this blogging business

a big fan, in both senses of the word

After more than a week, I’ve finally finished my piece about Lee Marvin. I had originally conceived the piece as a two-part survey of the high points of his career, perhaps ending with a few quick jabs at the current crop of lame action stars. Instead, my piece blossomed into a five-part/five thousand word examination of an actor no one remembers or cares about. Or so I thought, until, of course, the day after I post the conclusion, someone leaves a comment regarding his favorite Lee Marvin movies. This would be great news, since I didn’t even know anyone was reading my site, except for the fact that the movies he listed were ones I hadn’t explored in the article. While I did at least mention “The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance” and “The Dirty Dozen” (without actually discussing either of the films, since I haven’t seen them since I was a child), the other two movies are ones I must guiltily admit I haven’t ever seen. Worse, I can’t even rationalize not having seen either of them because of unavailability (which I could with a lot of Marvin’s 70s work), since not only are they both in the Netflix catalogue, but they’re both already on my queue. Honestly, I knew both of these movies are placed highly on the Lee Marvin canon, I just didn’t have it in me. Last week my girlfriend and I sat through the entire four hours of “The Iceman Cometh”, just because the Hickey part was played by Marvin. I’ve subsequently suffered tremendous guilt about putting her through this, considering I ultimately cut the section of my article that dealt with this production. As soon as we were done with that, we watched “Emperor Of The North Pole”, a movie that romanticized hobo train-riding to a point well beyond her endurance. Since both of the movies I haven’t seen that were mentioned in the comment are Westerns, I suspect my relationship would be placed in serious jeopardy were I to add to her suffering two movies from a genre she views with complete antipathy. I promise I will eventually watch both of them and then edit my piece to include their importance, but only after enough time has passed that the very appearance of Lee Marvin’s name during the opening credits does not produce quite the level of pained groaning from my partner.


I’ve been reading my friend Josi’s blog on live journal…she and all the friends she linked to, are hardcore crochet people, enough so that she has a book of patterns coming out soon. Looking through the sites of her and her Crochet Cabal is kind of humbling; these people have an actual talent to write about, to share with each other and the world. What depresses me is not the marketability of her talent (although that doesn’t help), it’s the concrete certainty of it as a talent. Is watching movies and then writing about them really a talent? After all, that douche-bag Richard Roeper does it, so how hard can it be? Looking at the beauty of her designs, and also the designs of some of her cohorts, I can’t help but feel a little silly about what I write here. I admit that I can be clever in my observations, and will readily share them with little or no invitation, but is that a “talent”? It sounds more like a personality disorder.


For those of us without talent, the other blog subject option seems to be graphically candid recollections of sexual escapades. Let me reassure the reader, it’s not that I’m without anecdote ripe for carving into the bathroom wall. Quite the contrary; the adventures my mattress has seen, slaying dragons and conquering ports through out the seven seas is the stuff of legends, the source of countless folk ballads sung throughout the world. The problem lies not with the sword, but with the swordsman. Not only do I fear that my record as a paramour might be seen as bullshit, but I fear it might easily become bullshit in the drive to create richer and more interesting stories. Or, if the maintenance of this identity doesn’t turn me into an out and out liar, it holds in it the threat of taking hold of my real self, compelling me to search for new and exciting tales. I’ve seen more than one associate succumb to the allure of being an on-line libertine, where dangerous, bad decisions were made solely to provide new fodder for the journal mill. There is, I’m sure, an exhibitionist thrill to doing that, to engaging in activity just to have the next posting’s subject, but I personally find fucking for an audience to be a depressing, lonely life. Sex is great and all that, but I think I’d rather watch a movie.

the mirror never flatters, never lies