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Tom Sutpen

Tell us about your blog.

I invariably have a hard time describing what Gunslinger is about, but essentially it's an ongoing, image-intensive blog tracing a large number of cultural pathways – with film admittedly predominating somewhat – produced by myself, Stephen Cooke, Richard Gibson and Kimberly Lindbergs. There are the occasional text offerings, which have become ever more rare over time, but all in all the chief motor for the thing is images; derived from as wide a variety of sources as we can scrounge, and arranged in serial forms such as Seminal Images (comprised of motion picture stills), Fun at Bohemian Grove (vintage photos of strange doings at the infamous California retreat), They Were Collaborators (self-explanatory), Annals of Crime (old newspaper crime photos), Tricky: Scenes from a Life (the adventures of Richard M. Nixon), From The Black Panther Coloring Book and Signs and Meaning in Cinema (both self-explanatory).

How does it work? Well, as someone once said (in an unrelated context), "Everything is connected with everything else."

How would you describe your readers? Do you have much contact with the people who read you?

Taking it in reverse order: I don't have much, if any, contact with our visitors; though I hasten to add this isn't by design (quite the opposite). I'm sometimes astonished, for example, when I see the amount of interaction that transpires at other blogs and measure it against ours, which has virtually none by comparison. I love receiving any feedback, good or ill (well... like everyone, my capacity for "ill" sometimes fluctuates), and I'm pleased that the tiny amount we've gotten over the years is at least outwardly positive. But with a few, highly valued exceptions, our visitors are generally loath to have any contact with us. Perhaps it's the nature of the blog; who knows. If I had to describe our visitors I would guess, from the sites that link to us, that they cut across a wide spectrum (reflecting the content... such as it is) both in interest and locale. Since a great deal of our entries are film related in one way or another, a large delegation hails from that territory almost by default. That being said, I do believe that for most cinephiles Gunslinger is a guilty pleasure if it's any kind of pleasure at all. It's not a site that many in that concord would permit themselves to endorse vocally and enthusiastically, in other words. I can speculate on why that is, and what it may be in reaction to, but I fear I would get too far off topic too quickly.

Tell us how – and why – you started your blog?

I started it as a solo enterprise back in October 2004. At the time there was a great deal of talk about the then-burgeoning blogosphere (much of it inspired by the role certain bloggers played in the institutional demise of Dan Rather over at CBS), so I figured... hey, why not... I'd give it a whirl. The first title for the blog that came to me was Nasal Retentive Calliope Music, and if I hadn't actually been listening to the Charles Mingus composition "Gunslinger Bird" when the time came to type in a name, I would never have thought to use, as I did, that piece's provisional title, long and unwieldy as it is. Beyond that, I had no idea of what I wanted from the blog. I only knew what I didn't want. For example, I hadn't started writing about film for publication again (that came several months later), so I didn't anticipate doing much of that; nor did I have any interest in producing a running account of my life and times, as such an approach would be guaranteed to induce slumber in any unlucky soul who happened upon it. The only thing I dared post, in the way of content, was a large number of images I already had on my hard drive. Thus did it begin.

Describe your blog day – do you work at home? Go to a café? Sit in an office?

I do the majority of posts at home (attired in a manner appropriate for such an august activity), generally in between other tasks; from time to time I'll do them at my day job, when I'm in the midst of downtime. Of late I've been scheduling my posts a few days in advance, but in all important respects my methods are largely unchanged from when I first started. There's virtually no coordination between myself and the other members of Team Gunslinger. I tell everybody who signs on that they can post whatever they like, whenever they like, as much or as little as they like. Such is the iron fist of my editorial mandate.

How do you find things to blog about and how do you decide that an entry is worth being in your blog?

Since the vast majority of my entries consist of images I find on the internet, rather than self-generated text, finding material for the thing is a turbulent union of chance, keeping my eyes and ears open for a hint of anything usable, then going forward on the basis of whatever configuration suggests itself. Occasionally I'll run across a self-contained series, such as the Bohemian Grove photos (approximately 400 of which were sent to me by an anonymous donor), that do my job for me. When I'm on a random safari for images, I've often found extremely valuable material simply by typing in elemental factors (years, words, names), then embarking on almost a stream-of-consciousness series of more detailed searches thereafter. When I'm looking for a specific image, I invariably find something fantastic that I wasn't looking for. We sometimes receive outside contributions (often astonishing ones); and even though we don't actively solicit them, they are forever welcome.

What is your favorite blog entry?

This will sound awfully immodest (even in the context of my previous answers; if that's possible), but among my own entries I feel a strange sense of pride whenever I'm able to write something halfway decent on a subject other than film. I've been able to do that three, maybe four times in the last few years; my favorite of which was an introduction I wrote for a presentation of the legendary Bob Dylan/A.J. Weberman telephone conversations of 1971. That one, I must say, turned out nicely.

What was your most popular/controversial blog entry?

It's a series rather than an individual entry, but the most popular by far – and possibly the only one that warrants the term – has been The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes: 25 segments of roughly a half an hour's duration each, culled from the fifty hours of interviews François Truffaut conducted with Alfred Hitchcock for what remains one of the most beloved coffee table books in the canon of film literature. I started posting them back in 2006, then about halfway through the series I heard dark, third-hand rumblings from the interior that the cinephile contingent among our visitors were taking a very dim view of my (occasionally sardonic) introductory remarks on each entry. I suspended the series until a few months ago, when I posted the remaining segments without comment.

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If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be
a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

That series (and, I daresay, nothing else) is responsible for the small measure notoriety we've managed to achieve.

The most controversial (and the most regrettable) entry I've ever made on Gunslinger came in the course of a series entitled An Illustrated History of Race Relations in America. To this day, I have no idea what came over me, but out of some birdbrained, épater le bourgeoisie impulse left over from the DIY Punk era, I posted a photo of the corpse of Emmett Till. Totally indefensible by every human standard, it took just a few hours before the first complaint rolled in. Believe it or not, I was initially prepared to defend myself ("Free speech, maaaan"), but this posture crumbled instantly after realizing just how hideously insensitive and grotesque it was. It was like coming to after a fever and wondering what the hell I just did.

I took the image down within twelve hours; apologizing personally, by email, to those who expressed their outrage. Fortunately it is the only thing I've ever had to remove, and I'm glad I was compelled to do so.

Is blogging the new path to fame and fortune?

Fame? Perhaps. But it's a highly exotic species of fame; hovering in some demilitarized zone between the Warhol 15 minutes cliché and something of marginally greater duration. Few bloggers, however, will ever experience what passes for true fame in this culture (what we call Celebrity Status); simply because the blogosphere doesn't lend itself easily to the kind of social stunts that now facilitate the condition (even the bloggers who took down Rather back in '04 dropped back into obscurity after a few news cycles had passed).

As for fortune... forget it. No one worth a damn in this racket will ever make a nickel at it. We are, all of us, idealists who blog for love, glory and the honor of our peers; and will solemnly turn down all fistfuls of cold hard cash offered to us.

What separates journalism from blogging?

Self-awareness. Mainstream media gives us this relentlessly snickering portrait of the blogosphere as a benighted epicenter of mass irresponsibility; a vast, unkempt army of geeks and amateurs barricaded in their homes, clacking away on keyboards with wild abandon, bereft of objectivity and professionalism and that commitment to humanity which makes America a force for good in the world. You know the drill. Whether this broadly-writ cultural stereotype has a foundation in truth or not (personally I think it's complete nonsense) is somewhat irrelevant when you begin to perceive the unexamined assumption at its core: the notion that so-called responsible, professional journalism, as it is currently practiced, is inherently more honorable; or that it's anything remotely close to what it claims to be.

Few bloggers on this planet will tell you that they scrupulously observe time-tested editorial standards. We might not endorse the more overheated criticism, but generally we know what we're doing, and how different it is in character from traditional journalism. But when our established media claims, as it does reflexively, that it is motivated by a burning devotion to truth, or to the interests of its readers, or to anything smaller than the overarching structure of private, corporate dominance, of which it is an essential instrument; when it betrays such blind ignorance of its true function in this system (maintaining stability), then it's hard not to regard the most breathless, half-baked and uninformed blog entry as, on the whole, a far more benign (and far less sinister) enterprise.

Who are the bloggers that you read religiously?

Sticking to the realm of film bloggers, I read Dennis Cozzalio's incredible Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule; Ray Young's wondrous, recently-revived Flickhead; group efforts The Auteurs' Notebook and The House Next Door; good old GreenCine Daily; the stark, image-rich sixmartinis and the seventh art; Girish Shambu's self-titled oasis; Jeremy Richey's Moon in the Gutter and Harry Moseby, Confidential; Matt Barry's The Art and Culture of Movies; and my co-blogger Kimberly Lindbergs' ever-lovely Cinebeats.

Two that I'd like to single out are Lloyd Fonvielle's mardecortesbaja.com and Zach Campbell's Elusive Lucidity. In the first, you have a remarkable creation that (as I've said elsewhere) truly succeeds where Gunslinger, in all honesty, fails; and does so through a phenomenal interplay of text and images. Lucidity has, I must say, grown on me considerably over time. It's just about the only film blog I've seen that artfully synthesizes film and the vastly more important world outside of it; without (and this is the key) leaving the impression that you're reading the work of two different bloggers. When you think about it in the context of cinephilic discourse – an endeavor that is insular by long-standing tradition – this is no mean achievement.

I read a great many blogs on other subjects, but not so frequently as to warrant the term "religiously."

How has your life changed because of your blog? Has it gone in any new directions because of your newfound prominence?

I go through periods where my morale gets nicked and bruised in a thousand different places, and since starting the blog I've found that it sustains me somewhat during these intervals. I couldn't begin to explain how or why or what the mechanism is. I only know that it has this function when I require it. Other than that I can't say my life has changed very much; nor would I number myself among prominent bloggers. What I am is more or less what I was.