Personism: List of Woman Speakers For Your Conference

Just followed a link and found this Personism's List of Woman Speakers For Your Conference. A great, much-needed idea. I've just returned from SXSW, a conference which goes out of its way to program its panels diversely, and still I was the only woman on the panel I moderated. Go follow the link and if you have suggestions, post them in the comments over there. I sent Jen, who moderates the site, an email suggesting a number of female writers and filmmakers (and myself, of course).

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Technorati WTF?

I love this -- Technorati asks its users to explain the appeal behind the day's hottest searches.

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SXSW Ahoy

As you may have noticed, I've added a SXSW button to this page. Not only will I be attending the entire conference for the first time ever, but I've got three speaking things lined up. First up: on Saturday March 10, I've been asked to moderated a Film panel called "Which Niche is Which?", featuring indie marketing giants such as Eamonn Bowles and Peter Goldwyn. Then, on Sunday March 11 at 5pm, I'll be joining bloggy luminaries such as Nick Douglas and Amanda Congdon on an Interactive panel titled "The Rise of the Blogebrity"; I guess they called me because they needed the washed-up corporate whore perspective. Finally, at 1:30 on Tuesday the 13th, I'm going to be the subject of a StudioSX interview. I've been asked to name a topic to discuss, and I'm having trouble nailing down something specific, so if you have any ideas, please let me know. Obviously, something involving the nexus of film and online journalism would be ideal.

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reporting on out-of-body experiences in a parallel universe

I'm interrupting my self-imposed vacation from blogging for an essential blockquote: with the Top Ten list the latest battleground in the epic mass plea for attention pissing contest that is film bloggery, J. Hoberman prefaces his '06 list with a predictably spot-on reclamation of the practice:

A curious form of journalism, film reviewing is highly topical yet essentially timeless. It consists of reporting week after week on out-of-body experiences in a parallel universe—subject to its own laws but intermittently visited by millions of others and filled with references to so-called real life. For this reason, a reviewer's annual 10 Best list is not just a barometer of taste. It's an exercise in autobiography (however veiled) and a contribution (however modest) to the history of the present.

Film criticism as an exercise in public autobiography? It sounds accurate, if not necessarily palatable.

Full disclosure: S.T. Van Airsdale and I are friendly colleagues; Hoberman is a former professor of mine; my own crimes in the name of attention-seeking have been well documented (mostly by me).

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The Blog Does Not Rest For God or Commerce

It's no secret that most of the working Western world all but shuts down from December 20 through the end of the year, but the media always makes a valient attempt at making it look like the lights are still on, even if it means the TODAY show has to scrape the bottom of the parent company's barrel in order to compensate for the absence of Merdith Viera, Matt Lauer AND Al Roker*** (who is actually potentially not on vacation, but pre-emptively benched -- last year, in the midst of a truly horrifying segment on holiday parties, my boyfriend caught him dipping a slice of ham into his glass of champagne on camera. I mean, do whatever gets you off in private, Roker, but let's keep that kind of thing away from the kids).

ANYWAY, I'm writing this post because it seems like at least half the A-list bloggers I read have made some kind of mention of their vacation status/location over the past day or so, and yet, unlike mainstream mediators, their blogs go on despite their physical displacement. Whitney at Pop Candy, for instance, promises she'll post tomorrow about the media consumed on her "looong drive" to Nashville today. The Reeler, meanwhile, is in "godforsaken California," and yet he's still blogging about the minutia of the New York film scene.
I like this -- I like it that blog ethic demands that the feeds be fed, vaguely-God-centric holidays be damned.

But me? According to Technorati, no one's reading this, anyway, so I'm just going to go to New Jersey tomorrow and leave the computer at home. Hopefully we'll make it back to civilization on Sunday in time to catch the program of racist and otherwise inappropriate Christmas cartoons at the Pioneer Theater.

I was going to add a picture of Al to this post, but Blogger's upload feature isn't working. Check it out here.

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Blogging Fox Before the Code
Earlier today, I wrote about Hoopla, which screened this weekend as part of Film Forum's Fox Before the Code series. I'm so excited about this series that I've completely rearranged my schedule this week in order to make screenings. Here's a list of other blog posts I've come across re: the series. I will update and repost this list as needed.

"Using dissolves, sound bridges, long takes, and character punctuating close-ups, Brown blessed Quick Millions with both gutter swagger realism and pulp expediency. It is the most undervalued directorial debut in the history of American film." -- Bruce Bennett (reposted from the NY Sun)

"Born to be Bad, (starring Loretta Young as a mother out of wedlock and Cary Grant as the married man who falls for her) and Coming Out Party (the arrival of a debutante carrying her immigrant boyfriend’s child) are just a few in the program demonstrating the racial and sexual quandaries present during the Great Depression -- not to mention the anxiety felt by many Americans over the changing depiction of urban life in America." -- Jessica Freeman-Slade @ The Reeler

Semi-related: Peoria Pundit reminds us what 30-something Norma Shearer looked like as Marie Antoinette.

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In a bout of insomnia, I've added some hand-coded additions to the blog roll. More to come, next time I can't sleep.

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The Scourge of C-List Celeb - and Friend of Stamos:

Jonathan Bernstein's profile of Perez Hilton in The Guardian reveals the one shocking secret left about blogebrities -- they're fucking hard workers:

You might imagine that someone so skilled at promoting hate and fear among the C-list would live a shadowy existence. But at around 6.15 every morning, Mario Lavandeira, the beefy, 28-year-old gay Cuban-American who hides behind the pseudonym Perez Hilton, sets up his laptop on a table outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Until 9.30 at night, when the club-hopping and whisper-gathering begins, he downs endless coffees and fires off endless malice-tinged posts.

Of course, it would be unwise to suggest that most professional bloggers -- hard-working though they might be -- are paragons of virtue, or even people you'd actually like to have a drink with:

He's even more incredulous when asked if he ever feels regret for anyone he might have wounded. "Not a single time. Not even when I put up the pictures of Princess Diana as she was dying. I didn't put it on my main page. I said, 'Click here to see the pictures', and even then people were outraged. But they made a choice to see those pictures and then they had the balls to fucking criticise me for it."

...unless, apparently, you're John Stamos:

"The people that last, the Tom Hankses, the Julia Robertses, my friend John Stamos, are the ones that are nice." I can't let that pass. What about Madonna - who's more horrible and unappreciative of her fans than her? Perez looks as if his head is about to explode. "Madonna's insanely talented!" But you said the people who last are the nice ones...It's almost endearing that this scourge of the C-list celeb who has Hollywood trembling is still so starstruck that he can come out with such a clueless statement.

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