Late To The Party

I once heard one of the gentlemen on the right say that he'd heard a mega-bigshot music writer (Sasha Frere-Jones? Alex Ross?) say that in this day and age, any critic who didn't have a blog wasn't doing his/her job. What the MBMW in question meant--I think--is that a critic needs a place where he or she can, like, just be himself, man in order to expand upon his/her opinions in a way that's not possible when a writer is serving as the voice of Publication X. In the blogosphere, a critic can't hide behind the style/length/reputation/format of their publication and has to put up or shut up--credibility comes from being able to deliver an articulate opinion and back that sucker up. Period.

That's liberating, sure, but it's also kinda scary, which is why I've put this off for so long. I've often felt that having to work within the length constraints of a print publication help make one a better writer (since you're forced to make every work count), but I also feel that writing without limits can make one better at coloring within the proverbial lines when it's time to do so.

So what the heck am I doing here? I'm going to be making my best effort at maintining a regular diary/notebook of my thoughts on television (the medium I cover for a living) with occasional forays into the realm of film, music, technology, videogames and politics. I'm going to start by blogging about the season and/or series finales of the umpteen drama series I follow, then continue with thoughts on the new network lineups, summer programming and...well, anything I come into contact with that seems to be worth writing about. And if I'm not able to keep this up (or if I make a complete ass out of myself), I can just delete this sucker and we can all pretend this never happened.