Thinking About Myself

I know my posts in the last few months have been few and far between, but as with all of us, the holiday season is hectic beyond reproach for me, so I'm sure you all will not hold my lack of blunt honesty and enough sarcasm to keep the world moving against me. So, I guess maybe you're wondering about the title of this post, well, its pretty simple really, here I am, the day before my 32nd birthday, one day into the "new world" as the political press is calling it, and as i often do, I'm looking back and thinking about my journey and how I've gotten to where I am today, I've no idea why, it just came into my mind this morning, and I can't seem to get it out.

Now, first off, let me state I am aware that my media is dying. I am aware that there is no real point to my job anymore given how easy it is to find reviews and overviews of movies over the internet, ironically i created this blog originally as my way of holding a place for me when the time came that the internet finally does kill off print media, but still, with that awareness, I still do my thing, I still speak the truth, I still get my cheapshots in at famous people who really don't deserve to be famous, and praise and defend those who deserve to be more famous then they are, no matter how obscure they are, and I still look back at old hollywood and love it ever so... But do you know what I do it? Why I still fight the good fight even though my fellow critics fall to irrelevance or sell out to studios that pay huge figures for a positive review and afew lines they can quote in a trailer and add campaign. Its simple, I still stand strong, honest and true because I love my job. I love my job and I love the entertainment industry, be it movie, television or music, I love them all, the expression, the joy the sadness, we speak our emotions clearly through what we watch and listen too, and we relate to others and show our culture to the rest of the world though these things, because sadly, less people then you'd think actually read books and watch documentaries these days then you'd think, which is kinda sad really, cuz well, documentaries for the epic win!

I always have abit of trouble remembering exactly what it was that made me fall in love with entertainment as a whole, the farthest thing back i can remember is my grandfather and my father taking me to the movies ever weekend, it was part of a tradition the two of them had before I was born, Saturday afternoons we'd go to see whatever movies were current and that everyone was talking about(I wasn't allowed in the R-rated movies till i was like 14), or what was showing at the big theater, and Sunday we'd spend at the triple feature at the revival theater near here. You might think that odd, but, from the age of 7 they were training me, the whole way home they'd both ask me questions about each movie, what I thought, what I liked, things of that nature, and they would explain different things to me, like if i didn't get something, or why a certain scene was interesting, they were cultivating a love of the movies, and the encouragement to dream and imagine with in me. See, the one thing my grandfather and my father had in common was their love of all forms of entertainment, but above all they loved the movies and television, and what started in my father's teen years as a father son bonding thing, became a three generation tradition when they felt I was old enough. We upheld this tradition of the three of us, we continued up till my father died of cancer, ironically in the last few years, it was the only thing my father and i could do with out arguing or tossing fists at each other, we stopped 2 years later when my grandfather died of lung cancer, but to the very last day he was able to understand what was going on around him, we continued to have our tradition.

You see, what they'd tried to put inside me, to instill in me, it was there, that love of the silver screen, and of the orthicon box, the limitless imaginations and dreams involved with in, in high school I started writing for the school newspaper, and later the underground student run newspaper that some of us who disliked the direction the main paper was going in started, and with 4 years of high school level film study, literature, journalism, music, and enough theater classes to understand all elements of the field, when i went on to college, I set on my course of becoming what I am today, I am not just an entertainment critic, as smug as it sounds, I am a master of my field. I didn't master it just to say so, I mastered it because i love it ever so. I love to sit in my theater I made out of my barn and watch movies new and old, I see something new each time I watch a film, it doesn't matter if its the first time or the 100th time, i still find something new every single time.

In recent years, I've revived my old tradition, with myself, my "adopted daughter' Kat, and my cousin's son, who happens to be just alittle older then i was when this all started, and though i've already inspired kat to get into my field, which she is in the process of doing at present, I hope that we can instill with in my cousin's child, the imagination, the love and wonder that me and kat have for the entertainment world, and maybe allow him to dream unhinged as well, just as i was able too, because really, our only limits in life are, our imaginations...

I never will forget.. never.