I’ve just taken down my old website and switched over to a WordPress engine. I’ve cut and pasted all my old reviews into individual articles and in so doing noticed how many of them are specific to a place and time in my life when I wrote them. Sometimes I reference my “girlfriend” who is now my wife. It predates me having a child. I was hosting my own reviews to maintain my copyright on the writing, not just giving it away to places like Yelp or Foursquare, or social media systems that make their money on hosting our collective intellectual property.
I didn’t post the reviews of places that are closed, even though some of them were funny. I wanted to keep them up for my own reference, and also a reminder to post some more reviews of not just restaurants but events, venues, stores, people, philosophical concepts, and more.
A long time ago I wrote movie reviews and enjoyed letting loose with my opinions, using the review as a journal entry in my life. The problem came when I started working for and with the very people I was criticizing or mocking. I took it down, but still missed the format. I used the review process as a way of clearing my head of the short term dross so I could do my other creative work. I’d like to get back to that short form work for the same reasons.
August 30, 2015