Jonathan Poritsky

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to Tony Gilroy’s fol­lowup to his incred­i­ble Michael Clayton ever since I hot wind of it. Apparently, I’m not alone. The 6:30 show I tried to go to was sold out, as is this 7:35 show. It’s packed and there was a line when I got here at 6:50. I’m going into this blind ( haven’t read any reviews) so I’m really excited. Congrats Tony Gilroy. Now let’s just hope I like this one, I’ll let you know tomorrow.

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.

I remem­ber last summer’s arti­cle in Time Out New York that offered up the fol­low­ing the­sis: Why the Hipster Must Die — a mod­est pro­posal to save New York Cool (May — June ’07, Christian Lorentzen). It seems debut nov­el­ist and con­fused word­smith Rayo Casablanca took this idea to heart, or missed the point entirely depend­ing how you look at it. His new novel, “6 Sick Hipsters”, is an attempt at intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing the nomads of Williamsburg who vol­un­tar­ily go by that moniker, a futile effort to say the least. Perhaps, for a fleet­ing moment, Mr. Casablanca for­got how passé it is to call one­self a hip­ster, but alas, let’s try and get to the meat of his novel.

Primarily it is the sto­ry of a boy and a girl who find them­selves in extra­or­di­nar­ily gory cir­cum­stances. Our hero, scientist/porn afi­cionado and author Harrison, spends his time cavort­ing around Billyburg with his equally fame-obsessed gang of pals, the self-titled Whole Sick Crew. It’s hard to tell what has brought this mot­ley bunch together, but to spend too much time won­der­ing would keep you from ever mak­ing it more than 10 pages into the book. In any event, some of his cohorts start draw­ing con­nect­ing the dots between promi­nent hip­ster mur­ders. For some rea­son, Harrison falls in love with Beth-Ann, a knit­ter on the verge of blind­ness who indulges his friends’ detec­tive work. Read on…

Perhaps it was because I was sit­ting in a uni­ver­sity audi­to­rium that I was sud­denly rock­eted back to my film school days while watch­ing the lat­est film “of” Melvin Van Peebles. Back then, I would have been snig­ger­ing through my fin­gers as the rau­cous movie veered out of con­trol around every sin­gle cor­ner, and when it was all over and the lights went up, I would have over-analyzed the shit out of it and bla­tantly made fun of my col­league in class.

On its sur­face, “Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha” resem­bles the worst of stu­dent film stereo­types, replete with sex, knives, con­fused edit­ing tech­niques, and above all, a mes­sage that it so con­vo­luted and over­done that it has got­ten lost among the screen-pollution you wit­ness while watch­ing it. That being said, I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just why I loved this film. Read on…

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…