Answer #2: Watching

Waiting. Commiserating.

In a previous entry, I noted that I was not much of a sports fan except on the most superficial level that there are, in my mind, good guys and bad guys, and I don't want the bad guys to win. But for every second of time I don't spend thinking about America's burgeoning sports culture, I spend a minute thinking about the entertainment industry.¹ I consider film and television to both be my wheelhouse, and anyone who's known me for more than five minutes knows that I basically rest all hopes of my future on them.

It used to be weird to describe movies as a hobby or an artistic passion that one could pursue. Books were the real currency of art and culture, the erudite would say; movies were just comfort food for the masses. But with the rise of filmmakers like Tarantino, whose educations were founded entirely in the hours they spent burning out their corneas going through the stock of the video stores they worked in, the worm turned and now film is quickly becoming less of a curiosity and more of a respected and vaunted artistic medium. In this way, it follows the path of the novel, which had to endure a similar rise to prominence the previous century.²

But just as the oppressed Italians in America quickly turned on the Irish that came after them, gleeful to no longer be on the lowest rung of the ladder,³ so have movie types turned on television. Most of the cool kids nowadays don't even own a TV; after all, it's just comfort food for the masses, they say.

Well, that's really too damn bad for them. Right now, TV is going through the same kind of creative renaissance that film went through in the 70's. Yeah, Two and a Half Men is still going, but for every piece of schlock like that you're now getting the kind of provocative, thoughtful stuff the world has been waiting decades for television to realize it could produce. So eventually when younger people than I unearth current slamdunks like Dexter and Sons of Anarchy the way people now might discover Casablanca for the first time, I'll be there yelling, "Better late than never, you little shits!"

Which brings the topic of this entry back to me. Due to self-engineered quirks in my scheduling and what is probably a horrible lack of prioritization on my part, I spend unholy amounts of time watching movies and sitting through TV series after TV series. I enjoy them like frequent meals, preferring variety but nonetheless having a rough palate that I tend to sample from. I think on them. I analyze them. I take them apart, peeling away narrative threads the way that creepy kid down the street might pull wings off a fly.⁴ I see how it all works, take the best bits, and I put it into my own writing. TV and movies are as much of teachers to me as the people that get paid to do it professionally, and sometimes their advice is better. Certainly, their homework is more interesting, but that may simply be due to a higher volume of explosions.

From time to time, I'll put up reviews of whatever I just watched on here. But this is just to introduce another thread.

What the hell is Paul doing here? Watching Grinding my eyesight to a fine powder and loving every minute of it.⁵

-PK


¹ This might be mathematically impossible. If you think it is, keep it to yourself.
² But novels are dumber, because there's no pictures.
³ Or so they think.
⁴ Hey, what are you looking at me like that for?
⁵ Except for the 125 that make up Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin.