I was playing with WordPress this morning and thought I'd repost my longer blog entries on movies into a new site. (The category page was getting too unwieldy to load anyhow.)
So: three entries will be uploaded a day until the old posts run out, which will probably be a month. I won't be editing any of them (regardless of how wrong they might sound to me now), just reposting them as I go.
It's interesting to see that, in the 11 years or so I've been blogging, my writing has actually changed -- for the better, I think. Whether it's an improvement in style (debatable), an acquisition of both writing and cinematic vocabularies, or a genuine attempt in taking the stuff more seriously, it's a reflection of an ongoing, immersive, giddy education in consuming movies. Or, perhaps more aptly, being consumed by them. I can't think of any other art form that has given me as much pleasure.
It should be clear that this cinematic "education" is not formal at all; when it comes to movies I'm a total amateur -- and yes, in the older sense of the word too. (And I should add that despite the mention of Tarkovsky and Kubrick -- and that screen capture from Last Year in Marienbad, which will change from time to time -- I'll still be mostly writing about flicks you can find at your local multiplex.)
The name of the WordPress blog -- Film, Eyeballs, Brain -- partly comes from an essay in The New Yorker by Jonathan Lethem called "The Beards". An excerpt from the piece is reproduced in a sidebar, and it should be self-explanatory. (However, I've actually taken it a bit out of context. It may be best not to reproduce the succeeding paragraphs as they're probably a little too revealing -- not of Lethem, but of myself. You can find it in anthologized in Lethem's essay collection The Disappointment Artist, but he rewrote the passage I quote.)
Please add me to your feedreader, link to me on your blogroll, tell friends, and most of all: please leave comments! (And please don't tell me that the url looks like it's four separate words ("Film, Eye, Balls, Brain") -- I know that already.
Called Accents, because I couldn't think of a title: mother tongues, Tagalog, from sea to shining sea, forming words in my head, dismay at "losing" my accent, and (I'll stop with the Journey references at some point, honestly) yet another little mention of Arnel Pineda towards the end. And no mention of "tongues like parrots" either, how about that!