How had he gotten here? He pressed his hands flat against the carpet and sat up slowly. The darkness was opaque and made his eyes invent blotches of inky light that swam before him like seaborne ghosts. He stood groggily, his knees popping in their customary way, and tried to shake the dust from his brain. He was dressed. Why was he dressed?

At once the room filled with light, blinding him, pushing him two steps back.  When his eyes adjusted, things weren’t much clearer. This wasn’t his apartment. He stood in a large empty room with black carpet on the floor and offensively bright white walls closing him in on all sides. One of the walls had a door in it, and the door opened, revealing an even brighter room beyond, if it were a room at all.

A neatly pressed man in a grey business suit stepped in. “Joseph Banks?” the man asked.

Joseph nodded.

The businessman squinted and nodded his head slowly, as if accepting a bit of bad news. Then he turned and left, closing the door behind him.

Joseph cleared his throat. He looked down at his clothing to find himself clad in a white dress shirt and pants. His feet were bare, the way he’d left them before going to bed last night. Everything else, certainly, had changed. He retraced the last few fragments of his conscious routine as best he could. Nothing out of the ordinary. He hadn’t been drinking. It had been an early night, in fact. A snack in front of the television at 10. Then he’d brushed his teeth, and…

Joseph paused. He halted his breathing. Something wasn’t right – many things, but something in particular. He began breathing again. It was the way the room smelled. It was changing. There hadn’t been a smell before, not even a hint of cleaning products or mould in the carpet. Now there was a smell. And it was familiar somehow.

The walls began to darken; bits of colour began to appear as though an artist were flicking a wet brush overhand to lend them definition. Burgundy and forest green. The smell had his mind reeling – it had been twenty years since he’d known it. Perfume. Anita.

The door opened. It was her. Good Lord. She couldn’t have been more than 16. He had an uncanny reaction to her clothing, as though she had chosen it from a rack in the back of his mind. When she turned around to close the door, the sight of her puffy, flawless cheek meeting the top of her neck made his heart leap.

She turned to regard him steadily. “Hey Joe,” she said, and smiled.

(Viretta Park, Seattle, Washington, February 2012)

There’s a girl in my room at the hostel who’s had a few too many. She asks me what I’m doing in Seattle. “Just visiting,” I say. “I’ve never been here before, and I’ve always wanted to see it.” She asks me who I’m travelling with. “Nobody, just me,” I say. “You’re a lone wolf,” she says, and laughs. And I laugh. And for a second I think about howling as a joke – fitting with the near-full moon hanging outside – but I don’t because it’s late and I’m tired and sober and on track for enough storytelling fuel as it is.

The “lone wolf” thought sticks with me for some reason. These days I travel with a lump in my throat. I don’t know where it comes from. It bobs there, a wish to share what I’m seeing with another person – immediately rather than on the Internet later, in an email or blog entry. I used to share things with people, but I’m in a stage right now where I don’t feel it’s possible, or likely, or correct. The lump in my throat is a collection of words I’ll never say. A couple asks me to take their picture in front of the Pike Place Market sign, and I do it carefully and attentively. I want to do a really good job for them, because I’ve been saving up my desire to do a good job for somebody all day.

I’ve always been a sensitive guy. Too coddled as a kid, maybe. If I were an only child I’d probably be downright insufferable. I grew up always feeling a stone’s throw away from a good cry. The insecurity over being in the world and feeling like an outcast still hangs out, still surfaces in the weirdest moments, usually when I’m forced to argue a point that I discover I don’t really believe in, or can’t really be called an expert on. I worry that my upbringing has turned me into an inauthentic person, unable to have truly authentic experiences, especially when it comes to art.

Art is something I discovered early without realizing it. I loved books as a child. I was a sucker for the written word. Movies, too – hours upon hours in front of the television set, watching narratives start and finish, feeling the tingle of resolution with each end credit. I listened to music, too, but not the way I would come to later. I discovered pop in the fifth grade and felt like I was on to something. Safe and saccharine hip-hop songs, ballads, boy and girl band treacle. The occasional curse word made it seem dangerous. And then in March of 1992, it all changed.

Before school one day, Much Music played the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana. I am the millionth person to claim that it was a life-altering moment, I know. But I lived in a small town of about 70,000 people. None of the kids in junior high were listening to stuff like this. It was every single angry, sensitive kid emotion I’d ever felt captured in three verses, three choruses, a solo, a riff. And at the time, I was the only one who understood it. I was about to discover what being an outcast really meant.

Art has that effect. As much as it brings us together through some communication of truth about the human experience, it also divides us by encouraging us to personalize it. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the first kind of art I’d ever really been consciously exposed to. Hearing it and seeing it put to video, in all its wild anarchic glory, made me feel as though I were waking up. There was something else going on here, something that I’d never found in my Milli Vanilli and Kid n’ Play tapes, or any cheesy Poison song that had guitar and bass and drums but no soul.

I was 12, but the strange thing about Nirvana is the way they seemed to speak equally to people 20 years older than I was. Adults felt what I felt too. Maybe they weren’t as impressionable, but they knew there was something incredibly truthful about what they were hearing, and they were shocked that the pop landscape could facilitate it. I started wearing flannel. I picked up a bass guitar. I felt authentic, in part, because nobody around me seemed to latch on to this grand, lovely thing that Much Music and MTV were serving up on a platter.

Things changed in high school. There were other kids like me, here and there, kids who shopped at Moondance for Alice in Chains t-shirts. I didn’t get along with most of them. They smoked pot, skipped class, skated. I wasn’t interested in any of it. I hung out with guys who would be guaranteed virgins until college. My rebellion was limited to loud music and wildman stage antics that made my dad raise an eyebrow, but never a hand. I was a product of my parents’ stalwart Christian household. The biggest difference between Kurt Cobain and me was his childhood endurance of a divorce.

After “Teen Spirit” I claimed rights to a category that I felt only a few people fit into. The music spoke to my friends and I. We would criticize other people who jumped on the bandwagon. They were “Nir-vann-a” fans, not “Nir-vahn-na” fans. We were merciless when it came to pop music. Every day became a battle of authentication – one that I was constantly in fear of losing. I should have fit in with the other grunge fans, the undesirables, but I felt like they saw through me somehow. I hadn’t suffered enough. I’d never been arrested or done drugs. I loved my parents. What could I possibly know about ostracism?

It took me years to get over it. I’m still not, not completely. I walked around Seattle alone last week, visiting sites I’d only heard about in my youth, places I’d seen on TV or read about in magazines 20 years ago, back when I used to stack my closet full of copies of Hit Parader and Rolling Stone. I spent many an hour in Starbucks (Starbucks, of all places) reading Mark Yarm’s “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge” to revisit things a little. The book is full of testimonies given by aging rockers, most of whom never quite got over the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in Seattle. It’s all there, or most of it. And reading it, I was reminded of how much of a fraud I was back then.

Grunge was packaged rebellion. It was a pile of shit that a lot of flies flocked to, desperate to sell the smell. For years after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, I championed grunge as the last spark of truth in popular culture before the modern world sanitized everything. Reading Yarm’s book and walking the streets of Seattle, I realized that none of the bands in the city really had any idea what they were getting themselves into, Nirvana most of all. Kurt wanted fame, and once he’d had a good look at it, it frightened the hell out of it.

These were young guys. A lot of them jumped from band to band whenever a member quit or was let go. The environment was incredibly passive aggressive; a lot of musicians wanted to get ahead, and would cut the dead weight of a drummer without telling him to his face. Drugs were a constant – alcohol, pot, and cocaine chief among them. Some tried heroin, a few became addicts, and even fewer became martyrs. There are a lot of crazy stories in Yarm’s book. Seattle at that time was not an environment I would have thrived in. As much as I love music, I’ve never really been into playing in bands. I would have been quiet at the parties. Alice in Chains had a calendar of strippers on their wall, and they would cross out the strippers they’d slept with, one after the other. That’s a mentality I’m many worlds away from.

But it felt like there was truth there, for a while, before it was inflated to international awareness and transformed into something completely cartoonish. The bands tried to have fun with it. I still get a kick out of the way groups like Mudhoney and Nirvana and Pearl Jam tried to buck the system with their sardonic senses of humour. When you caught them on an awards show, you knew they’d do something to bite the hands that fed them. They knew their popularity wasn’t worth much. That’s what happens when authenticity turns pop. It starts to parody itself.

My exposure to Seattle and grunge was all filtered through the media. It was a world I experienced secondhand in my bedroom amongst a scattering of CDs, committing a Krist Novoselic bass line to memory. Grunge was an identity that saw me through my adolescence. In the grand scheme of things, it was probably the lesser of a lot of evils. But at the time I had no idea how major labels twisted the images they presented, how politics ruled the airwaves, how bands would routinely tour like mad to make ends meet. Layne Staley died alone in his apartment after no one had heard from him in days. Fame means nothing if you self-destruct.

If a fate like that is authentic, fine. I admit that I’m as much of a product as the next small-town Ontario kid who grew up miles away from something “real.” The thing about being a lone wolf is that it’s lonely. You need something to grab on to. You’ll always be a product of your circumstances, but if you’re driven, you won’t let those circumstances stop you from finding it. Even if it means finally visiting a city 20 years after a five-minute video flipped the world upside down.

As I walked through Seattle’s Capitol Hill district on my last day in the city, it struck me that I was doing something incredibly morbid: I was heading toward Lake Washington Boulevard to visit the house where Kurt shot himself. I had been planning to all along, but until that moment I hadn’t realized what a weird act it was, sojourning to the place where a person I’ve never met but always looked up to died violently. What would he think of it? Does it matter? When does Kurt Cobain finally fall out of the category of moral artist crusader and into the category of media-hoisted historical figure?

Maybe never. I don’t know anymore. My walk to Kurt’s house was just another part of the product, an epitaph on my grunge-identity tombstone. Nothing especially pure about it, just a weird sightseeing endeavor. But as I approached the street a feeling came over me. The house is located next to the modest Viretta Park, comprising two benches covered in farewells and offerings. I sat down on one of the benches, smoked a cigarette, and spent 45 minutes listening to “In Utero.” I thought of the other contexts in which I’d heard the album before – on paper routes, walks, trips. Late nights spent on the bedroom floor just listening. I thought of the possibilities of every song Nirvana would never record, indicated by the power of the songs they did.

I was searching for that 12-year-old kid, too. I wanted to tell him that it’s okay to be a lone wolf. It’s okay that not everybody understands. It’s okay to feel something very, very strongly. You should trust that, because there’s probably a good reason for it. Don’t worry about being authentic. Just love the music, let it affect you. Don’t question it too much – or ask questions, but keep an open mind. Rely on art to see you through, no matter how you get your hands on it. Don’t let it go. It will be more honest with you than most people, even though dishonest people tend to create it. We’re all dishonest. It’s okay, it’s okay.

I had that time alone, there in the park. I’m grateful for that.

There are few places I’ve been where I’ve felt instantly welcome, without a shred of culture shock or displacement anxiety accompanying the first steps I take in town. Amsterdam is one, the benchmark set on the handful of European trips I’ve taken. Portland is another. Its population is only about 20,000 less than Seattle to the north, but the aesthetic difference is immediately noticeable – smaller buildings, quainter shops, a more relaxed atmosphere. And streetcars.

My previous associations with Portland have been rather superficial – I’ve always thought of it as a city where Seattle musicians played when they weren’t playing in Seattle. And of late, like many others, I’ve been watching Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s great work on “Portlandia.” My itinerary was initially influenced by the show, so I made it a point to head out to a couple of filming locations, including the PCC Library from the “Hide and Seek” sketch.

The library proved a decent tourist spot, since I had to hole up and take care of some transcription work anyhow. (Watching the video now, I was sitting at a desk beside the one where the old lady sits!) I also swung by the feminist bookstore known as “Women and Women First” on the show – it’s actually called “In Other Words,” and the women who work there were super nice. (And no, I didn’t ask to use the bathroom.)

Okay, enough geekery. Portland is a largely walkable city. The library and bookstore were located about an hour from where I’m staying – getting there involved a nice walk over the Broadway Bridge. My hostel was located in the Alphabet District in the Northwest part of town, so called because the east-west street names proceed in alphabetical order north of Burnside. Those running north to south are numbered, so it’s incredibly easy to find your way around.

Earlier today I checked out Powell’s City of Books, which purports to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world (and if they’re not, they’re a contender). Afterwards I headed to the Southwest District to visit the Oregon History Museum to brush up on my Lewis and Clark. They also had an exhibit devoted to Oregon’s pop music identity. Lots of donated instruments and vinyl and posters.

When I was in Seattle, I mentioned to someone that I was considering becoming a vegetarian. “Not until you try Portland’s pulled pork,” she said. Fair enough. I was also advised to check out the city’s popular food carts, a collection of which gather at the four-block square of 9th, 10th, Washington and Alder. At a cart called “Touchdown’s” I was served by a lovely woman named Janet, who offered up a pulled pork sandwich along with potato salad and beans.

I’m glad I put vegetarianism off. Further food-wise, if you’re in town and looking for a place with character, you can check out Old Town Pizza, which is reportedly haunted by a late-19th-century prostitute. They also do up a pretty good slice. I have a predilection for their food delivery manner, which involved placing a playing card on your table, like so:

If you’ve got a sweet tooth, I’d recommend Lovejoy Bakers on Lovejoy for their chocolate cream pie – the best I’ve ever had. Also make it a point to check out Voodoo Doughnut, who do things to doughnuts that should really be outlawed. And they have vegan-friendly options, too, so don’t let that stop you. Tomorrow I’m going to call it a trip. Tonight I’m heading out to drink some local beer and toast a terrific city. Keep it weird, guys.

(PS: Ending things on a negative note here, but there have been a few points along the way that I’ve resolved never to stay in a hostel again. Not that I haven’t met some cool people, or been treated nice by the staffs, but at 3 o’clock in the morning, when you’re lying in bed and the guy across from you in your six-person dorm is sawing big, thick, Pacific Northwest logs, you get to wondering if it would be worth it to shell out the extra cash for a private suite if it means not setting his bunk on fire.)

- Courtney Love

Some places you visit because you want to see what the big deal is. You’ve known about the Space Needle forever, say, and you want to see it up close, because you can, because it’s there. At the top is a phenomenal view of the City of Seattle, the downtown core to the east, Puget Sound to the west, and mountain ranges – including the impressive Mount Baker – in the distance on most sides. This is the building featured in the jazzy opening to “Frasier.” Where thousands gathered to hear Courtney Love read Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter.

Around the corner from the Space Needle sits the EMP Museum, an avant-garde structure currently housing an exhibit on Nirvana and the Seattle sound. People gather in front of glass cases to gaze upon smashed instruments, original lyric sheets, the Fecal Matter demo tape recorded at Kurt’s aunt’s house. Humbling. But there’s also the sense of the bizarreness of it all: a museum exhibit devoted to a 20-year-old scene, with Sub Pop pressings available in the gift shop, next to the band t-shirts, and multimedia presentations featuring countless interviews with people trying to piece it all together, as if they’re trying to narrow down the cheap shot that started an epic bar brawl.

Sub Pop has moved up since its early days of world domination; it’s now located on the third floor of a non-descript building on 4th, so non-descript that I missed it the first time around. A couple of blocks over, you can find the Moore Theatre. Sub Pop’s 1989 Lamefest took place here, and is regarded by many as the official launching point of grunge into the public eye – Mudhoney, TAD, and Nirvana played to a sold-out crowd that no one at the time saw coming. The Moore is also where Eddie Vedder swung like a monkey in the rafters before letting himself fall into a rabid crowd for the “Even Flow” video:

Located down by Puget Sound, the OK Hotel is the legendary venue where Nirvana played “Smells Like Teen Spirit” live for the first time. It’s an apartment complex now, sandwiched against the imposing Washington State Route 99. This is a spot where an innumerable number of people you’ve heard of – if you’re standing there for a reason – met and talked and smoked and formed bands.

The nearby Pike Place Market is overwhelming in its variety of offerings – all kinds of trinkets, jewellry, food, fabrics, and media are displayed efficiently and proudly. This is where you’ll find the original Starbucks location, but don’t think about getting too comfortable. Lineups are long and frequently out the door.

Big deals, tourist traps for a kid who’s always heard so much about this place. But I treat them with reverence anyway. A filling-in of geographical blanks. In the midst of the Nirvana exhibit, a father sits his five-year-old son down in front of a monitor and tells him, “Listen.” The “Lithium” video begins to play, captioned to showcase Kurt’s lyrical ability. A verse goes by, the kid sits, watching. What will he do with this memory? Twenty years from now, will he walk the streets of Seattle for a better sense of what his father was trying to communicate? It rarely works that way. He’ll discover his own passions, new as-yet-undefined outlets that will come to mean everything. And maybe he’ll wonder why they did so. Maybe he’ll plug in a pair of earphones out front of a venue he never got to check out, because it was too big and far away and adult at the time, and come to an understanding.

Dwindling big deals. On to darker places.

I’ve been in Seattle for about 24 hours. I’m bunking at the Green Tortoise hostel near Pike and 1st streets, right beside the Pike Place Market. Today I did a lap around Lake Union, watching the seaplanes take off and land. The skies of Seattle boast a hefty population of aircraft that appear to compete for the space.

Gas Works Park has been touted as one of the strangest parks in the world, and for good reason – its aesthetic revolves around an abandoned coal gasification plant, out of operation since the 1950s. Part of the old plant has been turned into makeshift playground equipment; the rest of it sits within a fenced and barb-wired enclosure, casting an odd Steampunk sterility on the otherwise green and hilly environment, popular with kite flyers. Others had gathered to enjoy the weather and the view of the downtown skyline along the south shore.

After passing through Gas Works I made my way into the University District, home to the University of Washington and its sizable student population. I was reading in the quad when two young guys approached me with a survey about Jesus. They were incredibly sweet and blessedly tolerant of my second-generation lapsed Catholic agnosticism. We talked for about 20 minutes.

I stopped in at an Irish pub called Finn MacCool’s for a black and tan before making my way back to the hostel, keeping to the east side of Lake Union via University Bridge. Downtown Seattle is joined to the north-end districts by two enormous highway bridges, the Aurora and the Ship Canal, which snake under and over other stretches of road like strands of spaghetti.

Much of what I have to say about Seattle will no doubt coalesce into a lengthy entry about grunge that I’m planning for Sunday or Monday. I’ve been listening to a lot of old music and poring over Mark Yarm’s “Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge.” If it’s possible to be nostalgic about a city you’ve never been to before, that’s what I’m experiencing.

He felt a pang of the addiction and tried to put it out of his mind. The feel of the coat on his shoulders brought back memories of Julie. The two of them standing outdoors at a winter fair downtown, the texture and feel of her knit wool hat on his scruffy chin that caught it like Velcro. They had wandered that day with mulled cider, looking in on the festive booths for handicrafts, trinkets for the windowsill over the holiday. The apartment had been theirs, together. She had moved in a month previous, and he’d sworn to give up smoking. It had seemed a likely catalyst then, though enough time had passed, enough to strike him that there were other reasons, the first in a bale of final straws. Sacrifices.

What he missed most about smoking was the ten-minute session before bedtime – especially in the winter, the hot, thick breaths striking trades with the intake of frigid air, a coating and immediate cleaning of the lungs. Certainly that wasn’t the way it worked, but it was the way it felt. He had been good through February, and then Julie had been unfaithful. He lit up that night to spite her. That was the reaction that had upset her most. No amount of screaming could have done more to cut her down to size.

Frank paused to wait for a streetlight to change. Checking his phone for new messages, he thought on grace periods. He had not yet come to narrow down the amount of time he typically spent letting his pride have power over his personal relationships. He knew only that it was becoming more distended as he aged, reaching pathetic lengths that he now forced himself to calculate ahead of time, whenever he found himself having a serious argument with a lover. Always waiting around for people to come to their senses, most of all himself. “When is This All Going to Blow Over?” his epitaph would read, should he have people in his life to attend to such duties when the time came.

And maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe they all go eventually. Frank was feeling sorry for himself. His feet were beginning to veer downtown, trudging the path near the river, kicking snow aside as they lifted and lowered. He walked to clear his head, to reinvigorate his ideas. As long as he could hold on to one good idea per day, he rationalized, he could keep himself sharp. Make fewer mistakes when it really counted. The alternative was wasting away, wandering into the walk-in closet due to boredom, gazing upon old things of Julie’s that he hadn’t yet had either the heart or brains to throw out.

by Joel Crary

Those of you who visit this site regularly will note that I’ve scaled my movie writing output back quite a bit. The reasons are simple enough. I’ve been travelling a lot recently. I started lending more attention to music. My blog went through a spurt of new content. These factors and more kept me out of theatres for a while. I began going to the movies as a means of catching up, rather than keeping ahead of, or at least up to speed with, audiences. I became more concerned with watching.

Last week I was determined to get back into the swing of review-writing. I went to see “The Artist,” a film I liked very much, one that’s been receiving a lot of attention. As I typically do, I found a spot at a coffee shop after the film was over with, cracked open my laptop, launched a fresh window, and froze. This happens sometimes in the process, usually when I’m trying to think of a good opening. I thought about the film, what it does with the silent-era aesthetic, how we react to it in a modern context. But the words wouldn’t come.

I’ve had this feeling before, especially in the early days, but it’s never especially prevented me from writing. Back then my aims for this blog were more specific. I worked at online criticism for a year – the minimum amount of time a writer had to put in to be considered by the Online Film Critics Society for admission. Members in the OFCS are allowed to submit their work to be posted on Rotten Tomatoes – that’s why you see people like Dustin Putman and Brian Orndorf (both are guys I read) in amongst the Eberts and Maltins.

After the year was up, I found that the OFCS had changed their requirement to a two-year minimum, so I kept at it. It afforded me the opportunity to improve my writing. A few people took notice and a bit of a following started to build. OFCS membership was the goal I wanted to attain above all else. I knew that I could only get so far with this blog; OFCS and Rotten Tomatoes would allow me to reach a wider audience. I am not a journalist; submitting my work to papers seemed out of the question, especially in a profession that’s becoming more and more anemic with each passing year, and most of the sites that approached me about writing for them seemed too fly-by-night or weirdly niche to bother with.

I wanted to work on my own terms. After another year of writing, I applied to the OFCS again. They rejected my application, either on the grounds that my site looked too unprofessional, or that my reviews were too sporadic (though I definitely reached the yearly requirement), or that my writing just plain wasn’t good enough. The latter is the only potential criticism that bothers me. I’ve read a lot of film writing. I’ve seen some of the stuff the OFCS supports. And I know my writing is comparable, if not better.

When I sat down to write a review for “The Artist,” I opened up Rotten Tomatoes and scrolled through the bits and pieces of reviews, the little two-sentence distillations of columns offered up by professional journalists and contributors deemed fit critics by the Online Film Critics Society. Right now “The Artist” has 177 reviews ascribed to it. After all this time, I had no idea how I could add my voice to it, or why I would want to.

Most of you read a review because you want to know if a movie is good or bad. Radio and print journalists covering a movie beat want someone who can speak authoritatively for a segment, so they reach out on Google and grab whatever film critic they can get their hands on. It doesn’t matter who the critic is. The voice is pointless. We go to Rotten Tomatoes, see that 97% of a group of faceless, nameless people thought “The Artist” was decent, so maybe we’ll go and see it. Who the hell cares what Ken Hanke of Asheville, North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress said about it specifically? Or Roger Ebert, for that matter? Most of you are content simply to know which way the thumb is pointing.

Charles Taylor wrote a terrific article on film criticism a few months back that talks about the ongoing battle between traditional print critics and rapscallion bloggers who are diluting the authority of their opinion. The climate is not only changing – it’s changed. I can’t remember the last time I read a film review in a newspaper. Film critics are losing their jobs because opinion is becoming too widespread. Do we really need 177 opinions on “The Artist” expounded into column-length prose? Perhaps not, since most readers are content to skim the hook of these columns before they head out of the house to catch a show.

We do need opinions on “The Artist,” and on all films. But a voice is still important. Any hack with a vocabulary can string together dry observations about why a film works. Taylor makes an interesting point that really good film writing comes out of communicating the pleasure of going to the movies. I strive to do so in my own reviews through anecdote. Film class residue can sometimes rise to the surface, but I know the average reader who stumbles across my blog isn’t really going to care about how I can overlay Christian Metz’s labyrinthine theories onto the latest Farrelly brothers movie.

But maybe I can draw them in by relating a scene to a time in my life, or drive home the effectiveness of a performance or an edit or a song through personal comparison and contrast. Lately I’ve been more attracted to the idea of an open-flow relationship with film writing, in which I save reviews for movies that truly make an impact. Most people don’t understand how the movies work. We watch them because there’s a truth in the experience that we can’t put our finger on. The critic puts his or her finger on it. Or thumb, for that matter. I’d like to be able to point to the movies that really matter to me and explain why.

Maybe that’s where I’ll find a unique place among the thousands of bloggers and critics. While I’ve been losing interest in the effort lately, I continue to enjoy writing about film – I hope that comes across after more than 300 reviews, none of which I’ve been paid a cent for. But there’s a need to refocus and expand my horizons a bit. The recent changes to this blog come out of a couple of years of internal battling. The intent is a more complete picture. A louder voice. Thank you for listening.

(Toronto, Ontario, January 2012)

(Dunrobin, Ontario, January 2012)