AGONY SHORTHAND MANIFESTO....Well, I don't really have one, but the weblog thing is going pretty well so far, thanks in large part to the comments those who've been reading this are tacking onto my rants. Really the germ for what I wanted to do with this thing was an idea for a straight-up consumer guide. I've always found that the only fanzine-type material worth reading are those that have a "writer" or "critic" whose tastes & recommendations you can trust when it's time to hit the racks. Obviously they have always been few and far between. Perhaps an unenviable and somewhat ludicrous task to posit myself as one of those, but that's sort of the idea. In the mid-1980s there was this very of-the-era fanzine called Too Fun Too Huge -- I think they were from the Boston area and I seem to remember the main guy Patrick Amory getting crucified in Conflict magazine from time to time. It looks like you can actually buy a 1986 issue of it here. Anyway, they would pop off with full-length reviews of whatever they'd happened to be listening to at the time, be it from the past week or from 20 years earlier. They even had nice things to say about the Fairport Convention (*snore*). It's a great approach, though. The blog concept seems to lend itself to this approach well. I'll see what I can make of it.

posted by Jay H. at 4:49 PM