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snoopyfigurine's review against another edition
4.0
i love the public library random books i pick out, definitely a ton of NY culture insight :)
chelseamartinez's review against another edition
3.0
I forgot writing like this still exists; transported back to being in college, the tiny blip in my life when I read seriously about art and started to understand the way in which scholarship that isn't scientific welcomes the personal; still confuses the hell out of me. Feels sillily 4th level recursive to comment on it any further (some of it a writer commenting on another writer's comments on a painting, for example).
shane_marble's review against another edition
3.0
I love some of Koestenbaum's older books so much that I still compulsively buy everything he writes. I think this is maybe where I finally get off the train, because while there are some amazing pieces here (i.e., his memorial to Sontag), there is just so much that seems like it could have been markedly better with tighter editing. Like the Ryan Trecartin piece starts out so sharp but then it just goes on and on.
lucasmiller's review against another edition
4.0
I bought this book impulsively on Amazon over a year ago. When I started reading it this summer I knew it would be an occasional book for me. Koestenbaum is a wonderfully quirky writer. He has perspectives and insights that are funny, disturbing, and often quite moving. The personal essays and ones on poetry and writing were easy to connect with, but at least half of the book collects the author's art criticism. He also writes frequently about opera. Many of these essays were extremely interesting, but I also skipped several of them.
frejola's review against another edition
4.0
Koestenbaum is the kind of person I bee-line towards in a party. Loud, witty, funny, but also lurid, mean - in any case brilliant. I love watching them, dancing with them, providing them with the setup so they can lash out the punchline for everybody to laugh. They're certainly an acquired taste, because at times they're just too much. But there's heart beneath the leonine behavior, so at the end of the party, if I'm not otherwise selfishly engaged, I make sure they make it safely back home.
drewsof's review
4.0
Despite the fact that it feels overlong and that several essays did not hold my attention, there's a wealth of great work here. More than any individual piece, it is the sense of self-examination that I take away from this collection - a sense that I, as a reader and a writer, must be able to consciously understand the way that I synthesize my cultural influences. So often we just let them affect us - but it can not only show us something about ourselves but it can, I daresay, make us better consumers of culture to know exactly what it is (or to even try to understand, even if we fail) that makes us love it so much.
More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/05/02/my-1980s-and-other-essays/
More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/05/02/my-1980s-and-other-essays/