New blog, same blogger

In college a professor and part-time film critic advised me to start a blog, to keep my writing skills from getting rusty. So I ran a blog dedicated to movies I deemed to be "obscure." It was called Celluloid Void, a name I still find to be charming, if a bit trite, but whatever. It was the first time I really committed to writing regular pieces on film. It was exciting, and exhausting, and without the experience I probably wouldn't have decided to go to grad school for film journalism.

The movies I wrote about ranged from "Picnic at Hanging Rock" to "Point Blank" (which I'm now writing about for next year's film issue of The Believer), Orson Welles' "The Trial" to "Witchfinder General." Of the 20 films I wrote about before deleting the blog, 5 went on to be The Dissolve Movie of the Week selections, and another 4 were subsequently released by Criterion, so I guess I had good taste. The posts, however, were not so good: long, verbose, unwieldy monstrosities, which I didn't edit or proof read. And with the advent of the interwebz, "obscure" is fast becoming an archaic concept, and the blog itself became a relic of a fleeting moment in my online life. After going to journalism school, I looked back at the blog and feared people would find it and hold its amateur, though innocuous sloppiness against me, so I deleted it.

But I just have too many fervid thoughts, and no way of venting them. Twitter's nice, though 140-character diatribes aren't so convincing. So I've conjured another blog, which will hopefully be less bad than the last. Reviews, think pieces, some arbitrary ramblings, longer feature-style things: all will be posted. I'll try not to unload 6,000-word behemoths on you, but I don't make any promises.