An affectionate wiki about my "work" includes some remarks I made about internet video several years ago, when my ambitions were more academic than practical.

"The evolution of the spectator's control over his cinematic experience must be taken into account. Web-hosted cinema did not evolve from television or the cinema of the congregated audience; it evolved from the sensibilities of home-format cinema. Like the VCR throughout its history, Web-hosted cinema gives the viewer unprecedented control over his experience, elevating consumption to a sovereign, individualized act--thus the implications of a theory or ethics of spectatorship."

The explosion of internet video and the taken-for-granted everywhereness of video-regurgitating tools and toys have effectively canceled my personal interest in internet video and nullified--by fulfilling it--the vision of BRAINTRUSTdv, which took an exhilaratingly narrow, impossible-to-sustain position between the birth of digital filmmaking technology and its nascent ascendancy--not the Old Testament prophets foretelling the coming of the messiah but the wild cousin crying, "Behold!" Any further posturing in the role of a pedagogical digital supremacist would be...well, it would be like arguing for the liberation of the fifties-era American housewife. Digital video technology and feminism might not have taken us where we expected them to, but they took us somewhere, inexorably.

The death rattle of BRAINTRUSTdv was a snapshot of the intellectual climate into which the video iPod was born. I zombie-walked through some additional interviews, using them as a platform for exploring ancillary interests (largely inspecting the documentary form), scuffing them with the erratic footfalls of intellectual restlessness. I was careful to ensure that the included films fell strictly within the digital video parameter, as if such circumscription were a sign of integrity. Actually it was a sign of my desperation to cling to a decidedly temporary identity.

Soon after the iPod roundtable, the one-two punch of mumblecore and youtube demonstrated that the grandiloquent prophesies of BRAINTRUSTdv were indeed a redundancy, and the site was sucked into the slipstream of history, instantly and mercifully fossilized. Youtube offered everyone a distribution channel, and everyone accepted. With unprecedented wit, skin, and intellectual acuity, the mumblecore gang made homemade digital features hip and respectable. These twentysomethings had the audacity to ban irony and cynicism from their work, and though I offered a strongly-worded caveat to some of the tendencies of the genre, I still feel that Joe Swanberg and Frank Ross have enormous talent, and I would cite them as inspirations, if not influences, on my own work in narrative features.

The last thing I wrote about internet video paid quite well, but I felt like a fraud even as I wrote it, as if reduced to self-impersonation. It was a thinly veiled edict for kids to go play outside.

Vitality is in large part adaptability, mutability. Forty years ago, Robert Benayoun wrote a fantastic piece in Positif in which he attacked the former staff of Cahiers du Cinema, who had suddenly decided they were filmmakers. To my mind, many of them remained critics; they were simply critics with cameras--just as Polanski contended that John Cassavetes was an actor with a camera. Given my past writing, one might say I'm a critic with a camera or a new media theorist with a camera, but those are needlessly aggrandizing labels. Really I'm just a failed writer with a camera.

A personal identity crisis and/or perpetual self-reinvention should not be spun as a cultural effect, so I gladly admit that there are plenty of exciting, legitimate ways to discuss and theorize internet video, new media, etc., but we must also admit that certain arteries of inquiry are occluded, as defunct as a caved-in mine shaft, and the blood flow should be redirected to other destinations.

Now to address the students who have sought me with a degree of ingenuity which is steeply incommensurate to my actual cultural value.

I think your interview with "me" is not only interesting but valid--oddly enough it mirrors some of the effects, techniques, and even themes I've been exploring in a project, now three years along, which involves Caveh Zahedi as a "documentary subject" (if you know Zahedi's work, you will know how elusive that phrase can be). I don't recoil at the sound of "my" voice in your delightful interview (nice accent); I don't cringe at "my" phraseologies; and I appreciate "my" factual errors (can they be "lies"?) and charming elusiveness because I don't have to be held accountable for them. Also it sounds like "I'm" smiling and have a beer in hand, which is a deft image makeover as far as I'm concerned. The fact that I could belong to you so thoroughly before having achieved even a modest degree of cultural relevance or fame is itself a far more electrifyingly relevant "essay" on the cultural effects of new media than I could provide. You have upstaged anything I could say on my own behalf. I wouldn't dare interject myself now. The effigy is superior to its referent by far--I only wish you could stand in for me in a dozen other contexts. (Cocteau once explained that he chose not to live in Paris because there wasn't enough room for him, given that he had to reside alongside the image of him created by the public--a horrible paraphrase of a profound sentiment).

Jaime, one of the students responsible for the wiki, expresses disappointment that most blogs, including mine, are "non-academic." If this means that the average blog has the intellectual density of misspelled graffiti on the walls of a public restroom, then I agree--that's an accurate assessment. But if this is intended as a lament that the blog form does not generally conform to the appearance of academic journals, then I have to disagree. It seems to me that there is a wonderful potential for the thinky blogger to put down a not-fully-drawn line of reasoning, a conclusion impetuously reached, to embody a ready-fire-aim approach to the exchange of ideas. Certainly a blog is a suitable context in which to express the beclouded thoughts one is blessed to have upon waking, those unruly ideas bounding before the lariats of reason have tripped them up. Or, to invoke a master metaphorist, "an idea is like a trembling branch which a bird has just left," and let's hope some bloggers choose to fan us with those trembling branches, before they are ossified with spellchecks and footnotes. As Emerson knew, "Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." I pray that my blog entries, from the first to the last, read more like screams than theses.

Now for some small, chaste and recycled thoughts.

I have begun to FEEL the distance from my couch to my television. Between watching DVDs on my laptop and editing my own films across several laptops (almost invariably in a boisterous public setting, a vitality-infusing habit from my fiction-writing days), I no longer feel "related" to my television. But this sensation isn't particularly fresh. In their book of transcribed chats, published in 2002, Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje talk about why watching a DVD on a computer feels more "cinematic" than watching a movie on a television in the living room.

Ondaatje: "Strangely, if you watch a DVD on a computer, with headphones, you get back to that true intimacy that film has."

Murch: "That gets back to the very origins of film, with Edison, who didn't like the idea of projection. He thought film should be seen by individual people looking through their own Kinetoscopes."

I tactlessly confessed to our final Cinequest audience that I did not believe Around the Bay should be watched by a large audience but in a cafe on a laptop with headphones. That's where it was edited; that's its womb; that's where it wants to be. Like a killer whale in captivity, Around the Bay would develop a bad case of wilty dorsal fin if it were asked to occupy a large auditorium for a "theatrical run." But how wise is it to confess this here, where I'm supposed to be promoting my work at all costs, assuring cast and crew that I'm diligently kneading it into the fabric of film festivals and seeking distribution?

It's okay: tomorrow I'll deny everything I wrote here. Hell, I've already forgotten most of it.