the past is another country
Monday, December 30, 2002
Readers may have noticed that my posting frequency has plummeted over the last few months. I apologize; my life has come to feel something like a plate-spinner's act. While I may not be up there with Leonardo or Jaq Schmidt (today's plate spinners probably aren't up there with Leonardo or Jaq Schmidt themselves; while everyone, myself included, loves to use plate spinning as a strained metaphor, and jugglers seem to be keeping the faith, when was the last time you saw one on network TV?), things have been really busy lately. Hopefully life will be somewhat calmer in the first few months of the new year and I can make something of the various notes and scribblings I've strewn around the office. (Some structural change will also be coming to Snarkout as soon as I can find the gumption to sit down and make it happen.) In the meantime, have you considered visiting one of the sites on my bookmarks page? Pure gold, the lot of them, even the ones that aren't there any more. I read Boing Boing, Leuschke, and Girlhacker on a daily basis. Those creepily obsessed with my everyday life can get an idea what I'm eating by reading V.'s Hungry Tiger food journal; for those more those interested in the sorts of things that rattle around my head, while Juliet is still (sadly) on hiatus, her archives remain dandy reading, and Portage has returned; WorldNewYork is back too. And it's not remotely like what I write (primarily by virtue of being so damn funny), but Izzle Pfaff! should be read now, now, now.
Thanks for visiting this year. I hope you'll continue to visit in the next. May 2003 bring you much happiness.
9:29 pm 
Monday, December 16, 2002
The International Documentary Association has recently announced that Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine is the number one entry on its top twenty list of "all-time favorite non-fiction films." Now, I was a big fan of TV Nation. I thought Roger & Me, Moore's apoplectic response to General Motors' treatment of his decaying hometown of Flint, Michigan, was a fine piece of work. I'll state up front that I haven't seen Bowling for Columbine. Even ignoring the curious coincidence that the best "non-fiction film" ever made was made just this very year (despite the presence of non-fiction films date back to the very beginning of commercial cinema; a paying customer could have seen Burial of the "Maine" Victims during the Spanish-American War), however, it seems highly unlikely to me that Bowling for Columbine is the best non-fiction film ever made; it's almost certainly not the best documentary. Moore isn't really a documentarian. He's a polemicist. (more...)
11:48 pm
