Without Further Ado...(or Adieu)

My new and improved home.

Note: The Powerstrip's address is BLOG.aspiringsellout.com

The new site is simply www.aspiringsellout.com, or aspiringsellout.com.

Got it? Yeah, it's longer...

Powering Down

Could it be? Surely, no. Is The Powerstrip dead?

Powerstrips -- real ones -- are fickle machines, and frequently fizzle out unless you spend the big buckeroos, and even then they can be temperamental. I often learned this the hard way in my A/V apprenticeship under the elder Joseph Lanthier, whose remarkably hand-on, holistic tutelage taught me to always, always, double and triple check yer power sources, especially if the gig is professional. You can have the most sophisticated sound set-up on earth, with limited edition, Wagernarian-grade German speakers baffled at precisely the right angles to produce uncanny surround in an amphitheatre, with all the spidery wires and tubes hidden out of sight as they web their way towards the engineer's top-o-the-line Mackie mixer, and all the lavalieres lovingly clipped at just the appropriate height to snag all the glorious cadence of a performer's diction, etc, etc, etc. If you ain't got power, you got nothin'.

It's not so much that I don't have power -- it's more that I'm applying it elsewhere. Writing for Slant Magazine and Bright Lights Film Journal offers me far better exposure, though I do wish that those pubs facilitated the same two-way conversation as a blog. Plus, blogging has a tendency to depress me because I feel the need to divulge far more biographical information than is necessary -- I feel like the Powerstrip has been tainted from the start by a tendentious self-deprecating tone, something I didn't view as a bad thing necessarily until a post by Glenn Kenny rightfully dissed some younger film writers for diluting their critical prowess with too much bitching. I have a right to bitch, of course, but I do think that mixing business with misery is a task best left to shitty, consumptive novelists.

That having been said, I'm letting this site lie dormant while I start up a new blog using Tumblr -- chosen for its emphasis on media over text, something I'd like to explore since I'm writing more than enough for various other outlets as it is. Because I've received a handful of backlinks from very gracious folks over the months, I will keep the blog here as a kind of archive, but after a subsequent missive regarding my new home there will be no more new posts.

I'd like to thank my small batch of readers for a great year. Without hurting feelings, I must shout out most loudly to my good pals Deedee and Who Am Us Anyway, who have kept me going through the darkest moments of 2009 with their unfettered support, and I could equally praise Sam Juliano, Movie Man Joel Bocko, Tony Dayoub, Jamie Uhler, Ed Howard, Kevin Olson, and Tony D'Ambra for great contributions (among others I'm sure I've forgotten).

And now, on to bigger and better things.

And oh, I *am* going to return to "Decisions at Sundown" soon, I SWEAR. Yeah, it's longer...

For Halloween...

There are a whopping TWO ways to read my most spankingly new film essay, "An Atheist's Guide to 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'" (and yes, it's about the cartoon and the original text):

At Deedee's fantastic blog Noirish City, which has a chock full of great screenshots that explain what I'm referring to with all my clumsy text.

At Bright Lights After Dark, where there are fewer screenshots, but some key ones, such as my cross-comparison of "Sleepy Hollow" and "Drums Along the Mohawk".

Thanks to both sites for allowing me the space, especially the incomparable Deedee. Here's a snippet:




The “Headless Horseman” musical number is a dense pocket of Disney brilliance, a collaborative effort aligning the inimitable talents of several men while maintaining an impeccable cohesion: We never lose sight of the fact that we’re listening to Brom Bones – outlined with incandescent yellow from the furnace behind him – attempting to scare Ichabod Crane out of Sleepy Hollow so he can wed and bed Katrina himself. Wolfgang Reitherman lent his sense of spatial fluidity while Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Ward Kimball allow a wealth of dissonant emotions to populate Van Tassel’s living room (Katrina’s amusement, Ichabod’s mounting trepidation). Likewise, the diversity of visual and aural influences littered about the screen and soundtrack is staggering: The scene encompasses Dixieland, Boris Karloff, Albrecht Durer, bandstand jazz, Edgar Allen Poe (or, more accurately, wood carved illustrations of his tales), and John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (below), just to name a few. The result is a story within a story (Brom Bones “elucidates” the tale of the Headless Horseman) depicted with horrifically makeshift illustrations (Brom rides a wooden chair towards Ichabod casting ominous shadows, a startled cat shrieks and darts into a hollow pumpkin, a window flies open letting in the grave solemnity of the dimming woods, and so forth). The effect is such that despite the distancing nature of the stylized animation we feel very close to the action – the scene is directed half at Ichabod and half at “the camera,” assuming Ichabod’s isolated, “alien” POV in relation to the remainder of the community who offer vocal accompaniment to Bones’ tune – and it’s though we’re imagining these images while being read to, and Disney’s animators are simply splashing them onto cels as they soar from our brains.



Happy Hallow's, folks...and here's hoping Captain Howdy doesn't get ya.
Yeah, it's longer...

Seedy Pulp

Been a while since I posted anything here, but I've definitely still been writing (up a storm, in fact, or at least a shower). Various distractions, however, have kept me from the usual updates.

In any case, here's a review that friends and well-wishers are sure to enjoy (one noirista in particular):

The Samuel Fuller Collection ****

"Part of what's so off-putting about the Fuller universe is that it is, without a doubt, a low-budget milieu. Even when essaying a more prestigious production like Pickup on South Street, a 20th Century Fox A-feature also available through Criterion, Fuller's artfulness is buried beneath adamantine sheets of histrionic stereotype, wholly off-kilter and utterly unplaceable vernacular, and puzzling motive. Curiously, these attributes appear to have been ingrained in Fuller's style from the beginning; even the blithering backstage sap story It Happened in Hollywood, a late-'30s script job, is made piquant by a firm, nearly reckless, belief in cowboy motifs, and a tall-in-the-saddle protagonist who puts his chaps on while leaving the set when gangster movies render his western career obsolete. The barely-feature-length Adventure in Sahara similarly introduces Fuller's pointless flourishes of dark human nature through a fascist bully of an army captain. Trying to determine why these characters say what they say and do what they do—in the service of either narrative framework or socio-moral significance—is likely to produce only frustration. The way to slug a dose of Fuller is through intra- rather than intertextual analysis; to approach his films squarely on their own terms, while keeping an open but static mind (ideally slackened by liquor or emotional fatigue) and an agile eye that can pick out seedy, pulpy rhythms expediently." Yeah, it's longer...

This Week @ Slant

Aside from the usual junk I've reviewed at Slant, there's a four star write-up for a 50-year-old film finally receiving a theatrical release here in the US. Call it the Army of Shadows syndrome.

Araya ****

"From the get-go, Benacerraf depicts the salt trade practitioners as nearly phantasmagoric; isolated from the remainder of South America, the arid landscape of the Arayan peninsula is fit for only the most resilient and opportunistic of life forms, and as the narration repeats endlessly in an effort to carve a direct path from Darwin to the salt pyramids we see chiseled, sunburned bodies forming grain by grain, 'All life comes from the sea.' In the positively trippy opening we hear a brief history of the universe against footage of primordial tide pools while primitive, Joe Meek-like synthesizers modulate on the soundtrack to accent inappropriately sharp pans and tilts: It's like an unkempt hybrid of the hypnotic, lava-lampish images of Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou's Genesis and the trashy sci-fi zeal of Jack Arnold's Tarantula."

St. Trinian's **

"Directors Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thompson could have successfully adapted some of the dark humor of Ronald Searle's original comics without risking too much griping from censors, but the source material—which featured uniformed girls who had a habit of drinking, smoking, thieving, and occasionally murdering their classmates—was meant as surreal socio-pedagogical satire for adults and not tweens (in other words, a marketing nightmare). The modicum of morbidity included herein reeks of PG-13 concession: The girls engage in target practice with masculine handguns, distill and bottle low-grade vodka for the libertine Flash Harry (Russell Brand, in a performance so awkward it excites one's pulse from embarrassment) and, at the climax, attempt to heist a Vermeer in order to settle their school's debts. And strangely, most of these plot turns are played semi-realistically, as though the notion of children manufacturing liqueur slave labor-style were inherently hilarious."

Peter and Vandy ** 1/2

"Peter and Vandy implements the time-shuffling love story with more poetic technical aplomb than any other film this year, but its flaws inadvertently fashion a cogent argument against the formula as well. If this is the best that out-of-order indie romances can get, why bother with them?" Yeah, it's longer...

2000s: Werckmeister harmóniák

Not much time for loitering over hee-ah at the Powerstrip -- chronic stomach upsetness kept me from meeting my typical productivity clip over the weekend, and there's deadlines to attend to in early October. But, as part of my mysterious, on-going project concerning the 2000s in film, I did manage to check out Béla Tarr's mysterious and on-going Werckmeister Harmonies Saturday afternoon/evening.

I'll no doubt be writing something more detailed in the future -- for now, however, I'll have to be content with noting the screening as one of those raw, numinous events wherein a critic discovers a film that seems to have been designed for he or she to stumble upon unwittingly and appreciate as a catalyst of painfully lucid introspection. I had a similar, non-cinematic experience leafing through the belongings of some long dead relatives in my aunt's dilapidated Brooklyn basement years go; the artifacts themselves -- toy trains, crumpled and dog eared magazines, discarded musical instruments -- were unmistakably of a different, distant time, but as I gravely examined the mouldy time capsule of middle American detritus I realized that the behaviors responsible for assembling it were much like my own. The seething desire for escapism and individuality through arbitrary past times. The cluttered inattention to detail. The painstakingly perverse affection for inanimate objects (or in my case motion pictures) when live bodies esurient for contact were likely confusedly wandering upstairs.

And although this is the first film by Tarr I've seen, I can safely add his work to that brief list of things that can -- somehow, nearly shamanically -- lower my heart rate, even during one of my intensely frustrated, anxious episodes (which have grown more frequent than is comfortable since I started taking SSRIs). Also included are red wine; Keith Jarrett's "Bremen-Lausanne" album; "The Scape Goat" by William Holden Hunt; cognac; the melody, but not the lyrics, to Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," which I once successfully used to assuage a panic attack in high school; playing Bocce Ball with my nine year old neighbor Jocelyn; Liv Ullman's cheek bones; some of the better scenes from Singin' in the Rain; porter ale, particularly when accompanied by popcorn or steak cut french fries with dipping sauce; most films/plays/poetry/fiction that evoke the mysticism but not the didacticism of the Bible; the Brazilian pop album "Clube de Esquina"; driving over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge with a dachshund in the passenger seat. These are, in other words, a few of my favorite things. Writing is simply one way of performing taxidermy on them, stuffing them in an over-sized aluminum encasement, hitching them to the back of a truck, carting them around the countryside, and charging folks two bits a gander.








Yeah, it's longer...

2000s: Nueve reinas

How well would a Mamet plot fare without Mametspeak? Not as dismally as The Spanish Prisoner fared with the inimitable verbal bandying, it turns out. Nueve Reinas -- Nine Queens in English -- is a perfectly adequate crime film (until the ending's final torking of expectations -- but that's to be anticipated with a "con" story) with more than a few hints of nihilism beneath the surface sweetness; watching the best scenes, which naturally include fancy-footed negotiations, are a bit like sipping a cavalierly mixed margarita that you thought was a virgin Daiquiri and nearly choking on a brackish mouthful of alcohol. The problem is that neither margaritas nor confidence man flicks are much fun without high caliber fuel, so to speak, and Nueve Reinas' script seems to have confused Cuervo with Patron. The anonymous-sounding Marcos and Juan encounter one another while the latter attempts antique money-changing tricks on innocent cashier girls (and not, it would seem, for the thrill, but in order to earn money for his father's medical expenses); inexplicably, the more experienced Marcos is drawn to the pitiful newb and offers to show him the ropes for 24 hours while he pulls off a big time heist. It's a recycled set-up, and as with most crime stories the golden calf -- in this case the titular stamps, an extreme rarity -- is of less interest than the legerdemain methodology, but where Mamet, for example, passes off slight of hand pseudo-psychology as Jungian angst to fashion films that are, reflexively, legitimate cons themselves, writer/director Fabián Bielinsky is more interested in funky relationships between characters who too easily betray each other's trust. If the crackerjack partnership at the film's obsequiously candy-coated center weren't pedestrian enough (truth be told, however, actors Gastón Pauls and Ricardo Darín offer fine performances with their beautifully complementary facial hair alone), Bielinsky's also got elderly and easily-seduced grandmammies galore, as well as an odd subplot concerning family honor, an errant inheritance, and a rift between a nefarious brother and his upstanding, hospitality-industry-bound sister. If it's a drama, where are the high stakes that reveal these characters for the indelible phonies that they are? If it's a comedy...why aren't I laughing? Surely not the worst of the decade, but unlikely to make anyone's top lists.
Yeah, it's longer...