Entries tagged with “Site Shit”

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To mark the fifth birthday of Culture Snob — born July 10, 2003 — I'll be hosting the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon from Wednesday, July 9, to Sunday, July 13. (Previously, I initiated the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon and latched on to Only the Cinema's Short-Film Week Blog-a-thon.)

Put simply, the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon is about the intersection of movies and life. My hope is that it will serve as a celebration of the power of the moving picture removed from the critical, cultural, and financial contexts in which it is typically considered.

Of course, we bring baggage whenever we talk or write about movies, but this is meant to be more personal — intensely idiosyncratic reactions and analyses, difficult times when movies became more than movies, brushes with movie stars, crushes on movie stars, memories from youthful encounters with film, embarrassing revelations, cinematic epiphanies, meticulous drawings of Darth Vader from your eight-year-old self, ... .

The only rule is that contributions have two central elements: movies and you.

Submissions (or promises of submissions) can be made in comments, through the Culture Snob e-mail form, or at snob@culturesnob.com. New work is encouraged, but moldy links are welcome, too.

And remember: For once, it is all about you.

In the past week, two major movie writers on the Web, Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead, hung up their stinky blogging shoes. Tim Lucas smells a trend and admits:

"I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn't come out of his nine-hour surgery alive."

So in the spirit of the week ... .

The "Short-Film Week" blog-a-thon technically closed Sunday, December 8, but I'll happily accept contributions as long as people send them (using the e-mail form or snob@culturesnob.com).

Blog-a-thons are unusual in the world in that they seem a genuine win-win-win proposition. The hosts of blog-a-thons get traffic from participants' readers. Participants get traffic from new readers through the host(s). And the world gets new writing, analysis, provocation, and thought that it wouldn't have had without the blog-a-thon.

In the case of Short-Film Week, we generated roughly three dozen new pieces on short films. This is a small, good thing.

While I hope that the people who host or write for or read a blog-a-thon benefit in some way, that doesn't diminish the need to express appreciation for their contributions.

From December 2 through 8, Culture Snob and Ed Howard's Only the Cinema are hosting the Short-Film Week blog-a-thon.

The blog-a-thon is technically over, but late submissions are welcome.

(The initial announcements are here and here. Pick up your logos here.)

Bookmark this entry and Only the Cinema to keep up on all the goings-on.

(List of contributions last updated at 11 a.m. on December 9, 2007.)

Anybody wanting to participate in or promote the "Short-Film Week" blog-a-thon is welcome to grab and use the two logos created by event co-host Ed Howard of Only the Cinema.

Continue reading to view and/or download the graphics.

When I read the initial announcement for "Short Film Day," slated for December 4 at Ed Howard's Only the Cinema, my heart sank.

I'd been mulling a short-film blog-a-thon for months, but was hesitant to set a date because of my experience with the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon; these things are a lot more work than I'd imagined.

So Ed beat me to it.

But then my barnacle/parasite/moocher antennae got all tingly, and I proposed that we co-host the blog-a-thon and expand it. He agreed.

Hence: Short-Film Week, running Sunday, December 2, through Saturday, December 8, 2007. During that week, write something, submit an old essay, or point us to your favorite writing on short films.

Commercials, music videos, movie trailers, and episodes of television programs are all fair game, as are proper short films — you know, the type that aren't trying to sell something else.

E-mail Ed or me with questions or promises of contributions, or leave comments on our respective announcements.

Track all the exciting blogging action here and at Only the Cinema.

Things might look (nearly) the same here at Culture Snob, but extensive interior renovations have been made over the past two months. We pretty much gutted the place and started from scratch with the site's innards. That work is now done.

If everything is working as it should, pay no attention. But if something doesn't seem right, please report the problem.

If you care, a detailed list of changes can be found here.

Now I can get back to writing.

Jeff Ignatius is a journalist who has, at various points in his career, been published as a movie, music, and book critic (in descending order of aptitude) and has interviewed internationally renowned musicians (from David Harrington of Kronos Quartet to...

This site is where I write (and sometimes talk) about popular (and not-so-popular) culture, particularly movies, in a way that's meaningful and satisfying to me. If you find it enjoyable or enlightening, all the better. My hope is that what's...

This page is the place where I'll post information about structure and feature changes at Culture Snob. In some cases, I'll also provide resources indicating how I did things. If you're having trouble with a particular feature, please report the...

In the week that marks the fourth anniversary of Culture Snob, Adam Ross at DVD Panache has featured this site as his Friday Screen Test. It's a great opportunity to indulge your insatiable curiosity about me.

Many thanks for the invitation and the virtual ink!

Somebody entered the following search query and eventually found Culture Snob:

talent OR skill OR intelligence "rupert grint"

By the time the searcher found this page on Culture Snob, he or she was on the seventh page of search results. Apparently, it's quite challenging to find talent or skill or intelligence in the kid who plays Ron Weasley.

It's important to misunderstand movies.

Put another way: If we limit ourselves to straightforward readings of plot or themes in film, we're denying ourselves the multifaceted nature of the medium. As the most inclusive of all the arts, cinema comprises narrative storytelling, photography, acting, sound, music, speech, movement, costume, montage, and architecture. Even the dumbest, most-crass summer blockbuster is a dense, nearly infinite trove of material to explore and analyze.

When we consider a movie "misunderstood," we're not latching on to plot points or obvious themes or even subtext. We're grabbing at those oddball moments that don't seem to fit: isolated images, tonal incongruities, digressions in dialogue, striking juxtapositions, narrative detours that seem to dead-end, camera angles.

We're detecting latent patterns, and we're crafting interpretations that never cross the minds of most people. We do this with the assumption that every scene, every sound, and every frame might matter. The joy of building a case for an unconventional reading is mining those peripheral moments or sights and finding meaning in them. We are watching closely.

That's the premise of the Misunderstood Blog-a-thon, which I announced last month and which runs through Sunday, May 20.

Follow this link to Misunderstood Blog-a-thon Central, and check back for updates daily.

Have you ever read or heard a discussion of a movie that made you think, They just don't get it? Have you ever wondered, Am I the only person who saw the movie that way?

Culture Snob is hosting a forum for essays, arguments, and provocations on misunderstood movies. The blog-a-thon will run Wednesday, May 16, through Sunday, May 20, although I won't turn my nose up at contributions that arrive before then.

The premise is that movies are marketed and evaluated coarsely and simplistically, and that they often contain a richness that's never mined by critics and casual audiences. Films operate on many levels, and subtle motifs, buried symbols, and seemingly awkward filmmaking choices are sometimes the keys that unlock new meanings. Is E.T. really a sophisticated exploration of diaspora? If "Rosebud" is both a sled and a clitoris, what does Citizen Kane say about sexual development among boys? How does the story of Pinocchio inform The Fisher King?

Give me your rigorous readings, your idiosyncratic analysis, and your silly, half-baked ideas.

The list of my favorite movies has been updated and moved here. You can always find it in the sidebar to the right. Feel free to use the comments section here to include your own list of favorite movies. I'm looking for anything more sophisticated than these.

For reasons that few should care about, I've shifted the "Favorite Songs" feature from the main Culture Snob content-management system to the Culture Snob Wiki. The list can now be found here. The link in the sidebar has also been updated. (In case you do care: It allows for easier editing and adding, and it makes it easy for me and readers to see what's new.)

More importantly, I've also updated the list for the first time in roughly two years. It's still not comprehensive, but I've added about 100 tracks. There are now approximately 850 songs — close to my original target of 1,000.

While the wiki doesn't have a standard "comments" feature, it does have a "discuss" tab in which you are free to make fun of me and my musical tastes.

The lists of favorite movies and favorite albums will also be shifted to the Wiki eventually.

I've begun to use the "tagging" capabilities of this site's content-management system.

That should make Culture Snob easier to navigate by adding a tool that's more intuitive. Until now, you were limited by the site's search function and its tables of contents. Tags allow readers to find related material more easily, both within entries and in a site-encompassing "tag cloud."

Proving myself to always be on the leading edge of late-adopters, Culture Snob has created a podcast for your listening ... amusement? For the uninitiated, "Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet for playback on mobile devices and personal computers," according to Wikipedia. We shan't be producing videos, but you'll have plenty of opportunities to listen to my sonorous, authoritative voice. (That last bit about my voice? A joke at my own expense.) Culture Snob's audio content is still developing, but right now it comes in three forms: (1) commentary tracks, (2) interviews, and (3) audio versions of essays.

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