Jonathan Poritsky

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.

NYC in Clouds
Originally uploaded by porit­sky

I’m still tak­ing pic­tures in case any­one out there was won­der­ing. My awe­some office win­dow view pro­vided another great cityscape, this time with an iPhone. I opted, as I often do, to leave the cam­era gear at home today and lug the lap­top in so I could catch up on web­site busi­ness. The clouds gath­ered over the city and I pulled the ol’ iPhone out to grab it. It still takes pretty awe­some pics eve though it gets abused in my pock­ets. I’ll keep the pics flow­ing for you all to ogle. Check out my photo gallery while you’re at it. Enjoy.

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…

Camel Closeup

Originally uploaded by porit­sky

So, it’s prob­a­bly not a big deal in real life, but I was rather excited to find a photo of mine fea­tured in a gallery on www.nowpublic.com. You can fol­low the link here Camel beauty pageant to be held in UAE. It’s a story about a camel beauty pageant, and there are a hun­dred other flickr pics up on it. Still, I can’t help but kvell over the whole thing.

Also, NowPublic seems like a pretty awe­some idea, here’s a blurb from their mis­sion state­ment: Read on…

Colorful People

Originally uploaded by porit­sky

These roof kids are pretty cool look­ing in the sunset.