I'm really sorry Stephen King's Entertainment Weekly column is done. I didn't necessarily agree with his picks or his criticisms, but his conversational voice (shown off so well in Faithful, his 2004 Red Sox diary with Stewart O'Nan) is a wonderful thing to spend time with. And I think the column was a useful illustration of the fact that you can have a lot more fun, while still maintaining your critical faculties, if you relinquish your sense of shame in what culture you consume.
Sophisticated, elegant, technically accomplished culture doesn't have to be boring, or unpleasant, or merely rigorous, of course. One of the reasons I think it would be marvelous to see a movie like Toy Story 3 or Up win best picture, or that I'm so pleased to see Robyn so high up on so many year-end wrap-up lists, is that art like that insists on both excellence and pleasure.
King, I think, sometimes aimed lower than that. I am not, for example, going to sign off on his embrace of "Who Let the Dogs Out."But pleasure is a justifiable pursuit in and of itself, and I think there are far too few critics who are dedicated to simply identifying and praising effective entertainment. Maybe it's true that critics like Anthony Lane aren't enough to hold back a massive tide of junk (though there's some sense that studios have reached a Rubicon and decided to turn around) and we need more of them devoted purely to art. But King was fun to read, and I hope he won't be just a one-off for EW, especially since Diablo Cody's column appears to have lapsed in October 2009.