My friend (well, he was my friend, and then he does this) Aaron Aradillas points me to New York Press critic Armond White's latest "everybody in the world sucks but me" screed, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies," which he kicks off by flexing his disdain for the "opinionated throng" of internet critics who emulate the "Vachel Lindsay-Manny Farber tradition." That's a great start, given that only a person who has read either Farber, or Lindsay, but by no means both, could possibly conceive of yoking the two together in this way.

White then goes on to piss all over the recently-grievously-ailing Roger Ebert...after which he wishes him "nothing but health." That's awfully sweet of him. Gets in a few swats at A.O. Scott. Praises the praiseworthy Shotgun Stories and pillories all the critics who either ignored it or don't love it as much as he did, because it "should have rocked film culture." Although he admits that in the case of that film, he was part of the problem: "Even I, shamefacedly, only caught up after it had opened."

White takes a little stab at Premiere, the print publication, too:

This sea change in media attitude was typified by the American launch of Premiere magazine (finally trimmed away two years ago), which perverted movie journalism from criticism to production news.

As a there's-nothing-new-under-the-sun person, I'm always amused by this kind of analysis as applied to, well, anything. The American edition of Premiere that launched in 1987—adapted from the French magazine that had began about a decade before—had a lineage. Noble or not is open to debate, but I always felt the book had strong roots in Photoplay, the American movie magazine founded in 1911. One of my favorite bits in P.G. Wodehouse's 1936 Laughing Gas is when the English-Earl-in-the-body-of-a-child-star (it's complicated) is kidnapped by gangsters who...sit around a table and discuss screenplay structure. Inside baseball's always had the appeal of, well, inside baseball; Premiere "perverted" precisely nothing.

But here's the thing, finally. White's wrong about the demise of the print publication; it went down one year, a month and two and a half weeks ago. And when Premiere magazine was "trimmed away," as White so charmingly puts it, a lot of close friends of mine—good and talented people—lost their jobs. Now, White's known for spewing bile at his peers in print, and then turning around and being quite affable to said peers in person—I've experienced it. And I've had it. So: screw you, Armond. Don't say "hi" next time you see me at a screening because you won't get a "hi" back. You think you're applying some form of moral rigor to your work, but the fact is that you're a bully and a hypocrite, and I don't want to know you.

Oh, and also—my Premiere review of Shotgun Stories ran the day of the picture's New York opening. So bite me.