"They've got organizations for people like me with stupid preoccupations..." -- Vic Chesnutt

Well. I've been in Florida for just about a week now and things are settling in at work, but I have been so preoccupied with transition and change that I have been a bad blogger! Here's the short list of things I should have been talking about...

1. First of all, congrats to indieWIRE for what by all accounts was a lovely 10th Anniversary celebration (which I missed due to the move) last week. You all have been so integral to the growth of community in the indie film world, and I know official praise was doled out back on the actual date, but congrats again and I wish I could have been there.

2. I got a new digital camera for my birthday and it inspired me to set up my own Flickr page, upon which I have been documenting my stay in Sarasota by trying to post a photo a day. I really admire and have been inspired by Eug's pictures and am clearly still learning how to use my camera (Manual settings... who knew?), but its been fun so far.

3. I'm writing a short film. We'll see where that goes.

4. A dear friend is working on a minor graphic overhaul of this blog. I've been changing things here and there as I await her new graphic elements, but in the meantime, I have changed the font (sweet, sweet Helvetica Neue) and disabled Comments on the site. Let me explain:

I was manually approving comments on this site for a long time, often searching through hundreds of spam comments a day just to get to the one or two commenters who were legitimate. I did not and will not censor comments, but I couldn't dig through the piles of spam any more. So, new policy. If you would like to leave a comment, drop me a note at backrowmanifesto@gmail.com and I will post it under a bold COMMENTS header at the end of the post for which they were intended. This way, I can approve comments (I will not censor) and end the daily nightmare of wading through offensive porn and ridiculous financial scheme spam. Thanks for understanding.

5. Left my ATM card in an ATM. Sigh.

6. Finally, I did catch up with Žižek on Netflix and I liked it very much, although it is far less formally ambitious than the amazing The Pervert's Guide To Cinema (see #2). It does a nice job of showing the daily grid of being a rock star on the international university lecture circuit, but it also keeps at a cool distance from Žižek and his life; I'm not sure how much more I know about the man having seen it. That said, it gives a glimpse into his thinking and inspired me to look more closely at his work. Which, of course, lead me to YouTube.

Few people know that there is a secret, underground society of individuals (some associated directly with indieWIRE) who took it upon themselves to attend the opening night screening of The Real Cancun a few years back. In this lecture, recorded in 2004 as part of the Theaterformen festival in Brunswick, Germany , Žižek shows off his Lacanian-Marxist stream of consciousness style by eviscerating the unreal experience of "reality" films and TV, before describing Casablanca as pornography. We join the philosopher in medias res...

First...

Then...