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...)

Tweet Emotions: Notes on the Process of Futility [Pt. 1]

Let me be honest from the start... I don't make a move online without sizing up the parameters of my actions. If I sign up for a site or program, I immediately think how I can use that particular spot for my own purposes. Self-serving? Sure, aren't we all? Isn't that what survival of the fittest is all about? Helping yourself to a heaping slice of this survival? It is only natural, in any venture in which we involve ourselves, that we seek out that which will allow us to reach our goals in the quickest way possible.

With the proliferation of social media sites these days, however, it seems that most people in the net-a-verse aren't so much concerned with "keeping it real" (though they have convinced themselves of this deplorable and completely erroneous phrase), but rather "keeping it noticeable..." Well, that and making lots of quick and easy cash. And if one can combine both efforts -- being popular and bringing in the Benjamins -- isn't this the whole point of life? Millions of Tweeters seem to think so, because half of the pages I run into seem to merely be there to convince me that this is the aim toward which I am supposed to be building. Which just proves to me that they do not know me very well.

When I signed up for Twitter, I did consider briefly that it might be a good way to introduce people to this site, The Cinema 4 Pylon. I've been plugging away on my little notebook of a blog for about four years now, all to little notice, and I have liked it this way. A handful of loyal pals, along with my natural impulse to vent and a low regard for sleep, have kept me writing. Through whatever rough spots and bouts with depression over this span, the Pylon has been here for me to work out my personal refuse, along with providing an easily accessible storehouse for my opinions on just about anything that crosses my path -- movie, music, animation (which expanded into the Pylon's sister site, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc), books, politics, and absolute silliness. The thrust of the site has never really been about reviewing popular culture, though, but rather about how popular culture has affected me, for both good and bad, throughout my existence on this sphere, with a simultaneous goal focusing on my need to combat the cliches of popular opinion and, especially, film criticism.

I would be lying if I said that all of my other online moves -- starting pages on Facebook, MySpace and their like, writing "reviews" for a selected writing group on Spout.com for a year -- were unladen with intentions of expanding my reach. At every instance, I thought how nice it would be if I could get a few more people, especially my friends who are hooked up with me on those sites, to bounce over from those pages and leave a few constructive comments on the Pylon.

Which never happened. I can get 168 legitimate, tried-and-true, actual friends and acquaintances of mine on Facebook, but I can't get a single extra one, beyond the handful that regularly attend services on the Pylon, to pop over for a note or even a quick look. MySpace was a tremendous bust, not in a good way and not just as a website, but as a portal for anything involving my interests, and the potential audience pretty much involved the same people with whom I now converse on Facebook, plus a massive amount of online hookers... and that asshole Tom guy.

Spout was great until I decided to chafe under certain suggestions, began a futile campaign of aggressiveness against those certain suggestions, and then tried to recover with an equally futile campaign to apologize to people who were giving up on those certain suggestions anyway. And sure, a few hundred people would check out each of my posts on Spout, and I received some nice comments and met a couple of interesting and generous people on that video-oriented site. But I couldn't nudge a soul, at least regularly, over to The Cinema 4 Pylon in all that time. Was it over-nourishment? Perhaps I should have just posted a few lines of each post on Spout instead of the whole piece. They got the milk out of the Spout consistently; why suckle straight from the udder?

Through the last four years, I have received positive and helpful comments from a genuine rock star and producer, a Disney comics editor and publisher, a couple of online animation historians, and a director who said I was the only critic to ever precisely nail the emotions behind his film after showing it worldwide at festival after festival. I have also received a not-so-positive comment from a former producer of Ren & Stimpy (and animation archivist), who decided to chide me for being too negative over the use of blackface in old films (let's make that archiv-racist...) Fine and well, these comments, both positive and negative, as long as the comments help me find my way or teach me something.

But what I really crave is even more exposure, which would hopefully lead to even more discourse. Not just nine or ten regular to semi-regular readers, and not just good friends, but a greater diversity of opinion in those comments. The good with the bad. Which is what drew me to the social sites in the first place. Which is what drew me to finally creating an RSS feed, and then posting my Pylon writing directly onto Facebook as well.

And what ultimately drew me to Twitter...

[To be continued...]