed (which were often enough chosen for that purpose). Her generation of imitators had no such excuse. On the other hand, I admit to chortling at a really nasty, vicious pan. Ben Brantley, in this morning&#8217;s Times (regreq), begins with the premise that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/02\/03\/theater\/reviews\/03good.html?pagewanted=all\">To Everything There Is a Purpose<\/a>, and concludes that the purpose of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.broadway.com\/gen\/show.aspx?SI=41374\">Good Vibrations<\/a>, the <I>Mamma Mia<\/I> of the Beach Boys, is &#8220;to make all other musicals on Broadway look good.&#8221; The best (and nastiest) part is the first three paragraphs, culminating in suggesting not that the performers are enjoying it more than the audience, but that the performers are somewhat less pained by it. Later, he excuses himself from mentioning any of the performers names, since they &#8220;aren&#8217;t really to blame&#8221;.\n<p>Ooh, it&#8217;s a cold morning on West 49th Street.\n\n<p>Thank you,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your Humble Blogger has often complained about reviews that are more about the wit of the reviewer than about the thing being reviewed. It\u2019s the curse of Dorothy Parker; her stuff is clearly about her, but then she is actually&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[200,203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-music-music","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17294,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions\/17294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}