Jonathan Poritsky

As part of my plan to be a bet­ter blog­ger in 2009, I wanted to let you all know that things are going to be chang­ing here soon. I’ve been tran­si­tion­ing things to a new site, so hang in there and I’ll be back soon. Thanks!

Me Behind a Tree @ flickr

Last week I sat down to com­pose a top 10 list of the best films of 2008 when I ran into a bit of a prob­lem. When I resolved to do the same things last year, at the end of 2007, I was sim­ply able to pull up my blog archives and re-trace my thoughts from the year. Not so this year, as I had only 40 posts in 2008 to 2007’s 50. What’s more, after perus­ing a list of film releases from the past year, I had seen only a frac­tion of the films released, espe­cially when com­pared to the amount I had seen in 2007. So how could I come up with a top 10 list? Well, I couldn’t.

Bummer that 2008 was such a lame blog­ging year for me. I started doing this as a means to orga­nize my thoughts, orig­i­nally on Myspace. Back then I kinda kept things sim­ple, say­ing only what I needed, but in 2007, thanks in part to hang­ing with a writerly crowd, I got a tad ambi­tious with my reviews, fash­ion­ing them after the work of my favorite crit­ics. This of course takes a great deal more time than blurthing out my thoughts, hence the reduced post count over time.

Anyway, it’s a com­pletely new year. My drafts folder is over­loaded with half-written reviews from through­out last year. Maybe I’ll fin­ish them, maybe not. In any event, I am com­mit­ted to mak­ing this blog, and maybe another, work in 2009. Even if it means short­en­ing my thoughts down, I really want to cre­ate a bet­ter account of my thoughts, a place to share them with the world. I look for­ward to the new year with you.

A good friend (fool­ishly pic­tured right) wrote me the fol­low­ing e-mail a few days ago:

Subject: remem­ber this?
Date: April 5, 2008 10:09:32 PM EDT

http://poritsky.com/thecandler/

what ever hap­pened to this awe­some idea?

Hold tight, dear friend. Hold tight…

So, the faith­ful out there will notice that I haven’t writ­ten in a lit­tle while, and when I have posted, it has usu­ally been a photo from my Flickr account (see right). Well, I’m here to let you know that I’m still here, and I wanted to let you know what’s been eat­ing my time up.

For one, I have been work­ing on a redesign of my website.

About 10 months ago, I bought www.poritsky.com as a means to a very sim­ple end: to find work. Back then, I was a free­lancer in the mid­dle of a 6 month con­tract at Present Focus Inc., (www.presentfocus.com) “a state of the art high def­i­n­i­tion video pro­duc­tion com­pany located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan offer­ing the lat­est in HD tech­nol­ogy as well as the finest in dig­i­tal and film pho­tog­ra­phy.” The seven months I ended up work­ing there were some of the most inter­est­ing of my life. At 22, to my own aston­ish­ment, I was the online edi­tor for an eight-part National Geographic Channel International series. The project, Oceans 8, headed up by writer-explorer-filmmaker Jon Bowermaster (www.jonbowermaster.com) is fin­ish­ing up the final expe­di­tion film now on Antarctica, which, sadly, I am not apart of. Read on…