Just recently, I spent a little over a week blogging about my experience watching 14 movies in 7 days. I used my Stevenson University blog to post my reviews, and while there is nothing wrong with that, I thought, at the of the process, that it would make sense to separate my Stevenson life from my outside life. Plus, that other blog should, ideally, be devoted to the work of my students, and not to me or my work.

Enter chrisreedfilm.com. I was lucky enough that this domain name was open. When I created my Twitter account, I had chosen @chrisreedfilm as my handle, and had then subsequently chosen “chrisreedfilm” as my Vimeo account name, as well. I already own the domain name christopherllewellynreed.com, which you’ll notice I have now pointed to that same Vimeo account, but chrisreedfilm.com is much simpler (even if there are many other people with the name “Chris Reed” out there, but only one “Christopher Llewellyn Reed”). And thanks to Google Apps, I now also own the email address chris@chrisreedfilm.com.

Of course, if any of you reading this have also read a lot of Milan Kundera (one of my favorite authors), you’ll know that there can be a dark side to this idea that we all have something to say, ergo we should all write it down for others to read. Here is a quote from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (the first book of his I ever read, and which I read in Russia, believe it or not, in 1988, when it was still the Soviet Union):

“The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”

It’s amazing to think that he wrote that in 1978, no? If you copy and paste that text, you’ll see that the quote is by now widely known (and over-used), but I like to keep it in mind as a warning …

So here I am, on my new blog. I think it would be most appropriate to provide a decent segue from the last few weeks of movie reviews, so here is a pdf of the text and links from those posts.

If you don’t feel like reading all of my rambling thoughts on recent movies, you could, perhaps, listen to an excerpt from the first of my two appearances on the Midday with Dan Rodricks show on WYPR, 88.1FM, Baltimore’s NPR News Station: Midday with Dan Rodricks: 2012.07.20_Batman Massacre

I was only on for 10 minutes that day, because we didn’t do the scheduled show – the massacre in Colorado that morning was of more pressing concern than summer movies.

But on Thursday, July 26, I went back on, and we had a great time reviewing movies, as we were supposed to the first time: Midday with Dan Rodricks: 2012.07.26_Summer Movies

Thanks to all who take the time read this and other posts in the future. I am grateful.