Thursday, January 10, 2019

Here We Keep Going Again: Mamma Mia and Us



The other night, we were flipping through the channels with much disappointment. Every one of our go-to cable distractions was a miss. There was nothing left on the PVR for us to burn through. We were lost. I excused myself to the restoom, and while I was in there, I heard from the other room the voice of one Christine Baranski softly crooning "Chiquitita" to Meryl Streep. I smirked - as is bound to happen from time to time, my fiancee had found Mamma Mia on TV somewhere.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Caging a Panther: Michael Finkel's Stranger in the Woods

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,   
has grown so weary that it cannot hold 
anything else. It seems to him there are 
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Panther" (translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Beginning in the late 1980's, 20-year-old Maine resident Christopher Knight did something unthinkable - both because of how inconceivable and difficult it was, and how bananas-illegal. Knight drove into the Maine wilderness and left society completely - well, mostly - behind. Spending the next 25 years in a small encampment in the Maine woods, Knight survived not by hunting or farming but by pilfering supplies from a nearby summer camp and surrounding community. He was seen by only a handful of people during that time, although the "Hermit" became the stuff of local legend. His own family had no idea where he was or if he was even still alive. He's the subject of Michael Finkel's 2017 nonfiction book Stranger in the Woods, which took me almost 18 months to get around to reading, and several months since I finished to write about. ("Better Late Than Never" is a title I take to heart.)


Why'd I Nuke My Archive?



Astute longtime readers - of whom I assume/hope there are none - will note that I have been running ScottoWilliams.com for a lot longer than the 8 months or so the archives go back - intermittently, but certainly I've written more than the half-dozen or so musings that you can find on this blog.

It's true. I began this particular manifestation of my online presence in late 2013 after spending a few years writing exclusively about music, because I wanted to write about a comic once, maybe sometimes a movie or TV show. Who could forget my epic takedown of Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, which was so effective they never made another Man of Steel II.

Then after a while I decided I really didn't have that much to say about a wide variety of topics, and got back into music-blogging, which otherwise would have swallowed this blog whole. I had a whole concept, and for a year and change it was a pretty fruitful project. I liked it, I had fun.

I flipped back in late 2016 and managed to squink out a few more thoughts on poorly-executed comic book movies, but as I was ramping up my coverage of Old X-Men Comics elsewhere, it wasn't long before this URL went fallow again.

I came back again again last summer when ideas for dumb little observations, far too long for a Twitter Thread, kept occurring to me. I had a new idea how to use this space, which has only partially come to pass. By that time, the archive seemed like an anchor. How can you make a fresh start when you have all this old shit hanging around, reminding people you only post super-sporadically? Even if some of it was worth reading.

Ironically, I wanted to reinvigorate this blog as a place where I wrote about myself, told my story as well as recounting things I have consumed, but no longer wanted to sign my name to a bunch of old shit I wrote. But it was the truth - I flipped all the old posts on this blog to Drafts, because that's what they were. Every day of your life is just a rough draft of the next one. Get that tattooed on your neck.

We're all changing, every day - hopefully for the better. I spend a lot of time revisiting old things I've written through the magic of Timehop or being overly interested in my archives, but there's no reason to think that intererst is widespread. What I've found is, there's a pretty consistent throughline of self there - I'm the same person, with new versions of the same opinions. Some things I'm more adamant about than I used to be, some things I'm more relaxed. And that's cool, and sometimes I got it more right back then than I would now. And sometimes I just have no idea what I'm talking about -- there are already posts on this blog I think I should revert so I can do them again better later.

Someday, if I deem it necessary, I'll go back and repost some of the good stuff. But I found it just as easy, for my purposes, to KonMari the whole lot of it and start fresh.

You know, like I already have with three or four other blogs.