Tuesday, April 29, 2008

A Word on My Blog and Film Blogs

I debate frequently on whether or not to use this blog as an outlet for my scholarly endeavors. I write a great deal on cinema, but not in a very "accessible" way. The jargon-laced and theory- driven stuff that I write for my profession is meant for, primarily, an "academic" audience. I stumble across a good deal of blogs that analyze cinema with high-brow ambitions, lensed through a "critic" or "cinephile" modality, which is not really what I like to read or what I want to write. My own thoughts on "how" to write when "tastes" dominate discourse and your audience could give a rat's ass about theory, are housed in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, which posesses the "style" and "voice" I'd most like to adopt for my own works. Sometimes I feel like joining in on the debates at some of these blogs, but mostly think better of it and keep quiet. Who would really fucking care what my two cents are anyhow?

It just got me thinking, when you do this for a living, the "fun" of intellectual debate is not fun, it's mainly "work."

As for Trash Aesthetics? I started Trash Aesthetics as a release for all my sensational turns of phrase, adjective whoring, opinion mongering, and most of all - fun. So, I've upheld my decision to not turn in works of scholarship to this site. I will continue to write about women that turn me on, films I loved as a kid, silly clips of the week, and my personal favorite - the GONE TO BED series. The goal of this site is to provide discourse on mass media, yes. But, I like to distill it through a very personal filter. I'd like the prose to read, oh I dunno, somwhere's between the informal, personal, yet authoritative voice of Stephen King, a sedate (as opposed to rabid) Harlan Ellison, and the accessible academic leanings of someone like Danny Peary. I Hope that I am succeeding and that the content is amusing, if even, every now and then, enlightening. And occasionally, there will be a tangentially academic post - what the hell, people liked my From Hell musings - and they bordered a bit towards the academic side, but I thought they were still plenty "light."

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