MUBI and other news...

I'm proud to announce that I've started writing for MUBI's The Daily Notebook, which I've always considered to be one of most insightful sources of film criticism on the web. To write alongside such a forward-thinking team of critics and other writers including Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, David Cairns, Ryland Walker Knight, Adrian Curry, Adam Cook, Fernando F. Croce, Michael Sicinski, and of course editor Daniel Kasman (who I met this past May in Cannes and who assisted me in developing the erratic thoughts that have led to my first post), among many others, as well as for a website that has spearheaded a new and fruitful approach to online film-viewing, is a massive honor.

My first piece, on a certain visual trend in Michael Mann's filmmaking in recent years that involves putting emphasis on the ear, is live now, and you can read it here. It's a continuation of a column called The Details that was inaugurated by Kasman himself in 2009, and my work for the website, as far as I can tell for the near future, will mostly be in this arena. The column is simple and self-explanatory; as Danny puts it, "a column that catches the small within the big, focusing on the individual elements that make cinema so expressive." It will be a nice opportunity to diverge from the more macro focus of this blog and a chance to indulge in my formalist side. Writing for MUBI will obviously take away from my time writing here, but I still plan to post several times a month, in addition to linking to the articles that are published there.

In other news, I am moving to Los Angeles for a three-and-a-half month semester, which for all intents and purposes is totally irrelevant to all of you, other than for the fact that it may both put a strain on my mental capacity (I already feel allergic to all this traffic and beautiful weather, though there's an undeniable charm to California as well) and influence the kind of writing I do and the films I watch (three examples that have sprung up already: 1) yesterday I saw a man in a cowboy hat disappear behind a very Bottle Rocket-esque motel building while appearing to look at me, making me feel for a second that I was in a Lynch movie; 2) driving through the dusty, barren hills of wine country had me thinking a lot about Kiarostami; and 3) as I write, I'm in a Santa Barbara hotel room where one member of the considerable Mexican population in California is cleaning my room, giving me the unsettling feeling that I'm one of the targets of Lucrecia Martel). Alas, before I know it I'll be back in Boston and out of this strange dream world. Hell, maybe writing for MUBI's not even real.