This Shit Just Ain't Working

I thought of coming up with a clever title for this post or, at least, a more dignified one. Maybe something from Shakespeare. "Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange," from The Tempest, perhaps. I've used that before so it felt safe and familiar. Then I thought, "Nah, just tell it like it is," and here's how it is: This shit just ain't working anymore.


I write here, at Cinema Styles, and at Turner Classic Movies. I post pictures at If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats and my tumblr site, Unexplained Cinema. And with TCM I write not only my Wednesday post but program articles for the site as well. And now I realize, after five weeks of doing this, I've got to cut some things loose and those things are pretty much everything except TCM. I don't have the time I used to have to browse photo archives searching for exceptional photos that caught my interest. I used to. I don't anymore. And I don't have time to develop separate ideas into fully realized posts at two different blogs. I just don't. It was foolish of me to think otherwise.

My first instinct is to abandon Cinema Styles altogether. There is an out, however. At TCM, we're generally supposed to keep things to pre-1990. It's not there for us to write up new movies and it's really not there for television or music. So while I have neither the time nor the inclination to approach the history of film from two angles, at two different sites, I can do reviews here and my more familiar overview essays there (at TCM).

It is those overview essays (that's what I call them) that have always been my favorite to write because they come from inspiration whereas reviews come from a need to organize one's thoughts on a recently seen movie. I don't dislike doing that, it's just not my first choice. Recently, however, I put together an overview of trilogies here and an overview of "classic" cinema there and the reader results couldn't have been more striking. I think it's time to simplify Cinema Styles if I'm to keep it going at all.

I hate to make this change fully, since I began Cinema Styles as a purely classic cinema blog in 2007 (I once did posts on the Oscars, now deleted, where I refused to go past 1979) and it was that status as a classic cinema blog that, frankly, brought in a large audience that didn't care to read about the latest cinematic offerings everywhere else, but the fact is, this blog hasn't been exclusively classic cinema for a very long time now, anyway. What better time to toss off the traces and go full-fledged review oriented than now?

Of course, I don't see new movies that often, so by new I probably mean something that came out three months ago or last year even. And I'll review more music, something I enjoy but lost track of months ago. I thought I might have time to join in Ed Howard's music club but I haven't (but if you want to, follow that link!). And television, another thing I started on a while ago that fell off the blogging map. Also, I'll probably move my series, The Land Before CGI, over to TCM as, again, it fits with the classic theme there.

And that's about it. Not much more to say right now except I hope you'll follow me over at TCM and keep up here as well for discussions of newer cinema as well as music and television. I can't guarantee I'll write much more than a post a week, or when I'll even start doing that, but when I do I'll try to make it at least marginally interesting. I hope I succeed.

Thanks for reading.