How Can I Keep from Singing?

Recently, one of my co-workers and I were chatting. He's in a band and I was asking about what he did in it, did he sing? And eventually it came up that I used to sing. Quite true, I did. I used to sing a lot in fact. My family has always encouraged it, especially on my mother's side, and I was in choir in middle school, through high school and college. After starting in our basic level as a freshman in high school, I quickly moved to our audition-only madrigal and jazz choir, as well as our larger SATB group. I got my first solo as a sophomore, joined our sweet adeline quartet, sang a lead in our bi-annual musical. I eventually lead the jazz octet I co-founded at one of the state's most prestigious competitions at which we took fourth place; the only student-lead group competing. I won an award when I graduated for all I'd done in the department. I sang all eight semesters in a women's choir in the conservatory at Oberlin and sang in the symphonic choir both there and at Sonoma State University. I felt like a liar the entire time.

Captain America 2, The Winter Soldier: Short, Controlled Bursts

It's a fucking snakeskin turban, people. And no, Mom,
 she doesn't "just look that way" and those aren't her real
cheekbones. Gah, we argued so much about this dumb movie.

It's always a kick in the pants when the Oscars come around. My degree is in cinema studies and working at a grocery store comics. This left me rather depressed, having read my living-the-dream, scriptwriting amigo's annual top ten list to discover I'd only heard of any of the films via a fashion blog I read and not seen a single one. I haven't seen any of the nominees this year, except (cough) Maleficent which is up for costume design. Arg.
through high school and college, I was ever so tapped in to Hollywood (and beyond). The steep drop in my consumption of film--at least current film--coincides quite noticeably with the absence of any disposable income to speak of. Ah, how culture eludes the impoverished! I graduated six years ago in the spring and I've reduced myself to what I can steal from the internet, my streaming-only Netflix subscription, and movies related to my chosen field,

Giving Me a Number, Taking Away My Name

More than the snobbish angst of having not enjoyed any high art at the multiplex this year--and that's being generous in assuming some was made, I'm a cynical snob--is that I have no brevity in my nature. My articles on Watchmen and The Hunger Games are more akin to essays, and between tracking down images, writing and editing, they took days of time to produce. This is a hurdle, more than a flaw, I'd say: It's the way I tend to rant articulately about my opinions to a few people, promise myself and others that I'll write down my thinking and then never do that is the real, real problem. But, since I'm a deli-slicer extraordinaire these days (we don't give out numbers, actually), I might as well do as Devo commands and get up off my ass.

I've Got One Hell of a Job

This is a challenge all writers face: Not writing and feeling bad about it. Let's remember to work with what we've got, draw inspiration from whatever truly does inspire us, and just keep trying to write it down. I did see some movies that were in release this year. I do have opinions about them, discerning critiques as a writer, a filmgoer and a scholar of the silver screen. Let's get nitty and gritty, let's think critically about mass-audience entertainment, let's commit to following through on our promise to ourselves and each other and elevate even the lowest common experiences to the level of intelligence befitting discourse! Or, at least let's delve into a very long exploration of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, like I fucking said I would when I saw it in April. Yeehaw!

After this point, there are mega-spoilers, not that I probably need to warn anyone about a movie this old and some triggering things like descriptions of violence. Oh, and hereafter, there will be no more references to "Secret Agent Man" by Devo, in part because Steve Rogers makes the worst secret agent ever.