This week's project is one that's still very much in it's larval stages. I came up with it a while back when I was looking for the phone number for the Li Po Lounge. The Li Po is a drinking establishment in Chinatown very close to my heart; after all this is where my theatre company Sleepwalker's Theatre was essentially formed. Still it is not a place oozing with swankyness, nor does it try to be.
It is my belief that all forms of criticism should be based on whether a project or place succeeds in what it's attempting to do. Therefore I was a little peeved when I saw on the Li Po Yelp page, next to some glowing semi-ironic ones, a few reviews disparaging it's dingyness, criticizing it's bathroom and even one that mentioned the "pervy chinatown ruffians".
After my initial irritation I began to wonder a little about the people who wrote these things. Where did there impulse to criticize come from? Where does that impulse come from in any of us?
To answer these questions, as well as give reviewers a little taste of there own medicine, I thought it would be cool to create a website where we review the reviewers. As a start I thought we'd review each person who's posted regularly to Yelp in a very methodical way. Read all their reviews and point out recurrent themes and make thesis's about where there impulses and quarks came from.
The natural extension of this would be to write a small book where you review famous critics in mainstream media the same way they review movies, books, food and music.
I'm not sure how hard this would be to do as a website but I do know the amount of work it would take to actually write the reviews might not be worth it. Still if this website existed I'd read it.
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