Pickings have been a little scarce here at the Cinema 4 Pylon, I know... but that is precisely why the Pylon exists. It is a portal through which everything else that I am currently involved in,or will be working on in the future, may filter. While it seems that not much is getting done here, the bulk of my writing is occurring over at my second blogsite, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, where there are, I'm not kidding, updates every single day! Each day, I present a review of some classic or not-so-classic cartoon from the mists of animation history; some films that are easy to find and some that are not so. The entire thing is designed as a titanic daily writing exercise to help keep my instrument tuned and supple (not that instrument! That's why we have the rest of the internet...), and my intent is to keep it going through the entire year, and perhaps even longer after that point. I am assuming that no one is reading the animation blog at all, because the number of comments on that page has reached a grand total of... (drumroll, please)... 1!I have been involved time-wise and brain-wise in helping to coordinate a huge convention that my company holds annually, and to say that I have little left in the energy department each night is an immense understatement. Most nights I have barely had the voltage to throw up the next post on the Cel Bloc, let alone write the damn thing. But the convention is now over, and was a huge success, with almost 10,000 attendees. (This is more than a significant increase over the previous year. I attribute this rise in popularity, of course, to my arrival and participation. Ahem...) I can now get back to my regularly scheduled workload (which never actually stopped), and still have the brainpower left to spend most of my spare time pounding mash notes and diatribes to all manner of films and cartoons.
I will now reply to a handful of comments (although I may also have when they were first made), and also clear up a couple of common misconceptions:
1) "Never had a dinner...", which was inquired about by more than one person, was part of a routine that the comedian Red Buttons used to do on the old Dean Martin Roasts in the '70s. He would take the lectern and try to shame Dean and the rest of the panel by pointing out that there were far more worthy recipients of the honor of being roasted that night than the actual roastee in attendance. For instance (and this is by no means necessarily an accurate retelling of the joke; it is clouded by twenty years of distance), he would shout out the sad case of Moses: "Moses! Moses, who when he came down from the mountain, told his people, "God said "take these two tablets and call me in the morning'"... Never! Never had a dinner!" Again, I have never had a dinner...
2) Were I to have dinner, it would not involve the rending and devouring of human flesh, as I consider humans to be a pestilent species and unworthy of my attention. Nor, if I were to accept human flesh into my diet, would it be true that Rik "dines on the flesh of the living," as one of my dear responders described me. I, despite my reputation (largely earned) of being able to eat many weird combinations and mixups of various comestibles, am also squeamish in regards to things dying in front of my eyes for eventual devouring. More than a dozen times I have had to turn the station during Iron Chef, until the point when the squirming squid or lobsters or crawdads have been dispatched and it is safe for me to watch the rest of the show. And despite my Wimpy-like adoration of hamburgers, I am also always one piece of bone or gristle away from leaping headlong into devout vegetarianism. (Weirdly, though, since I moved to Anaheim, I have developed a taste for shrimp. My mother, who had to endure my childhood of kicking and screaming rants about eating the stuff, will be shocked...) So... no people. If I were a zombie, I would starve.
3) To a respondent on the Cel Bloc, I will be getting to some Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Wolf cartoons in the very near future. There are several, they are all hilarious, and there are some interesting themes at play in them that you may not have picked up on in your childhood. It is only when you hit the adult workforce that they become more than simple, funny cartoons.
4) I have not been sending out e-mail reminders to anyone about anything. This is due mainly to it being one more annoying step that I have to remember to do after I post on this site. However, since I have not been posting on this site, it has been even more easy a task to avoid. Soon, perhaps with this post, perhaps not, I will get it up and running. (I did promise not to send out reminders for the Cel Bloc, though I might start doing a weekly update, if only to get you jokers reading it.)
5) A couple of friends, both named Matt (though I actually refer to them as Squeak and Mattman), have started their own, uh, b-words recently. They are listed on the side of this page under Friends; so, check them out. (My reticence over the word "blog" is because one of them is insanely obstinate over the use of the word "blog"; in fact, he refuses to use it. This would be Squeak. To those of us who know and love him, this comes as no surprise. He is consistently stubborn in his stands.) Another friend, Aaron, has started his own b-word called Working Dead Productions. Check it out, too... Aaron, I still hope we get to work on one of those projects in the future. The minimal amount of prep work that we did last year was a lot of fun...
6) I will post my actual full George Romero tribute in a few days. It was what I meant to put up on his birthday, but have not found the time to finish it until this week. I will also get up some pre-Oscar musings, my picks for the best movies and performances of 2005 (which run about 50% counter to what the Academy whipped out); also, sometime in the next couple weeks, I will have a screed about misplaced priorities in moviegoing, as well as an update post about my newly found life as an Advance Movie Screener.
All this and more! Coming up onnnnnnnnnn... THE CINEMA 4 PYLON!
