Texts of Antiquity XI: "Delectation of the Über-Muse" (Creative Loafing, Atlanta, 1998)

Delectation of the Über-Muse: Blast Off's skewed, long-running reign as Atlanta's premiere video salon continues.

As you shall soon see, I borrowed a wee bit from the old Antenna intro. Sue me. I wrote the damned thing; who better to heist it than yours ungwodly? Lest you pout, 'twas for a great goddamned cause. Sam Patton was the best man at my 1993 wedding and remains one of the coolest mofos I've ever known. We're talking world-class cool, parsecs beyond the likes of (insert name of avant-rock icon/famous indie dude/undie noise doofus you know I know). His dearly departed vid boutique needed a bit of jizzness in '98, so I put stump to keypad. Creative Loafing ran the piece as their cover story (if mem swerves) in May, 1998.

Blast Off closed its gull-wing doors for good in 2001... VHS was on the wane, and Sam grew weary of the grind. His contribution was enormous, and his shop will forever be missed.

This is the complete, unexpurgated version of the text. CL ran with their own in-house edit, lopping a hundred words off the original submission...

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Blast Off Video has the best damn eye-candy in Atlanta. There is no competition; never has been. If hapless main contender Movies Worth Seeing is the Fred MacMurray of the Metro-area vid racket (imagine My Three Sons' torpid Steve Douglas shepherding a chino-clad Highland Avenue businessfrau into a Jill Clayburg festival - that's the vibe, in toto), then Blast Off is George Sanders (after 62 brandy sours), clasping Diana Dors' garter snaps about the folds of his frenum.

It has been suggested that wickedly risible proprietor Sam Patton is the reincarnated shade of Sanders, albeit with a smidge less drollery, and a slightly smarter knot in his ascot. And the physical similarity? Couldn't begin to tell 'em apart.

Whether greeting each Little Five Points conspiracy dullard and post-rock panhandler with withering invective, offering urbane, sagacious exploitation enthusiasts the skinny on no-budget auteur Will Zens, or fashioning peignoirs out of Norwegian Phantom of Soho one-sheets for the distaff inner circle, Mr. Patton has done more for the advancement of film in Atlanta than IMAGE, Quentin Tarantino's nervous coke twitch, and all the art-plex closets in North Fulton combined. Nonetheless, there is dissent.

"Certain customers come in and are openly hostile," says Patton. "Poppin' Fresh suburbanites... it irks them that we exist."

Makes you wonder. After a rough week of cotton-chopping and Movado/Raymond Weil comparison shopping with Atlanta's least and dimmest, there's nothing quite like worming one's way through a woeful, mottled narrative. Blast Off slogs through the septic vid sump for all of us, only purchasing those films deemed capable of reversing life-affirming patterns. No Spielbergian cornpone. No Tom Hanks idolatry. No copies of Liar Liar. You should be worshipping, but don't get there too early - Mr. Patton keeps "proper" hours.

Most first-time visitors walk into Blast Off's absurdly overstuffed pit area and jaws hit floors, scoliosis victims pop-lock, and saline superstructures of off-duty ecdysiasts bob in amazement... so many tease-o-matic nudie wallows, so few Julia Roberts misfires!

"We represent a permanent moratorium on middle class smugness and those crappy little Che Guevara cigarette lighters," Patton avers. "The ultimate satisfaction lies in renting Escapades in Mexico to Patsy Kensit cultists. You get some shots of drooling, toothless stevedors. One set - a shack. Stock footage cutaways of a jai alai tournament. Then back to the shack. Perfection."

Blast Off is bug-eyed with hypercritical savvy, possessed of a preternatural fondness for the stultifying effluvia which flushed through Southern grindhouses and drive-ins during the pre-vid 1960s. That knack for superior cogitation also informs Mr. Patton's appetites for contemporary cinema. He's not stuck in the past, but his tongue laps deep into history's honeyed run-off groove.

Horny for a fuckload of deviant genres? Fill up the ice bucket, grab a couple dozen dental dams, and dive feet first into the peroxide!

If you thought A Thousand Acres was an apostasy, well, Lurleen, you ain't nodded off to nuthin'! Dig real hillbilly operas and turgid country music cavalcades? Slop down the original kid-poon classic, 1940's ultra-depressing Child Bride (sorry officer, nothing explicit, only implied degradation!), or inbred director Bethel Buckalew's perplexingly seedy Country Cuzzins. Prefer ultra-low-grade Euro detective trash? Hey, me too! Suck down The Incredible Paris Incident or Secret File 614, a must-must-MUST see! Does your lack of good taste run toward deliriously moronic stock car dramas? Rev, don't hobble, and get under the hood of Speed Lovers or Fireball Jungle, a lamentable 1968 NASCAR-themed hate-spewer helmed by Blast Off favorite Joseph Mawra, and starring (in his final and, happily for us, least distinguished role) a pie-eyed Lon Chaney, Jr., "repressing his homosexuality," Patton opines, "by drinking himself to death with Vat 69 and Vitalis."

Time your ab flexes to the onset of incongruous musical inserts in Italian gym-buddy pec epics and Mexican monster-wrestling mat fiestas? Crunch to Rene Cardona's muy odd-ass 1968 suplex-stuffer Santo en el Tesoro del Dracula. Need a leprous dose of the world's most reviled (post-PC) genre? Blast Off has a very healthy selection of miscegenation-fear potboilers. That peculiar Jim Crow-era sub-cinematic species expired around the time of the implementation of the Voting Rights Act, but for a taste of the truly transgressive, rent nobrow auteur Larry Buchannan's meta-lurid High Yellow, I Spit on Your Grave (not the late '70s Camille Keaton rape/castration 42nd Street hit, but the 1962 French-filmed account of an interracial romance that was sold to segregation-happy Southern whites by sly Northern promo hucksters), or the astonishing, Klan-financed Anarchy USA. Then burn your Dickey Betts albums, and never step foot into a Moovies again.

"Hellfire! This shit SUCKS!," you counter. "What about art, production values, Meg Ryan, box office statistics, Oscar nominations?" Mr. Sammy (a handle only the most salubrious of Blast Off's parolees are allowed to employ) has heard his share of splenetic criticism: "We're a
magnet for the upper stratum of the beautiful people, that's true. We get the post-ironics, the swingin' four-layer Optifoam sockliner crowd from Emory, the odd gaggle of worsted wool GSU gals, and more than our share of Buckhead cabalists in their Fastex buckles and traditional
fisherman's stitch patterns. Unfortunately, we also seem to attract every independent bomb maker in the state."

"As for the disenchanted," Patton continues, "all they have to do is shut their lids and rhumba. Bad video stores, like unhappy video mavens, are everywhere. I'll be happy to refer any and all Dave Matthews Band fans to Blockbuster. I've heard that they stock a variety of rib-tickling family favorites!"

Anyone who's stumbled into Blast Off's charming Euclid Avenue alleyway entrance, blanched at the adjoining skate shop's appalling mural, and opened the door (the best-festooned in the city) into the climate-controlled foyer, can attest that... well, there's crap all over the counter, and hepcats and adenoidal cuties will likely be sprawled from the film noir stall up front to the partition of "big bust" compilations in the rear. It's a Floyd's Barber Shop for the "I Hate
My Half-Assed Generation" Generation.

And you're always invited to ask the inevitable dumb questions about Gregg Araki, and then rent some goddamn movies. Maybe Bill Grefe's dumbfounding 1974 William Shatner vehicle Impulse (perhaps the finest film yet produced which stars a "Star Trek" captain as a child-molesting serial murderer). Or Get Down Grand Funk, the re-titled vid version of Miami grade-Z legend Barry Mahon's 1970 docu-oddity Mondo Daytona. Or the just-arrived Jess Franco brain-boggler Vampyros Lesbos. Just leave those special order requests for Brenda Vacarro titles at home, and bring your kneepads - you've got some genuflecting to do.

-Tom Smith

Comments

Anonymous said…
wondering if you could get me in touch with Sam ?

this is me:
www.littlesebastien.com/sp.html



Sebastien

babyseb at gmail dot com
Tom said…
Hi Sebastien,

Sam's fallen off the radar in the last few years, much to my regret. I'll stir up the cauldron and see if my fellow former spooks can locate him.

Best,

TS

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