Franklin Bruno  

"In playing down the personal, [ Manny Farber is] miles away from Lester Bangs, his nearest equivalent in rock criticism. As Howard Hampton noted in “Let Us Now Kill White Elephants,” neither is a hypester or a flack, and both excel at arguing themselves past received positions. (Bangs’s love-hate relationship with Lou Reed is a more tortured version of Farber’s with Godard.) But if Farber ever staggered home from the Thalia vomiting Seconal before phoning his exes, we’re not in on it, and not merely because the New Leader wasn’t Creem. His language constantly calls attention to itself, but hardly ever to Manny Farber. It isn’t that his writing pretends to objectivity; it’s just that, in the formulation “my response to this movie,” the emphasis falls squarely upon the second term. Farber wrote as he paints: as a modernist, with all the self-consciousness about the medium that label implies, but one whose concern with his chosen subject matter is no less serious than his interest in his own materials and methods."--"In Praise of Termites" by Franklin Bruno