I start an essay for most every movie I see. Whether I actually finish the essay – or even make any headway on a thesis – is another matter entirely. Today I’ll be the old man who runs out of candy at Halloween and starts handing out worthless crap that’s lying around the house.
To break away from The Dark Knight, here’s a Culture Snob essay that’s been distilled by Wordle.
The Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon ended yesterday, and while participation was … selective, I couldn’t be happier with the submissions. My own writing aside, the blog-a-thon generated 14 15 new essays (as of July 15) and gave new life to a handful of others. More importantly, the work was often searching, naked, funny, touching, real, and resonant.
These are things that just ain’t happening for the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, for reasons of time, energy, and tone. Feel free to steal an idea – the blog-a-thon runs until Sunday, and we’re not much for deadlines. Or beg me to complete one in particular.
Dearest Emily, Right now, your primary activities are eating, reaching, sleeping, pooping, laughing, peeing, bouncing, crying, sitting up, and spitting up, but before I know it you’ll be running around and saying all the nasty words you’ve learned from your parents. And before we get too wrapped up in soccer practice and homework, I want to ask a favor: Each year on my birthday, I want my present from you to be sitting with me and your mother and watching a movie, and talking about it afterward.
A documentary short by Jeff Ignatius. Starring Emily. And the voice of Pamela.
To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob (and the second day of the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon), some raw data and some calculations: In five years, Culture Snob has produced 514 entries, 36 polls, and 17 commentary tracks – nine full-movie commentaries and eight of the five-minute variety. I have written roughly 450,000 words for the site – an average of about 250 a day, or enough to fill 1,800 double-spaced typed pages over the site’s life.
For many years, I’ve said honestly that I have no idea what trigger pushed me from being an ardent consumer of movies to a film lover. Alternatively (and ultimately less truthfully), I’ve said that there was no specific movie/incident, instead placing the transformation some time in the early 1990s. Occasionally, I’ve credited seeing Fearless in fall 1993, and the connection between Peter Weir’s movie and my father’s death. The vagueness of my answers has long bothered me, but I didn’t do much about it. Watching the new Criterion release of Before the Rain was epiphanic, though: I recognized that the movie was a critical event for me.
It was a summer in the early 1980s. We were on a family vacation. Perhaps to Disney World. It seemed that at every stop on our journey, Under the Rainbow was in a constant loop on HBO on our hotel television. We must have seen parts of it a dozen times. Memory is a fickle thing, but I remember that the PG-rated farce had one bare breast that pops out when the little people are running through a communal dressing room, or somesuch. I mention this because I can, as we have arrived at the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, running Wednesday, July 9, through Sunday, July 13. This is the official Culture Snob birthday party, with this little site celebrating its fifth birthday on July 10. So give me a present: Write something for my blog-a-thon!
To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob – born July 10, 2003 – I’ll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.
