Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
First off this week, I’d like to plug a recent piece of my writing. I was asked by Sight & Sound magazine to contribute a column about the forthcoming edition of its decennial Greatest Films of All Time poll, the results of which will be released later this year. Here is said column, which, heads up, features mention of 90s Britpoppers Kula Shaker, and is also published in the June 2022 print issue. Oddly enough, my first ever published piece for Sight & Sound—a “Lost and Found” column about Wendell B. Harris’s stunningly sui generis conman caper Chameleon Street (1989)—was supposed to run in the 2012 Greatest Films of All Time issue, but got bumped to the next issue for lack of space. Happily, Chameleon Street has now been “found”—restored and re-released by the great folks at Arbelos Films, and streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel.
Two quick recs this week. The first is the film Black Safari, first broadcast on BBC Two in 1972. It stars the recently-knighted filmmaker and artist Horace Ové, and, in the accurate words of Ové’s son Zak, also an artist, is “a spoof documentary in which a group of Black people ‘set sail’ through the UK to discover ‘darkest Lancashire’ and find the heart of the UK. It parodies a longstanding British colonial attitude of positing Black and African as ‘Other’, and the ‘white explorer’ who ‘discovers’ and makes that discovery official with an Occidental label.” I first saw this funny, sharp, and still revolutionary-feeling film at the British Film Institute many years ago as part of a day devoted to celebrating Ové’s work, and it’s really stuck around in my head. It comes in at a tight 57 minutes, and you can watch it here for free.
This week’s second quick rec is a book I return to frequently: “The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing 2002—2018”, a collection of writings by the film critic A.S. Hamrah. It’s everything criticism should be: idiosyncratic, informed, thoughtful, funny, occasionally (extremely) vicious, and untethered to contemporaneous currents of consensus. These days, Hamrah is the film critic for The Baffler, and I’m always happy when I see a new column of his pop up. I think he was especially great on Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent Licorice Pizza, a dark, prickly, and exceptionally strange film that was sold as a sunny comedy:
“…everything is backwards and wrong in Licorice Pizza, as it was in the 1970s when compared to now: children raise themselves, adults date teens, teens start businesses, restaurants alienate customers, and getting work is an audition for something else, with hidden, sexual motivations barely under the surface erupting as stupid jokes. It is impossible to know whether things are based on skill or luck as the world slips backwards into the future. Everything is temporary and can be snuffed in an instant, like the waterbed sales that reverse supply and demand overnight.” [full article]
And before I go, I thought I’d continue a putative tradition of dropping some Italo Disco bangers into this letter. Here’s the thudding, perfectly nonsensical “Geil” by Bruce & Bongo (1986):
Until next time!
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always love the Italo Disco bangers!