~Last week I finished the rough drafts of The Fourth Wall Season 2. While there is quite a bit of work left to do—as a matter of fact, most of the work left to do—I’ve told myself the story, and that makes a lot of things much clearer. Now if only I can settle on a title for Episodes 3 and 6…
~If you’re reading this, you’re digging deeper into the site than most, I’d imagine. So, here’s a little update. As I write this, the movie review blog is already up to 84 entries. Even though it’s existed for almost half as long, it is already giving the flash blog a run for it’s money in word count. Who will reach 50,000 words first? Flash fiction is currently at 45,612. Movie reviews are at 42,830. Stay tuned, but the direction for the 3.0 version of this site is starting to shape up.
~An old friend passed away recently… I’m sorry, that should have read “a movie theater of which I had a lot of fond memories—but had fallen into disrepair—recently shut down all of a sudden. The Promenade Palace 12, once owned by Hollywood Theaters and then absorbed by Regal, hadn’t much as a single upgrade since 1998 when it opened, and it was starting to show. Frequently empty as a tomb, I guess it made sense that the theater would eventually collapse in on itself, much like the mall around it. I just get bummed out when these things happen, especially since I had just been there not more than a couple of weeks before to catch a last-minute matinee of Aquaman (2018). Had I known it was going to be the last time I would ever be in the theater, I might have made more of an event of the occurrence.
And then the news came that mall management insists that the theater will open again under new management. They said two weeks, but that was nearly two months ago. We’ll see. But maybe, just maybe, one thing in this world can turn back the clock.
~As I go about reorganizing the music I carry with me on my new phone, I am struck by a dilemma. I’ve cut out all Woody Allen movies from my watching diet, for reasons. Is it okay to re-adopt the music from those films for my listening diet? I mean, the soundtrack from Manhattan (1979) is one thing, but should I really punish the Marx Brothers for the crimes of another man, long after they were all dead? It’s a subject worth some consideration.
~As I write this particular sentence, it is 02/08/19. I am eating a pretzel, listening to AC/DC, and reading a biography of Eliza Hamilton. It occurs to me while I am doing this that I am likely the only person in the entire universe doing this exact same series of things at the same time.
~Although this will just miss Black History Month by a minute, a tweet (or, rather, a series of them) came across my radar that detailed what a an African American Batman would be like.
Now, of course some are going to be bent out of shape about such an idea, and really, seriously fuck them. This in inspired. You’re telling me that Batman can credibly be The World’s Greatest Detective, a manic depressive Tim Burton stand-in, an aging Dirty Harry type, a straight up murderer*, and—in the guise of Adam West—the greatest hipster doofus the world has ever known, but can’t be an educated, woke as hell black man?
Anybody that isn’t into this idea isn’t a fan of Batman at all. Fight me, America.
Now, that all being said, looking at a bat flying into a window and deciding that it is a symbol that will inspire fear in the cowardly and superstitious lot of criminals is kind of the biggest White Guy Leap Of Logic (™) in American culture, but I digress…
*Seriously, read some of those early Detective Comics stories from the 30s. That Batman loves two things, guns and pushing people to their deaths.