Keanu Reeves articles & interviews, 1987 - 2008

REBUILDING THE LIBRARY

18th September – 27 October 2008

by Anakin McFly

"What, you felt like you needed another challenge or something?"

KeanuWeb went offline on the 20th of April 2008 when its webmaster decided to do other things with his life. This left Club-Keanu as the largest website in the fandom, containing among other things the sole remaining online archive of Reeves articles and interviews, by far the largest and most comprehensive one on the Internet. Then CK crashed and lost everything. I volunteered to rebuild its article archive, thinking it could be something to do in time that was my own & private; I'd a hope that there wouldn't be that many articles, just several hundred, perhaps. Fiercelyred and LucaM kindly e-mailed me their saved copies of the CK articles - effectively the entire library, and discovering the truth freaked me out. They numbered over a thousand, all needing to be separated and formatted and translated into HTML code. It soon became apparent: hoodwinked by the sight of the few articles from 1987-1990, I had assumed that it would continue more or less like that for the rest of the years. It did not.

Evidently, this was not going to be a walk in the clouds. Faced with a complex matrix of HTML code each day, I slowly approached breaking point; breaking point was not a nice place to be. Something's gotta give, I thought, as this excellent adventure I thought I had taken on started to look more like a bogus journey. The articles had no pictures, namely those of the original magazine sources that had been scanned in by people who had a scanner. Darkly muttering at the resulting broken picture links, I nonetheless pushed on.

A brief scan ahead of the work I'd have to do was no cause for happiness; I saw for the first time the ginormous number of articles that 1994 and 1995 contained. Even cowgirls get the blues, and though I'm not a cowgirl, seeing the mere volume of those articles made me get the blues. Right, I thought, the moment I hit 1994, I'm heading over to CK to ask for replacements to take over the job.

Nevertheless, when 1994 arrived, I was still hanging in there. Barely, though. Those were trying times; for Keanu fandom, the day that CK crashed was the day the earth stood still, or maybe that was just me as I saw my leisure time rapidly vanishing into nothing. Finishing the archive on time looked really hard; balls I lacked to bluntly carry on. Yet I managed, working under the influence of Weird Al music (Mr. Yankovic, I love you to death).

Unhappily for me, this was not the first time I had done something as time consuming and life-threatening as this in the name of fandom. The first time had been single-handedly compiling the Back to the Future Fan Fiction Directory; that took two weeks. This, taking over a month, was suicide when it came to the life that I had finally managed to get. I vowed that this would be the last time I committed suicide. It was nice, having a life. And I missed it.

Rather than running around and smelling the roses, I was picking my way through articles that mysteriously misspelled 'Little Buddha' while spelling 'Feeling Minnesota' right; contemplating the pornographic connotations of the title 'Babes in Toyland'; and unwillingly playing the devil's advocate as I grudgingly formatted articles that blatantly insulted The Anu. Over at WINM, we call Keanu critics fish; the swarth of articles were all too often a lake filled with 'em. And apart from fish, the lake housed countless articles filled with cringe-worthy bad puns and often-desperate wordplay involving the titles of Keanu films. (Journalists are a pretty sad bunch.) Meanwhile, insufficient hours in a day led to me engaging in dangerous liaisons with my homework committments, which were constant in ever reminding me of all the other stuff I had to do. The article archive haunted me in dream after dream; to believe that I could finish it before 2009 sometimes seemed incomprehensible. During the day, I jumped at the random folks who came up behind me going, "Wat 'cher up to?" During the night, heat from my laptop warmed my hands.

Even at such a time, I counted my blessings. I was clothed, fed, sheltered and watered, not a homeless bum out on the street; kings had more stress than I did, running countries and all that, while I was young, blood running through my veins with youthful vigour (in a way that would have made Dracula very happy and very fed), and I vowed to carry on, not letting the sight of the vast volume of articles pop my confidence. In the name of the Keanu SWAT Team - that brotherhood of justice that lacks brothers - and as an act of vengeance against the fish, those evil beings who contrived against The Anu, I looked forward to the day when I could, with the sheer weight of article evidential support, easily remove a contriver's edge and win more arguments faster. The fish would always be there to attack Keanu; life under water isn't exactly filled with fascinating activities. Besides, only suckers give up. Rule of thumb: suckers get nowhere.

Energized, letting go of my misgivings, I strode bravely on, managing always to keep one step away from a nervous breakdown. I learnt things - like the reason behind the many Keanu characters named variants of Johnny. Mnemonics had never really worked for me when memorising things, but after reading through all these articles, I now know - in chronological order - the entire Reeves filmography by heart. Providence was kind to me - there were more foreign-language articles than expected, and those I cheerfully ignored.

Very soon the end was near and I found myself speeding through the last few articles. The night before finishing was actually filled with homework angst and stress. I thought that I still had about forty articles to go; but as it turned out, I had been wrong, and thanks to the gift of miscalculation, it was over way before I expected it to be, leaving me staring stunned and somewhat surprised at my computer. All that angst had been much ado about nothing.

Emerging completed in October, days before this sweet November, was an amazing feeling. This whole journey would go down in permanent record as one of the greatest achievements in my life; it is my hope that this would set off a chain reaction of even more accomplishments in future.

So this is it; it's over. All that's left is to tie up the loose ends, ship the lot over to Club-Keanu for them to deal with the missing articles and pictures, run a broken links check on my site, add the extra few articles or so that weren't originally listed on CK, and then get down to my homework and my life. So enjoy the archive, and don't forget to tune in tomorrow at WINM when I will, hopefully, finally get down to making those long-procrastinated site updates. Maybe. Anakin out. #

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