My second column for Sound On Sight is up now! This week, a rant about zombies, their popularity and why I’m not necessarily down with it any more. If you’ve been reading Cinema S for a little while, I’m sure you’ll be familiar with a few themes explored theirin since some of the article is culled from recent articles written here.
2 Apr
The Weekly Body Count #1: Idiot Free Horror Movies
I’m trying my hand, again, at writing for a site other than my own. I briefly had a stint as one of the celebrated Bloody Good Bloggers but a sudden wave of real life responsibility, coupled with my desperate search for time to work on my own website caused me to resign from my post over there and continue trudging forward on a strictly solo basis. Finding myself with a little more free time and the means to get my name out there a little further, I hooked up with the fine folks at Sound On Sight, the twice weekly podcast devoted to all things movie. I’m hardly podcasting (though it is something I’ve been considering for a couple of weeks. My own, that is. Not theirs.) yet I’m contributing a weekly horror-themed column that allows me to wax editorial about practically whatever I want to talk about.
The first article is always the hardest one to come up with because you want to make a good impression but since I couldn’t come up with anything that I think would knock anyone’s socks off, I submitted the overly chatty, self-congratulatory exploration of movies that won’t make you feel stupid having watched. I bring you: The Weekly Body Count.
4 Feb
Guest Bloggery: Talkin’ vampires at Geek Force Five
It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to kick it live over here and somewhere else, but Chris Clark, the obsessives obsessive, tapped me to chatter on the topic of the modern vampire in the wake of True Blood and Twilight since vampires are among this week’s Five at his blog, Geek Force Five. Here’s a taste:
Being the analytical horror buff that I happen to be, a guy who believes that the cultural value of the genre is much higher than most are willing to appraise it at, I have a tendency to see the trends and think about them on a deeper level. For a while, I was pondering the popularity of zombies until all of a sudden I couldn’t help but notice that I was surrounded by the high drama of waifish vampires once again. My wife, Denise, obsessively burned through the now-iconic Stephenie Meyer Twilight series and then picked up on the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse novels now on television under the title True Blood. Since she was neck-deep in the undead, vampires became a regular topic of conversation as I sought to find my way to the bottom of this fashionable new wave of vampire fiction. The staggering success of the Twilight feature and a trip through the young adult section at Barnes & Noble only cemented my suspicion that vampires were here to stay, at least for a while. But upon examination, I’m unable to deny that this is a new breed of vampire. One that I’m unfamiliar with, entirely.
19 Aug
Vote for me at South By Southwest!
Against all odds, my panel submission for the upcoming South By Southwest show in the interactive portion has passed the first test in spite of being submitted over a month late. And if you can believe that, it has nothing to do with movies. I’d love nothing more than to roll out there and pretend that I’m some kind of horror movie expert for the movie portion of the show, but the fact is that it’s in Austin and that place is overflowing with wannabe Tarantinos, Roths and Harry Knowles… so, you know.
My idea for a panel is actuallly about comics. Open source comics, to be exact. Myself and Nick Plante of Zerosum have been talking this out over the last week or so. A social network aimed at artists and writers to create a line of their own comics in a single mythology, similar to the Marvel Universe or the DC Universe. It is to be completely non-commercial with a very rigid and limited set of editorial constraints. Everyone is free to be a part of it. The foundation of the panel is to suggest one alternative direction for social networks so that the web doesn’t become a series of tribes of Myspace of Facebook folks but to actually give social networks some purpose.
So please vote for me.
9 Aug
You have no excuse. Get your own god damn blog!
I don’t know if it’s a testament to the success of this site but I’ve been receiving a lot of submissions or emails from people asking to write for us and I have to take on the editorial role of telling them no, which I hate. This site was born out of the frustration of editors telling me that they wouldn’t take my stuff. So one of the things I try and do for everyone is make it clear that they don’t even need me.
Head over to Bloody Good Horror and see for yourself. I make a few suggestions and point out where you can get what you need to have your own site up and running.
9 Jul
Fear Itself sucks
I’m not really feeling Fear Itself. Though, I didn’t really have high hopes for it in the first place, it was nice to see that horror was getting a shot at glory on network tv. Unfortunately, they’re squandering this opportunity. I posted a new blog over at Bloody Good Horror about it, making some recommendations to the producers about how they might improve it based on the success of the candidate for the best TV show of all time, The Twilight Zone.
http://www.bloodygoodhorror.com/bgh/blogs/07/09/2008/fear-itself-sucks
I’ll probably do this every time I post something new over there.
28 Aug
Theme update
You’re probably going to notice the look of the blog changing throughout the day. Bear with me. I was tired of struggling with the Mandigo theme and Andrew of Gronkyco sold me on the MistyLook Wordpress theme. It’s much easier to edit and doesn’t have the display restraints that the Mandigo theme I was using had.
The biggest problem was displaying Adsense. I could only put a couple of ads on the site and that doesn’t do too well since not all of you are coming into the site from the Index page which was the only place I could put the ads. There is also the matter that it isn’t XHTML valid out of the box. Steve of Lost Highway managed to hack the Mandigo theme to make the sidebar dynamic, but he assured me that it was not easy to do. So I’ll periodically be updating the new theme throughout the day to make it look as close to the old Mandigo Cinema Suicide theme since I really liked the look of it.
11 Jun
First post!
So here we are; the blogosphere that you’ve been hearing so much about. I’m still in the process of getting my shit together, but I figured I should probably put something in this space to remove the standard WordPress Hello World placeholder. Shortly, you can expect to read news, reviews, interviews and self-indulgent ramblings on the topic of b-movies. As soon as I get the site map and adsense in place, I’ll start rolling this out to the masses but for the moment you’ll have to settle on vague promises of things to come.
Big ups to Andrew Watson for the hosting. Hopefully, I’ll shortly be able to stop freeloading and get my own host.
