I Fell Down A Hole

Soooooo...

I ended up being swamped with academic demands for most of April, which for me is an awful time to be not in a coma because my brain goes haywire when it gets cold. It happens to me every year, without fail. April sucks. It is my least favourite month, of all months. My mood swings get out of control when this month rolls around and I'm glad it's nearly over. It's a month that's awful for a number of reasons I could name, financial woes, getting sick, seasonal affective disorder, depression, the works.

And then by the end of the month when my cash flow started getting better I began to think about the kind of hobbies I used to really love but ended up neglecting because of academic or depressive reasons. The things that make me feel alive again, or more alive than angry I guess.

I watched End Of Evangelion today, for the first time since I first watched it along with the rest of Neon Genesis Evangelion with my brother and he punched me in the stomach over the ending and he autotuned my yelps of pain with his I-Am-T-Pain iPhone app for the lulz. I will never forget that night I watched End Of Eva with my brother not in a grudge holding sort of way but in a "That was the summer of Evangelion" sort of way when I think back and really remember what it was that used to make me happy before the first rounds of horrible, horrible depression sank in.

I'm not sure if most people are aware but I was a Pathways student who did my final high school year over a number of years so my high functioning autistic brain could cope with the workload. I was emotionally abandoned by three separate year groups of students who just plain forgot about me the minute they graduated, so as a result I'm really nervous a lot of the time that the people I go to University with will forget about me and never talk to me again just like they did. I'm awful at making long term connections with people. Never had a girlfriend, all I have is my novel writing and because I've been so busy with art school work doing a Photomedia degree I no longer believe will lead me to what I want to do with my life, my blogging here's taken a bit of a back seat to the madness that's been going on at home. Not exactly newsworthy madness, but definitely a neurotic madness that leads one to wonder about things of minuscule importance at 3am because I can't sleep properly.

I guess what started happening as to why my brain seems to be resisting the winter blues more than usual is because I've had to get up earlier in the morning than usual for a number of reasons, one is that I'm back at University. I have theoretically, somewhere I need to be instead of being a self employed novelist bum who sits around at home reading books and watching cartoons of both the Western and Japanese variety.

I'm putting this up here so that I don't look like I've been squatting on this blog URL making nothing, but new stuff is coming.

Roger Ebert Dead, Criticism Lives

My brother woke me up this morning and told me Roger Ebert died, I was barely awake. The hours passed and my brain couldn't quite process it. As a Taoist I believe the afterlife has a lot of options, not so much that one not believing in one faith bars you from an afterlife but rather that an afterlife believes in you. This sense of metaphysics is probably how I took the death of my surrogate grandfather who was the granddad in place of the two granddads I never knew so well.

But Roger Ebert believed in more than just what any old person believed in, he believed in something that is very difficult to have faith in even beyond the struggles of man and religion. He believed in cinema, even as he saw the worst of what Hollywood had become in later years he never gave into the hateful critic mould and retained his humanity to the very end.

A lot of people are weighing in on this. I'm not as familiar with Siskel and Ebert as say, American Gen X-ers are or 80s kids in the USA are. I grew up with something called David And Margaret At The Movies, which was on SBS weekly and ran by the same formula but had some kind of Australian flavour to it that's hard to explain to somebody who didn't grow up here. But Roger Ebert I think retains a level of dignity as a critic beyond nostalgia goggles.

Roger Ebert was to me, in my early University days, the last bastion of giving a damn about the artform you devoted your life to. Ebert never phoned it in, never faked out an opinion to please others. A sellout he was not. He was the emblem of caring about what wonders human creativity could bring rather than giving into the depression and misery life can sometimes throw at you.

Last night I was even peeking at Kindle previews of some of Roger Ebert's books, thinking he'd be around to write many more of them. When I woke up the next morning I found out something that made me realise how wrong I was about that.

As a mildly disabled, high functioning autistic man, Roger Ebert is up there with Christopher Reeve with disabled icons who inspire even the most handicapped of humanity to achieve, despite these great challenges. The man was a movie critic who lost his ability to speak, yet was enabled by technology to continue reviewing films. We live in a world where a Youtube channel called The Blind Film Critic exists, and finally all of a sudden nobody laughs at this idea. People will always look at what they think is silly with disdain at first, but if it offers something of great value, they will take note.

Roger Ebert was a vanguard against haterade in an encroaching digital future. We may not be able to replace Roger Ebert, but be aware: there are films that Roger Ebert will never be able to review. Some good, some bad, some ugly or beautiful. And there will come a time when people have to appraise these works of cinema that the coming generations have made. Because these films have not yet been committed to cinema. Otherwise Roger Ebert would have tried his hardest to give his opinion.