Tedlog

Glossary

Ted's Movie Database is a list of every movie I've ever seen, grated on the Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (DTMTBD) scale. The idea is that seeing DTMTBD is just about the same as seeing no movie at all. Anything better is a plus, anything worse is a minus. Here's the complete scale:
3: one of the best movies ever
2: much better than DTMTBD
1: better than DTMTBD
0: about as good as DTMTBD
-1: worse than DTMTBD
-2: much worse than DTMTBD
-3: one of the worst movies ever.
The system has served me well since 1991, the year of DTMTBD's release. The only downside is that I can't ever, ever, see Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead again, or I risk throwing my whole aesthetic universe out of whack.

Pazz and Jop is the yearly Village Voice poll of music critics. I've made it every year since 1990 save 1998, when I was too busy finishing my dissertation. Some entries also include my year-end comments.

Radio On is the late, lamented music zine edited by Phil Delio and Scott Woods in the 1990s. The idea was that every summer, they'd send a bunch of critics a list of current singles. We'd expound on each track, then rate it from 1 to 10. Phil would type up all our comments, compile the stats, and send us this wonderful package that usually had an obscure 1970s baseball player on the cover.