Top 5 Steve Rogenbuck Pieces

Literature and the Internet are 2015's star-crossed lovers.

For all intents and purposes, everyone who writes should be pumping out genre-bending, multi-media pieces. It's just where writing needs to go if it expects to survive.

The alt lit movement was a brief explosion of this idea but, unfortunately, very few of its artists really took off.

An exception to this rule is Steve Roggenbuck. Using collage-based Youtube videos, self-publishing, and colorful, creative misspelling, Roggenbuck created a wildly energetic body of work that, though initially confusing, is equally infectious.

These are my five favorite Steve Roggenbuck pieces, in no particular order.


5. 

Roggenbuck's work is normally uncompromisingly joyous, so when I first heard the slightly melancholy and very lovesick tone of "Somewhere in the bottom of the rain" I was quite surprised.

This piece is very direct for Roggenbuck, and all the more emotionally powerful as a result. 

4. 

Witty observations on personal branding, responsibility, self-worth and the power of effort buried in Roggenbuck's normal stream-of-consciousness collages. A slow-burn, but well worth the slow pace.

3. 

Another one of Roggenbucks's more downbeat pieces. He highlights a certain romantic relationship that comforts him and the impermanence of life, but most of this video is spent with streams of nonsensical words and stories about the daily minutia of life. The reasoning for this is rather brilliant.

By pairing up nonsense and descriptions of the ultra-mundane with very dramatic, constantly building ambient music, Roggenbuck is subtly bringing home his point that the little moments in life are just as beautiful as the not-so-little ones.

2.

Roggenbuck at his most frantic, optimistic, and thoughtful.

"One solution, humans with wings." Gorgeous.

1. 

His magnum opus. It was only right to include it. The essence of his work boiled down to five minutes.

Buffalo '66

Written, directed, starring, and scored by Vincent Gallo, Buffalo '66 tells the story of Billy, a volatile man-child you cannot communicate his real feelings, and may not have any at all. The film has the same problem, but has such an intense no-wave energy that it sucks you in anyway. Considering the plot revolves around kidnapping and stockholm syndrome, this emotional dichotomy is nearly fitting.

The film opens with Billy, portrayed by the exhausted-looking, animalistic Vincent Gallo, getting out of jail. He needs to take a piss and spends the next few minutes wondering around a dilapidated, grey-scale New York looking for a place.

He ends up in an aerobics class. He borrows a quarter from Layla, played with sensuality and studiousness by Christina Ricci, and calls his mother to lie about his good fortune. It's the first hint we get towards Billy's complicated relationship with his parents. 

He then kidnaps Layla and forces her to masquerade as his wife.

They go to Billy's parents house, where the comedy, and the surreality, kicks in. Billy's parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara) are obsessive Buffalo Bill fans who know next to nothing about their son. His mother even admits that she wishes she never had Billy because giving girth made her miss the '66 superbowl. Billy's dad takes Layla into another room to "sing" for her. Instead he lip-syncs to a record, in a surreal scene that reminded me a lot of the more out-of-your-head moments from Trainspotting. 

 We learn that Billy had bet $10,000 on the Bills to win the super bowl, lost, and had to go to jail in order to appease his creditor, played by Mickey Rourke in one pugilistic, vicious scene.

Meanwhile, Layla does a pretty good job of winning over the parents. Billy takes her to a bowling alley. It turns out Billy is good at bowling, probably the only thing he's good at and the only thing that makes him visibly content. The lights go down, and Layla does a little surreal slow tap. It's sweet and a little bit creepy. Billy considers killing the guy who ruined his $10,000 bet, but decides to entertain the idea of Layla becoming his girlfriend. The movie ends on that hopeful note.

Layla is a standout character. Very little information is given about her life and her feelings are never defined. She could actually being into Vincent, or she could just be trying to avoid his wrath. It adds another level of uncomfortable to a film already wrought with it.

Billy is just as interesting, a low-rent Travis Bickle in ill-fitting clothes that doesn't like to be touched but wants to be held.

This movie is vague, cold, and surreal, but I didn't want it to end.

Welcome!

Hello, there. My name is Josh and I write for a living.

I'll keep this intro very simple. I love film and I love literature and I'd like to review them.

This is a companion piece to my other blog, Kvlt of Personality.