Blogging Hiatus (kind of)...

It looks like Ken Russell won the blog poll for my next director retrospective. I have loaded up the Netflix queue with Russell films, and I will begin viewing those shortly. However, when I actually post stuff will be sporadic at best. In fact, I have decided use this retrospective -- and the breadth of Russell's oeuvre -- as a way to get out of doing a second Italian horror-themed blogathon. For those of you that don't know, I am an educator; actually, I think of myself as more of a social worker considering the the type of students I felt a vocational calling to help ten years ago. I've worked with at-risk teenagers for at least five years now, in various arenas, but specifically in an options high school that is associated with a local community college where the students -- mostly teen moms, expelled students from public high schools, marginalized teens, or former gang members (and sometimes just super smart and ambitious students who think the public school system works too slowly for them) -- take a term's worth of classes in three weeks.

I mention all of this because I am in the midst of wrapping up my masters degree in education (I'm writing a research project and two work samples right now), and I'm teaching classes at night. So, I'm essentially working from 9am to 7:30pm. Needless to say I am tired, and I am going to anticipate being tired for a long while. Sadly this will come at the expense of the Italian horror blogathon (but I plan on doing it again next year) and some more recent movies I wanted to go see (I still have a slew of 2010 movies to catch up with); so, expect a lot of content when I'm on winter break (sometime in mid December) and random content until that time. There will be plenty of horror-themed content out there for you all to get your fix. I will continue writing blurbs for the Wonders in the Dark horror countdown, and it sounds like Bill of the wonderful The Kind of Face You Hate is returning with his great October series on horror literature (with the great theme name of The Kind of Face You SLASH).

So there ya have it. I will try my hardest* to continue posting brief thoughts on "Boardwalk Empire", and like I said, I'll get to work on the Ken Russell movies when I have time, but the plan is to step away from multiple posts during the week for my own sanity (and my wife's). See ya when I see ya.

*Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the school I teach at just started the school year off on the absolutely worst possible note: three students -- ages 16, 18, and 18 -- were standing on a sidewalk waiting for a bus outside of our school when a driver who was under the influence veered two lanes over and jumped the curb instantly killing one of the students, injuring another so badly that she died later that night in the hospital, and critically injuring the other one. I was the first teacher on the scene, and I noticed right away that the critically injured student was one of mine; three of my other students saw the entire thing happen, and I know what I saw...so I can't even imagine how they're dealing with what they saw. We're a close-knit school community (only about a 120 students total), and we're all extremely shaken-up by all of this. So, even though film and television is a positive and cathartic distraction for me right now, I think you can understand why I feel so ambivalent towards posting content: On one hand it helps to watch, read, and discuss about other stuff; on the other hand it just doesn't seem to matter at the moment.