Wake Me Up When September Begins...

Did you blink on January 1st?

If you did, you might be wondering where the last eight months have gone. The last time that I posted here on The Cinema 4 Pylon, on that very same inaugural day of the new year, I had been giving anyone that still cared some pre-climb instructions before I launched into a massive blog series chronicling my assault to the summit of my self-constructed Tower of Film.

But there was trouble almost from the start. I discovered that the department store which occupied the first two floors of the Tower was having a fire sale on various and sundry thingies, but it was almost impossible to deal with the salesmen. Some insisted on pushing only the wares of the previous decade, mired in their plaid-heavy, staid comfort and nuclear winter certainty, while others were more intent on showing me the brilliant, shining promise of a new tomorrow, with its eventual shag carpeting and orange furniture.  However, the sale wasn't a total loss. Since Jen and I were in dire need of kitchenware replenishment, I went hog-wild in the spatula section. (Not so strangely, it turns out none of the lot I purchased were ever actually used on food of any recognizable form).

On the third floor, I was caught in the massive crossfire brought about from the activities of roughly forty spies, most of them working for the same governmental system, but  all completely at odds in methods and tactics. No sooner had I formed a grudging allegiance with the two agents most apt to have spare go-go girls at the ready, the scene abruptly shifted, and the seemingly certain notion that my doom would be spelled out via ballistic penmanship left my mind. Suddenly, a drink was in my hand instead, and the original melee had slipped into a non-stop martini party. The drinks were fine, but far too much smoke and Aquanet and not nearly enough oxygen left me reeling. It threatened to get even worse when the scene slowly shifted once more, and the well-dressed evening crowd with whom I had been lounging was gradually replaced by odious hippies smiling far too broadly, who insisted on a shared experience of their own particular madness. As hippies have always served as a room-clearer for me, that was the definitive sign that it was time to renew my efforts up the tower.

Eventually, I fought and clawed my way up to 1970, and I thought it would be a smooth glide straight through the decade to follow, but as I was approaching an area where I had far more expertise, things went truly wonky. Sure, I had no trouble at all accepting that there was a swingin' cheerleader party on that seventh floor -- assisted by additional cadres of swingin' stewardesses and swingin' nurses -- but then the roving biker gangs showed up to ruin the fun. Raping and pillaging ensued, as things are wont to do where roving movie biker gangs are concerned. The problem was chiefly aesthetic on my part. While I could partially identify with their naive form of "freedom," I couldn't come to grips with their need to sporadically reinforce Nazi imagery. Also, their raping ways had to go. Luckily, roving, raping movie biker gangs are also wont to die off in droves, so my path was cleared in time for...

Now.

In the preceding eight months, I have been around, and I have been writing. I just have not been posting. On my laptop, there is a file folder with exactly 137 text files featuring the lost posts of the last year or so, let alone the past eight months. Some of them are complete; most are not. I could go back and complete them and retro-post them, but my intent behind writing the bulk of them is long vanished from my mind, and where I do recall the intent, I most likely cannot dredge up the same urgency that brought me to create them initially. Better to move forward...

Which is why we are now at this exact point. When reviewing the goals I set for myself early last year when I first conceived the Tower of Film project, and then comparing them to my actual achievements in that time, it is certainly clear that I have dug myself into a massive hole. But, when compared to the goals I set when I first moved here almost 5-1/2 years ago, it is even clearer that said hole has likely reached the earth's core.

Have I gotten over whatever was keeping me all but completely silent for these past months? Probably not, but believe me, I have never been shy about sharing the details. Simply filling in the hole and calling it a fresh start is not an option -- as I said, I've dug myself into it. I spent all my climbing energy on the damn Tower, and right now, I am taking a rest from it. For my own creative sanity (and for other reasons that will become plain as I gradually roll out what I have been up to in this time), the only answer is to start digging my way out the other side.

Welcome back, me. Here's the shovel. Oh, don't forget your scuba gear. The other side of the world comes out in the Indian Ocean...

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4: The Facts, Ma'am... (Maybe the Facts)

On the Internet Movie Database, which most of us simply refer to as IMDb (small "b", thank you) and which has largely taken on a generally accepted position as the main online resource for instant movie information, I have (to this date) rated around 5,000 movies.

Let's get this straight from this point on: I know that I am not a complete poser. Despite what happened with The Last Detail and those other films, I am very certain of my love for the movies. It's like asking if I wish to continue breathing. And I have actually seen all of the films that I have rated on IMDb. I may not have seen some of those films for over twenty years or more, but I have seen them. The difference, though, is that I actually care and consider what I am rating on the site. 

Fully aware that the way I felt about certain films in my teens, twenties and even early thirties may not be the way I feel about those films now (and even considering the fact that I might have nothing left of the memory of the seeing of a certain film except for my love, hate or boredom with it at the time), I have taken great pains in recent months to amend these ratings to fit my current state, but only by freshly viewing the films in question. While it is not of any importance to any other person but myself, it is the way that I have to tackle things to keep my sense of critical opinion as pure as I can, given the fact that I am as deficient and as prone to posturing and wrongheadedness as anybody else.

The one constant in my life of misspent youth, careless education, menial employment, and suffocated relationships has been my love of movies. The movie theatre has always proven to be the only acceptable form of a "church" to me. I don't require religion in my life, but it doesn't mean that I didn't spend a certain portion of my teens trying to figure out where I fit into the system in which everyone else was so willing to switch to lock-step every Sunday to enter. Combine my youthful wandering with my early love for movies, and is it any wonder that the only times that any socially accepted church really reached me in any way was when I took in various viewings of The Cross and the Switchblade and The Greatest Story Ever Told inside churches? (OK, it was also to make out with girls in the church pews. Hardly watched the films in two instances...)

And so it has gone. It doesn't really matter where the experience takes place, though I prefer a legitimate theatre. The flicker of the movie image, the darkness of the room, the comfort (or charming discomfort) of the seats, the smell of popcorn, the shared community... all of the standard cliches of why one loves going to movies also apply to me -- call it my one true moment of conformity -- and there is nothing for me to trade for the experience. I long to see movies everywhere, in any setting. Anywhere Sam-I-Am would not eat green eggs and ham is where I would watch a movie. Even on a vacation that has been solely designed for me to partake of an area's distinct pleasures, my first thought is of seeing a movie at some point while I am there. The movie theatre is where I always long to be, and for this statement, there can be no pose. It is where I meditate. It is where I can truly think through problems. It is where I need to be. It is where I am truly me.

Perhaps you see my movie adoration as too romantic. Well, if I must prove romantic in some small measure, then this is it. Personally, I view this stance as more theological, maybe even personally political. Regardless, what I know is that I am a movie fan. Of that, I can be certain, and my motto of "Any film, any time" is also a true statement, at least to the degree that I can follow through on it by financial means and via my ability to reach the location in question at the proposed time.

But, if I know who I am, why did I get all flustered over my reaction to not having seen The Last Detail (and those other films)? If I just kept to my occasional pose in those situations, aren't I the only one to know of my infrequent deception?

That is precisely the problem: for most of my life, I have simply been deceiving myself. Maybe even all the time.

Worse, to a large degree, I have drowned myself in sewage, and never really taken advantage of the full breadth that the cinematic world can offer me. I have resigned myself to the film ghettoes for so long, that I have forgotten how wide-ranging and interesting the total film experience can be. See only wide-release films, and you will only have a wide-release history and knowledge of movies. Keep to watching only slasher movies, and your ability to dissect films of deeper intent with the same casual ease of a killer's butcher knife through a victim's flesh will be met only with struggle and the eventual rending of true understanding. It's the equivalent of only keeping to beach reading, but never approaching the literary canon. While I have made exposed myself to and studied films throughout my life, it has only been through the keeping of company with very particular directors: Hitchcock, Lang, Kurosawa, Powell and Pressburger, Welles... But there are so many more worthy of deeper study and appreciation, beyond seeing one of their films and calling myself done. There is a broader, film education waiting out there for me, of which I thus far largely chosen to neglect myself. The first step is to watch the films. The second is to understand them.

I have friends who only go to the movies to do what they term as "escape," an overused term, to be sure, but it is the way I have heard it phrased. Get off work, "need to not think for a while," go to any stupid film that weekend... that is the relationship that the bulk of people have with the movies. It is a night out with friends, a wife, a date, a lover... nothing more. Dinner, a movie, and then... come what may... return again next weekend unblinkingly and machine-like to the next wide-release movie...

I, too, have walked the path of shared ritual as regards the movie experience. I love going to new movies, too, but I never call it escape. Never. I cannot shut off the brain, even when watching Friday the 13th, Part Eleventy-Thousand: Jason Gets A Hysterectomy. (Believe me, they will find a way...) My need to not simply watch, but to ascertain and critique, extends to my home movie ritual, where the DVD player almost never seems to stop whirring. And lately, whirring non-stop without any true focus.

And it this inability to simply watch a bunch of dopey After Dark horror films (in the same manner that I just fervently watched thirteen dopey horror films over the Halloween weekend) and discovering nothing but ennui over the idea of continuing through the series, combined with my anger over the collected lies of my reactions to simple conversational movie repartee, which led me to moment a few months ago for which metaphors concerning holes and digging were created. This point in time saw me finally get a grip on all of these issues, and brought about the establishment of "The 46x60 or So" project, involving the creation of a massive (and ever-growing) list, and a new sense of purpose guiding me through the movie landscape.

[To be continued in The 46x60 or So Project, Pt. 1: Building a Tower of Film...]

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)

Why I Don't Fight (and Why I Must)...

So, where'd I go? How come I have not posted on this blog for well over a month? What happened to my rather recently pledged resolve to soldier on with my writing, battling through my idiotic depressive states and bouts of low self-esteem?

How does an upper respiratory infection and bronchitis hit you? How does constant wheezing and coughing and nasal dripping and not being able to breathe for the last four weeks sound?

To me, until late last week, this round of illness has been pure exhaustion, and the last thing I have wanted to do was sit at a computer and concentrate on writing. Writing about anything, even half-assed notes to my friends and family. I even found it straining to use Twitter, and so my tiny little bon mots and pocket reviews found themselves largely reduced, almost to a standstill, for a couple of weeks, with only an occasional attempt to right the ship. I would play a couple of songs on a Sunday morning on Blip.fm to cheer myself up, to try and convince myself that everything was all right, even when I was drowning in mucus and growing ever sicker of the echo of my own hacking cough. And then I would decide that melting into the pile of pillows and blankets on the couch, where I have largely lived for the past month, would be a far more comfortable and smart choice.

And so I have hardly written in well over six weeks now. Yes, in the last two weeks, I have begun to respond more and tweet more and catch up on what has been going on with everyone. After a misfire with Urgent Care left me taking antibiotics which didn't seem to do me a lick of good, I finally hit a real doctor, who put me on an inhaler (AdVair) which has cleared me up enough where I am breathing, the infection is apparently gone (at least the florescent green, bugfuck-weird stuff has subsided completely), and my cough sometimes seems like a mannerism out of which I need to trick myself. My energy came back last Thursday, and I am now sleeping comfortably most nights (for the first time in ages), and my increase in energy has been absolutely evident to my friends and co-workers, even though I start up a death rattle of a cough once in a while, and then continue to cough for another ten minutes before I can relax my throat enough to actually speak. And then there is that glorious sizz-urp (that's what Raw Meat, via his beloved gangsta rappers, calls it) -- I don't like to take it during the day because it does make me weary, and perhaps I haven't taken it enough, not even halfway to fully recommended prescription. But it sure works wonders for me at night, when I don't have to worry about the dizziness and lack of coherence. And I am now at the point where I can spend an entire day (yesterday) not coughing at all, and then have it trigger on me all through a movie (Bruno) and into bedtime.

Clearly, though, if I can muster up enough concentration to sit at a computer for a couple of hours at a shot rather comfortably now, shouldn't I be at the point where I can begin writing anew?

Practically any time our nation ends up in any form of war -- and I will not go into justification nor political asides here -- the media of our nation are fond of putting out varied films or publications with this constantly rehashed title: WHY WE FIGHT. They may even do this in other countries as well, but Americans are particularly prone to using this blueprint for the media's reassurance and justification to the general public. Usually the resultant pieces are formed from their creators' editorial take on exactly why our men and women take to battle, for whatever cause it might be or against whichever enemy, and uses the pulse of recent events and popular hysteria to construct an outline for exactly how and why we got to the point where we had no other choice but to take up arms and attempt to destroy the enemy. This started out with propaganda films in WWII, and now the phrase seems to get hijacked anytime a magazine or writer wants to explain the Big American Purpose of the war at hand.

My constant enemy, as with many others who attempt to make even greater nonsense of their lives via the written word, is my own psyche. I have written at great length previously about my battles with self-diagnosed depression, and how I have to keep a frantic, almost relentless pace of creation in order not to get lost within myself. In fact, some of you might be sick of hearing it, and I understand this. However, it is part of who I am, and I have to do very well to recognize the symptoms as they surface, and do my best to battle them. if there is a recurring theme on this site, it is the continuation of the battle that has consumed my entire life: the struggle between what I have been all these years and what I could have been with a little more focus and initiative.

And yet, until I write these words, I have done nothing over the last six weeks to stop myself from sinking back into the blank, comfort zone of zero creation and laziness.

So, WHY DO I NOT FIGHT?

Because it is so much easier not to do anything at all. Every day or so, I hear the call of the keyboard... and then I ignore it. I turn my ear away, but I can't shut off my mind. I tell myself that I just don't feel like writing, and I stare at the keyboard for ages, close the laptop and shuffle back to the couch. But then I feel so much more terrible that I am doing nothing at all, and I head back to the computer to stare at the keyboard some more. Every morning begins this way, often with the impulse to begin creating again, and then the impulse swiftly dissolves into ennui and I just start floating around the internet or popping in another movie. And then this tug-of-war leaves me exhausted.

This is not to say that I have not been plotting my return.

Before the illness, in the last piece I posted, I mentioned a new project I was planning to undertake, tentatively called "The 44 Times 30 Or So," and to say that I haven't begun work on that would be a vast understatement. Just before I got sick, I had created, from a variety of solid sources, a massive list of films from 1964 (the year of my birth) through the current year, most of them award-nominated or highly acclaimed films within each year of the list. Over the last six weeks, I have been watching films constantly -- scads of films, droves of films -- sometimes, in the days when I couldn't leave the couch, five or six a day, and on just plain, normal days, averaging between two to three per day. I have already watched 95% of the films that make up my must-see list for 1964, and huge chunks of 1965 and 1966, along with scattered films throughout the first two decades of the list I created for the project.

The groundwork has been laid to initiate the attack on my reticence; the unleashing of the dogs of war remains, as in: the actual writing, my summation of what I am discovering on my new journey through film history within my lifetime. This time of illness has proven fruitful in one major aspect, and that is I have had a lot of quiet time in which to reflect. Any time that one reaches a certain state of middle-agedness and then becomes sick, and then celebrities famously drop dead left and right over the course of your illness, your own mortality becomes an issue as well. It is hard not to think about it. Layer this with the fact I was intentionally launching a personal film-watching project beginning with my birth year, and the reflection gets compounded even more.

So, clearly I am on the verge, if this ridiculous missive from the front is any clue, of finally getting back to the keyboard. The truest question now will be: what form will the summation of my current project take? I have been mulling over and experimenting with various possibilities, but I haven't yet decided on my final presentation as of yet. But, clearly I have taken the first small step towards victory by engaging the enemy -- my twisted fears and laziness -- in battle again. Sure, I know victory is impossible, but it won't be the first or last time that war has been perpetrated on a complete and utter falsehood.

Tweet Emotions: Notes on the Process of Futility [Pt. 3]

So, now I have spent a month establishing myself as yet another constantly tweeting knucklehead, and losing those tweets amongst millions of others, having them read only by a small fraction of the 140 or so followers on my Twitter page, only three-quarter dozen of whom I can claim any sort of real, lasting friendship, work relationship or kinship.

With such a tiny, immediate audience available, why I would think Twitter would be a decent place to push The Cinema 4 Pylon and the writing that I place upon it?

The answer is this: it's better than nothing. Certainly better than my options currently at hand, which is less than nothing. As I said, Facebook and MySpace have proven to be busts for this. Only a few friends are willing to make the journey over to this site, and they are known quantities. Otherwise, I believe those sources are tapped out for the most part (and I used "tapped out" in a more traditional sense, rather than in the sense that lead to a line of idiotic T-shirts). And while I do get some decent comments from complete strangers on the Pylon directly, it is so random and so infrequent as to be not much of a factor. Thus, trying out Twitter seems as worthy an attempt at reaching an audience than any other. The potential for audience gain is immeasurable; the trick is getting people to the site.

I must state something to anyone new coming to The Cinema 4 Pylon, whom I will mostly assume to be those who do not know me in the least: there is nothing for sale here.

Any promotion that I do to get people to this site is solely so I can have you read what I have written. All of my writing is from my heart, and is not meant to promote anything else except for my opinion. That is it. The Cinema 4 Pylon, as I have stated numerous times before, is nothing more than my notebook, filled only with film non-reviews (though most would think they are actually reviews, criticism of film criticism itself, tributes to my favorite films, records, comics, books, etc., and attempts to begin discussions on just about any topic that catches my fancy at the time.

There are no ads on here at all. No Google Sense, no AdWords... nothing. I do not allow them on the Pylon, even though I have had a couple studios contact me to ask if I would place ads on here, owing to the fact that I primarily write about movies and video. And I will never allow them on here. I am not against commerce, and on another site built for mass appeal rather than personal depth and growth, I would certainly consider it. But the Pylon is not the place. It's about keeping my opinion pure. And myself in the process.

The problem on my end is producing material worthy of having more people tuning in to it. If you dig back a couple of months on here, you will find a series of articles reflecting my dissatisfaction with myself (you will find I am my own harshest and most terrible critic) over the work I had done on the site since September, when I still reviewed for Spout and last believed myself to be firing on all circuits, and just before I hit my latest deep and sincere bout with depression. And since taking myself to task, I have done relatively little in the way of "reviewing," instead throwing most of my concentration into my real world employment (I get paid to work for a soccer organization, co-edit their website, and write and associate edit the organization's membership magazine, which goes to 90,000 homes quarterly).

It isn't that I haven't been writing; I just haven't been concentrating on my own work, fairly putting it on the back burner, and only working on it sporadically. What I have been doing, though, is watching droves of films, all based around the moment when I will be ready to plunge headlong into writing more again. Also, in the meantime, I started goofing around on Twitter, TwitPic and Blip.fm -- all in the last month -- and I will not lie to say that they have had some small, detrimental effect on the way I approach writing these fuller pieces of late. Once you start thinking in 140/150 characters, it is hard not to do so. It's like when I play a video game too long, and then go to bed, but the game is still playing out behind my eyes, and I can't get to sleep. I keep working your brain through escapes to get me to the next level. The same with Twitter, where I can't even eat a burrito or lose it later through other means without working through a dozen different sentences to place on my Twitter page. After a single month, it has evolved -- or de-evolved -- my grey matter.

But, assuming that my work once more reaches a level where I am halfway satisfied with it, the question remains: why should you come here? What is in it for you? The truth is, this site is no good for those looking for a quick fix, seeking out a place for pocket-sized opinions and celebrity gossip. You will only get something out of it if you are the sort that isn't looking for a "This film sucked!" approach to criticism, though I do hold out the possibility for you that on the day that there is a film that sucks so mightily that I cannot blurt out anything else but "This film sucked!", the reason for my not posting more than three words regarding the film's failure as entertainment on any level is because I ran out to get my first driver's license, purchase a car, purchase a house with a garage, drive my new car home legally, lock myself and the car in the garage, and then turn on the engine so I can rid myself of the memory of said suckhole of a film.

My approach to film criticism has very little to do with the way it is practiced popularly, and rarely has much to do with the overall excellence of a film. It's a small part of every piece I write, to be sure, but its not the most important part. My chief thrust here is criticism as self-held therapy. When I talk about a film, it is usually because I am trying to understand what I see or don't see in it, how it affects me personally, how what I bring into the film emotionally and experientially affects the way I see the film, how what I have seen before affects the way I see the film, and how the current film fits thematically into the massive pile of films I have already seen. For me, as always, each film watched -- feature-length, animated short, etc. -- is part of my personal conceptual continuity; every film, no matter the quality, as equally important to my overall artistic sense as the next. And none of my approach depends at all on worrying about spoilers or sneak peeks or pirated advance copies, etc.

If this seems like pretentious hooey to you... well, goodbye. I don't need you. I have told you already that this site is primarily for me to immerse myself therapeutically through the cinema. If knuckle-headed fanboy stuff is your thing, go back to your Harry Knowles-type sites and enjoy spoiling films for yourself with idle speculation long before they actually come out, or head off to your four-word review sites for a less-than-haiku wackoff session. Because I don't do "condensed" here, and I don't do gossip. I like to take my time when discussing a film or an idea, and if you are sort that wouldn't mind hanging around for that, then I invite you to join in. Leave a comment or two, take part in the discussion, and please, always leave a link for your site so that I can follow you too.

I will probably get one or two of you at most, but if you are quality people, that would be just fine. It would certainly help to class the joint up around here.

Coachella Updates, just not here... technically...

So, I am not going to blog about the events at Coachella. I have decided to go the route of the internet "tweet" to post my notes about my adventures at the show in Indio, CA on Friday. Once we returned to the abode early last night after a delirious day mucking about in Palm Desert and Palm Springs after getting about four hours of sleep, I began posting a series of notes on Twitter recalling everything that I saw at the show.

"Recall" is perhaps not the appropriate term, as most of the notes were written at the show as they happened, or just after, on both notepad and on my phone. I had been planning to Twitter from the show itself, but the phone service truly sucked. We had full bars on our phones the entire time, but most likely due to all of the electrical equipment at use, I couldn't even call Jen properly from ten feet away. She could text me, and I would get it... but then I would try to reply -- and she wouldn't get the message until... well, last night. I sent two tweets that never arrived on my Twitter page when I checked it the following morning, nor did Jen get voicemail from me until well after the show. So, I gave up early, and decided to go this route.

If you want to catch up, check out my Facebook page (if you are a designated "friend")... or you can check out the handy listing on the right side of the blog here, from which you may click to read the whole damn series on my Twitter page. I will likely be putting these up well into this evening, or even tomorrow morning (Monday).

And, as a footnote, Raw Meat should have been there. Didn't have my musical wingman... but I have disappointed him as well recently by not drunkenly seeing Suicidal Tendencies a couple weeks back in L.A. Turnabout is fair play, I guess...

Hope you join me for the tweets...

All Apologies... and Corrections

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!

A Declaration of IMDbendence

Try as I might, I couldn't fight it. 

I struggled mightily against the awesome pull of IMDb and its 46 quadrillion movie entries. (That's where I lost count in doing research last night. I went "46 quadrillion and...," then Conan made his hissing-at-the-cameraman noise and I lost count. Oh, well... there's always tomorrow night...) Was it even possible that I, severely movie-addicted since I was a mere child, could even begin to resist the megaforce that is IMDb? (Though the reverse maxim of "Words, not deeds" proves to be more true in their case.) I have been movie-database mad for much of my life, with a library full of Who's Who books and Encyclopedias of Film, Actors, Science-Fiction, Westerns, etc., etc., etc., what have you. And while it may not be the end-all be-all of movie websites, it has proven, after extensive testing by the Cinema 4 laboratories, to be the closest that I can find right now.

How slowly, how surely I was sucked into its vortex. Little did I know, as I perhaps looked up a couple of movies that I had just seen to see just who played that hot waitress in that throwaway scene 40 minutes into the picture, what lay lurking online, hungrily awaiting me behind its brightly glowing interface. How could I have possibly foreseen the trap laying in wait for me as I went back to the site again and again, reveling in my newfound treasure trove of information, when after a few dozen more lookups, I took it upon myself to become a registered user. This was merely to take part in the polls, but then it proved providential when I decided to write a handful of reviews for some sorely neglected titles. And then began the voting of a couple thousand of movies off and on for about a month, until the day that I asked, "What's this? They have a built-in filing system for personal video collections?" It was the beginning of the end...

It's a year later, and after entering over 5,000 titles, meticulously categorizing them into sections that will only make sense to the deranged, and injecting laboriously detailed notes into each one, I am now a full-on IMDB junkie. I know that it is not perfect, and there are many features that I would alter or excise, and others that I would add, but that is a discussion for another time. For the moment, it is most important that I have admitted that I have a problem. Still, beats heroin as a monkey on your back...

Such is the same with this blog. It seems that I am yet again trapped in another whirlpool built of endless keyboard clattering and very little sleep (though they are two items that I am completely used to already). As for blogs: I knew about them, resisted them, read a few, resisted them, read a couple of them that intrigued me, begrudgingly resisted them, read many that made me shake my head in disbelief that anyone could be that idiotic from day to day, happily resisted them, then a number of friends began some...

Blogger begin to speak to me like the shady letter "O" salesman off of Sesame Street: "Psssst... Hey, Bud! C'mere! Why not get a membership, and then you can comment on your friend's blogs, and, OH! By the way...in case you might be interested... you can start, you know, your own... blog... if you want to... it won't even cost you a nickel..."

"A nickel?!!"

"Rigggghhhhttttt...!"

So I bought the "O" and took it home that night...

And here I am.