Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Spark
Welcome to 'The Culture Cannon', the all-new name for 'The Big Picture'! For now this is just a name change, but it represents a new philosophy for this blog going forwards. For the last year I've been unhappy with the name 'The Big Picture', as it was chosen back when this was intended to be exclusively a film blog. I wanted not just to review films, but to post film news, share trailers & posters with commentary, discuss wider issues in cinema and look back at film history. However I found this task difficult to maintain, I'm just one person and films are not the only cultural hobby I enjoy. Not to mention there are many sites that already offer this, and on a much more consistent and regular basis.
My problem is I'm interested and excited by all sorts of art and culture, not just films, and I want my blog to be a platform for expressing that. Films are still a major part of my life, but this year you've seen me write much more on Video Games and Pro Wrestling, other parts of pop-culture that I love. In the future I'd like to write about music, television, dance, theatre... whatever happens to inspire me to write at the time. In short – this has not been a film blog in a long time, it's concerned with all sorts of culture and I think it's name should communicate that.
The inspirations for 'The Big Picture' were primarily '/Film' and 'The End of Cinema'. '/Film' is just about the best film blog in the world, balancing news & opinion very well. 'The End of Cinema' meanwhile taps into my love of lists, not to mention well organised and structured discourse about the history of cinema. I've leaned more and more towards an 'End of Cinema' style from my initial attempt to borrow from '/Film', as can be seen by my 'Years in' lists on the sidebar. However this past year I've watched a fraction of the films I used to, and now have no local cinema to keep up to date with the new releases. As such, more of my time is spent enjoying video games and wrestling and naturally I find myself writing about these instead.
I am going to continue what I've started with my lists, only expanded to include other interests besides film. These lists - and the reviews they link to – are in a way my personal canon. These are the pieces of culture that have mattered in my life and form my understanding of various art forms. While they will always be incomplete, they will surely grow and change as I do. That said, I also want my blog to be able to adapt to accommodate whatever I'm keen to write about in the moment. Hence I'm looking to write more philosophically or politically than I have before, discuss topics in-depth and just expand the content of my writing online.
I'm also in the early stages of working on various video content, and I think 'The Culture Cannon' is a good name by which to establish that. It has the right tone I'm looking for – it's loud, animated and direct, yet also flexible and bold. I'll have to see how it all goes, but for now I'm quite confident about the name.
But I want to know what you think – Do you like 'The Culture Cannon' as the name not only for this blog, but for a web video series? Also; what kinds of content are you most interested in seeing from me in the future?
Monday, August 29, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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