Want to know my name?

Over the time I've been writing this blog, a number of things have come along that threatened to spoil my anonymity, most notably, my posts on the Flickchart blog, where I have been using my real name. These posts have contained links to The Audient, so anyone who discovered my blog that way would know my name before they even got here.

However, in order to prevent avoidable breaches to my anonymity, I've never directed you either to anything I've written on another blog, or to my film reviews. For reasons I can't entirely explain, I've considered my true identity to be sacrosanct.

Until now.

This past weekend I appeared on the official podcast of Flickchart called Flick Fights (link here), hosted by Angelenos Travis Betz and Devin Barry. They're the guys you see above, in their own variations on the posters for Cool Hand Luke and Eraserhead. Travis is a writer-director and Devin is an actor. They both know a shitload about movies, and their podcast consists of playing Flickchart: Getting battles, deciding which movie wins, and arguing about the victor when they disagree. In decidedly humorous ways.

As a tie-breaker, they usually have on a special guest. This past Sunday, that guest was me. The podcast posted online yesterday. You can find it here.

I was a bit nervous going in -- after all, this podcast has had guests as high-profile as Busy Phillips from Cougar Town. But the easygoing ways of Travis and Devin put me at ease right away, and after a beer, I was downright loosey goosey. So if I made any shocking assessments about which films are better (or worse) than other films, I blame the beer. That's right, it's all your fault, Sierra Nevada. (In fact, I have since discovered at least two instances of films I chose as winners, even though I had the other film ranked higher in my own Flickchart.)

So why am I choosing now to reveal my name? (I'm not going to make it easy on you -- you have to go check out the podcast if you really want to know.) Two reasons:

1) Like many of us, I have some narcissistic tendencies. (Why else would I have a blog in the first place?) Pointing you to the podcast feeds those tendencies in a major way. Even if listening to it made me discover that I find my own laugh annoying as hell.

2) Flick Fights is a really good podcast, and I hope to make some new converts. It comes at the discussion of film at just the right intellectual level: 1) smart, but in an accessible, non-pretentious way; 2) funny as hell.

The mask may be off, but I shall remain ...

Vancetastic