WELCOME!

Hi, and welcome to my e-zine. I’m calling it an e-zine, rather than a blog, because the purpose of this site is to post articles about underrated movies and music, not to recount the minutia of my daily activities. It’s not that I think I’m wholly without interesting qualities (quite the contrary, in fact), it’s not that I’m so self-delusional to think these qualities are of any interest to you, the reader. Also, having been the unwelcome subject of others’ on-line journals, I have no desire to victimize the people in my life with the kind of self-serving distortions inherent to this kind of endeavor. And again, aside from any issue of respecting my loved ones’ privacy, does the world really need another live journal or blog constantly updated with two or three sentence blurbs about mean bosses, lost childhood toys and what was eaten for dinner the night before? Who reads these damn things, aside from other ‘bloggers’ looking to get linked?
So while I have no interest recounting (or inventing) issues relating to my sex-life, diet or bowel movements, I do want to share my deep passion for movies and music with others. There are some wonderful, wild and often weird movies laying about waiting to be discovered. It is not my contention that we have to watch these films out of some reverent sense of duty, like they way ‘classics’ are treated in school…medicine you should take because it’s “good for you”. No, the reason you should watch these movies is because they’re often quite good, and always at least interesting. The reason I’d rather watch a Klaus Kinski movie instead of a Russell Crowe one isn’t because Kinski is dead and largely forgotten, it’s because even in his worst movies (which there are quite a few), he always delivers an unexpected performance that threatens to derail the whole production with its’ bizarre intensity. Crowe, on the other hand, is an alcohol-bloated blow hard, who seems to stagger from movie to movie, barely interested in-or even aware of- the dialogue he’s alternately mumbling or shouting before the green screen the CGI scene will later be applied to.
You don’t have to watch a movie that’s identical to the last movie you had placed before you. You don’t have to listen to the same limited variety of music over and over again. There’s a seemingly bottomless well of music from the 1960’s; not only are they constantly reissuing garage bands never heard beyond their local market, psychedelic bands that were lost in the flood, and the general oddities that have surfaced from seemingly nowhere, there’s even become a cottage industry around the early rock music from Latin America, Asia and Africa. So why limit yourself to the same six, seven hours of Woodstock/Vietnam soundtrack in endless rotation on “classic rock” stations? Not everything has to sanctified by Time-Life…
We live in an odd time; we find ourselves with all this new, wonderful technology for listening to music and watching movies. Not only has the selection of what’s generally available increased astronomically in just the past few years, the internet and burners have made it incredibly easy to either purchase, copy or share all these wonderful discoveries. But how does the entertainment industry respond to the resurrection of masterpieces like “Seconds” or “The Big Red One”? Remakes of “The Wicker Man” and “The Manchurian Candidate”!
My argument (and my reason for starting this site) is not that these old movies deserve to be watched, deserve an audience, but that you deserve to watch something more meaningful, more challenging, more original than remakes, sequels and adaptations of crappy old sitcoms. If you’re going to surrender two hours to listen to someone’s story, shouldn’t it be a story you haven’t already heard?