Point of Departure

Influences and methods.

This newsletter will comprise bulletins on what I’m reading and watching, considerations of what I’ve read and watched in the past, and meditations on interesting connections to be found therein. I’m envisioning this mostly taking the form of lists, short bits of prose and occasional forays into essay-length writing when I have more than usual to say. With the turn of the New Year I rounded out a decade of writing down in order the title of every book I read, and movies or filmmakers that I really like often draw me in for repeated viewings or career-length assays, so I’ll keep my eyes peeled for patterns and connections in the art and literature I’ve consumed in the past while trying to stay rooted in the present consideration of whatever I’m interested in at the moment.

From youth I’ve gotten a kick out of reading entries and lists from Halliwell’s Film Guide. The capsule reviews in Halliwell’s are succinct and pithy and proceed from the assumption that all films roll opening credits with a rating of zero stars and have to earn even the first star out of a potential four. (Grab a copy and flip through it. Once you’re adjusted to this premise that the first of any stars is to be awarded begrudgingly, a picture stands out with even one star, and possesses an aura of untouchable sanctity if it makes it to the four-star list at the back of the book.) The Halliwell’s house style, with its surgical economy and balletic elegance, has a way of reducing a short plot summary and critical assessment to a kind of snooty koan, cutting to the moral center of a film while refusing to concede that even a transcendently good or criminally bad motion picture is worth anything approaching a thousand words. A Halliwell’s review might loom in my mind with mystery and wonderment for years until I get around to seeing the picture, only to then take on a deeper resonance and sometimes suddenly become comical in the novelty of my appreciation for its incisiveness.

I’ve always been a devout Simpsons nerd (at heart I’m an originalist adherent of the First Eight Seasons orthodoxy, which is a subject for another entry) and am much influenced by the excellent companion book The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family. As a kid I obsessively videotaped new episodes and syndicated reruns of The Simpsons, ultimately compiling twenty tapes, and once spent a weekend compiling a detailed list of the contents of every tape. Drawing inspiration from Halliwell’s, I wrote down for each episode on my tape list the responsible personnel and my own feelings about the episode’s strengths and weaknesses. The Complete Guide book, which is the first in a series of guides to each episode’s production details and chronology, was indispensable in these efforts and was also inexhaustibly fun to read for its own sake.

With these organizing principles and influences in mind I feel as though I have a good enough point of departure, so I’ll file new entries soon to glance at what I was reading this time in 2011 and to examine some reads and watches from 2021.