New Blog!!!!! Again!!!!!

Yeah, I get bored easily. I'm starting another blog. What can I say, I'm a wayward and inconstant doof. I like "12 grand in checking" a lot, but I feel like this blog is too aimless sometimes and therefore has no identity. I need an identity. That's why I cooked up my idea for a blog that's more focused, more purposeful; something that can incorporate my love for older pop culture and tie it more directly into my interest in current-day cultural politics.

The guiding philosophy of the new blog is what I'm calling a "retro manifesto," which argues that early and mid 20th century pop culture AS A WHOLE is superior to the pop culture of today. It's not to say that there's nothing good going on in the pop arts today (that's obviously not how I feel since I watch and read and listen to plenty of current stuff), but that, taken as a whole, our culture was simply better (in terms of popular media -- music, film, television, literature, comics, journalism, etc.) "back then" than it is today. Maybe you think that theory's all wet, but I don't care. I'm a true believer. I think it's important to spread the retro love around and maybe get some converts. Call it retro evangelization, if you will. I want to proclaim the gospel of retro and hopefully bring in the wayward prodigals who realize there's something a little soulless and empty in their day-to-day media consumption that a walk on the retro side might cure.

See, the thing about retro is: there's no corporate cross-promotion or blaring, inescapable wall of media to bludgeon you into paying attention to it. There's no incessant advertising campaign, no constant headlines, no subtle groupthink that informs pretty much everything "current" that we come across in the media maelstrom. Retro culture is an old toy in the attic, the one the world tells us is useless and gross and weird and old -- irrelevant -- but the retro lover is the one who can break out of media conformity and see beyond the groupthink haze, the one who looks at that dusty old toy and thinks, "Why not?" And then a new world opens up. Suddenly he begins to question the assumptions of his age and he's no longer a slave to what the current media world has to offer. Suddenly, he can know a time and a place and a people beyond the bubble of his twenty-something lifetime. It's about realizing that you don't have to be stuck with "beautiful" women like Paris Hilton for your image icons or the latest cookie-cutter rap star for your musical "geniuses" -- Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth and Carole Lombard are waiting for you; Frank Sinatra and George Gershwin and Cole Porter are waiting for you. That's what my retro revolution is all about.

The new blog uses salty, rough-edged language, so you've been warned. It's more provocative because I figure it takes a bit of blaring hyperbole to get read on the internet and I do want to be read (I mean, I write because I like to, but let's face it, we all want eyeballs looking at our page). It'll be a mindtrip through all the movies, TV, music, art, comics, literature, and nostalgic junk that I dig (and dig up) from the past. It'll be a little more political and little more strident. It won't be all old stuff all the time -- I'll find time to wax on about the greatness of things like NBC's action-comedy-drama CHUCK or the latest garage punk band I'm blissing out to at the moment -- but I'll try to always bring it back to The Retro if I can. I'm also considering a podcast and other "extras." I want the new blog to be big. It's my mad-scientist experiment in making retroheaded monsters, technicolor punks for a new millennium.

Enter DERELICTION ROW!