Thursday, March 02, 2006

Trying to Reign the Horsley?

Well I was sworn off further attempt to propagate myself into the world but a fella still needs to pay the rent, so a few weeks back I sent out some of the best material from Dogville Vs Hollywood to various publications, New Yorker on down. I sent out maybe a dozen emails with sample, and received only one response. From a still-forming new US magazine which I won’t name, I received the following:

Mr. Horsley,

I apologize for the length of time it has taken me to get back to you. I have read your piece(s). Here is my candid opinion, but do not be precipitous, I also have an offer for you.

Despite a rather loathsome opening ("chastity" and "whores" indeed, sir!), the body of the work demonstrated a nice grasp of film dialectics, cinematic history, all expressed in perfectly nice prose. Yet I found the whole to be a chore to read. Perhaps it was my time in graduate school with some rather cutting-edge seminars and tutelage under Timothy Murray (Like a Film, Drama Trauma, Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought) but your piece has already been done to death. The corruption, in short, sir, begins at home.
Yet you are good at what you are doing.
My dilemma: how to use you while reining in your tendency to rant and excess.
My offer: send me a review of any current film (okay, within a year of its release). No Hitchcock or Kubrick or Coppola - unless its Sophia (ugh!). I want to see how you perform and how you engage your considerable talent and logic in a single, uh, stall and/or track (its that horse metaphor, you understand).
I want a full expository, context, relation of this film to ones similar (i.e. in the same genre/venue). Do NOT pontificate. The gate is open, Mr. Horsley, care to show me how you run?


End quote.

Needless to say i did not rise to this challenge but simply declined to be reigned (tho the idea of bucking this arrogant rider and send him flying certainly had its appeal!).

My wife thought the email so amusing she suggested i post it here, however, and so i have done