I am Barton Fink

I first saw the movie Barton Fink after watching and loving Raising Arizona also by the same writer/director combo Joel and Ethan Coen.

I hated it. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't get it, nor did any of the descriptions handed to me by various critics make my suffering any less as their explanations failed to find the mark with me.

What the hell was this movie about? And then a short time after that a friend told me the simple secret that unlocked the meaning of this movie for me...

It's about writer's block.

It was written by two guys who were suffering from writer's block on another project (my favourite gangster movie, Miller's Crossing) and provides as convincing a vision of Writer's Block Hell I think I'll ever see.

You see, I am Barton Fink. Metaphorically, of course.

It's getting harder and harder to come up with anything original to say. It's getting harder and harder to get mad at things I can't change, which was one of the reasons I wanted this site in the first place.

I find that I'm reading quite a few good blogs out there with entertaining, intelligent ORIGINAL content, and a truckload of other crap sites that are imitating the hell out of them, badly, I might add. I wonder what people think of this site when they pass through when something they were interested in turns up on the search result.

Does that mean I'm shutting it down, packing it in, taking my ball and going home? No...but I do have some thinking about what I want to do with this site, what I want it to be...

There are many blogs that do news better than mainstream media.

There are some bloggers who are more scathing than any foul-mouth stand-up comic that I've ever heard.

I have to figure out what I have to offer you, gentle reader to want to be here reading this site, and whether I have what it takes to provide it.



Then again, maybe something will make me mad tomorrow...