Additional cinema website coming

I've been thinking of doing this for a long time and now that time has come: a separate blog that will contain only observations and reviews of movies, the occasional doc-men-tar-y, animated work, & series. Beyond that, there are no rules, I'll do it at leisure and much of it will be my opinions on the state of the movie business. I haven't thought of a title yet, or even given it any thought, frankly, but I will in the next week. The standard American view is to assume that the industry is shielded from all of the problems we're all exposed to in mainstream economic life and somehow exists in its own space and time. It does not. 

Making motion picutres has always been a raging battle against art & commerce. As with everything else, that battle is essentially over with capital winning. The old Hollywood studio system was a separate and organic industry at one time; that time is long gone & ended with the general collapse of the labor movement and the decline of the working class. It was always about spectacle, but now power expresses itself more fully, spectacle being all that's left now. There can be no doubt that the movies were always a pallative--an opiate to calm the masses from making the natural connections about their predicament & revolting--and they still are, indeed, more than ever. It's never been a pure thing, but there was a time when you could still make relatively subversive (to power) statements. 

In the United States at least, most of that maverick spirit died with Sam Peckinpah, and by the late 1970s, nearly all the major studios were being bought up by conglomerates. That process was basically completed by the early 1990s with the death of Orion Pictures, the last genuine independent distributor left standing by that point. (One of their final releases was George Romero's The Dark Half.)

Don't get me wrong, the unions in the Hollywood system cut their own throats by a thousand cuts; but they're just as much victims. Right now, most of the computer animators are watching their own jobs evaporate to overseas labor pools. I'm sure that they never saw it coming. My question is, why?

What's going on?

I've been writing again. For over a year after the completion of my first book, I took time off to rest and recuperate, it being a five year journey, and a solitary one at that. Some of what I've been working on is general research into future projects that are non-fiction, while others are short stories--most in early drafts, embryonic form--and one fictional screenplay that might end up being a short film of around ten minutes, one reel.

My feeling now is that I would prefer to work on fiction with some non-fiction essays and research on a few narrow topics. I'm not telling what they are right now for a variety of reasons. Pets, caring for my ailing mother, yardwork, work of all kinds, & helping my niece do homework. Life's pretty good right now. No one's fucking with that. Expectations require throwing money. In other words, serious enquiries only. I am very open to questions and comments about the DC Madam book. However, I know a waste of time when I see one and you'll be ignored if you ask impertinent ones or simply want to have some catharsis with me thanks to your bad childhood.

Speaking (more like writing-or "writhing") of that, as the world has become more hopelessly lost, I've become more obsessed with cinema, not really a surprise, but there it is. Because of that, I'm thinking of keeping this blog going but starting another one that's only about movies, therefore, it will have reviews and some commentary, observations, and whatnot, on the current state of cinema and where it's been.

Oddly, the hits to the blog have risen substantially while I've been fucking around on Twitter. Top three nations of readers are as follows, in order: USA, France, & the Ukraine, fancy that. Yes, the less you write, the more people want to read. Human beings are perverse like that.

And in the spirit of that thought, that's all you're getting for now.

how to deal with mooks & online trolls in one simple step

As anyone who's put up with these assholes for even a moment knows, mooks & trolls need air to survive just like the rest of us.

The best thing to do is: Never respond to them and their childish baiting & lies. 

If they defame you, if they smear you, find out, document, and wait for later. If they've gone over the legal limits of our proscribed rights in society, the onus will be on them. The best thing to do is to never respond.

Hard, I know, and we all slip at some point. There are times to set the record straight too. But the fact is, these assholes exist in a fringe echo-chamber. Normal people don't listen to or buy into their lies. That's all you need to know in the end. Let them do all the talking, the defamatory scribbling--let them dig their own graves. It's about all they're good at.

Let the fuckers suffocate.