The Thrilling and Then Sad Trumpet

Sentiment, being nothing but a fleeting bubble in an effervescent heart, is often best articulated by art.

That’s all art is good for anyway, I’m sure. And one of the best feelings in the world is to see the people you love in your life succeed and be recognized for exactly what is inside of them, and yet made even sweeter when they’re extended the opportunities to unfold into something even bigger and true-er than they already are. So the only way I can put this is by telling you that inside, I’m doing the Snoopy dance.

It is so fucking cool that my girl Kartina is a special commentator on Roger Ebert’s new series, Ebert Presents at the Movies. And yo, you wanna know how cool she is? Fucking Richard Brody is like pointing at her and saying, yeah yeah they’re all pretty good but this one, this one is real fucking good. This is the one you’re keeping an eye on.

If there’s a last word on anything cool, it’s Richard Brody.

When I saw that big mention, I send her a message that says, “!!!!!!!!! RICHARD BRODY OMG,” followed by the addendum “O.” “M.” “F.” “G.” in four successive texts. She writes back to me, “Saturn is entering retrograde,” or something stupid. How annoying are artists?

And then I’m poking around the internet for a few minutes in Kartina and Ebert related news because that’s all I can stand on the internet anymore because it’s annoying and I’d rather obsess over anything that doesn’t exist exclusively in my head. I see this bullshit about Huck Finn and the swap of the word “nigger” for the word “slave.” The first thing I think is holy shit, the reality of this bunch of PTA hayseeds implicitly equating those two logos is so wildly detached from the facts of people’s lives that I can’t even remember why I am even still alive for a few moments. I forget how cartoonishly overfed and spoiled we are on the East Coast.

I don’t dare go West, I really don’t.

I love the pain it brings all these Stepford Wives when you wipe the vaseline off their lens. No, you’re right, it’s not romantic, all that history. Yes, it certainly does tense the jaw to hear the word “nigger,” doesn’t it. Even to read it. Surely to write it.

Good. It should. It should punch you in the fucking nose. You should taste for a sad half-a-second all the suffering that stands behind that word, you should be so goddamn lucky. Stop making everyone into a fucking victim all the time, like having watched the OJ trial has you knowing better than the people who live it. Fairness is a lie, nothing’s fair. All we have is kindness.

History is not a film and it’s not a book. You can’t take a scissor and some tape to a few frames and you can’t tear out the pages. I won’t get hysterical about it because the acrobatics Americans do to muzzle all discussion so it comes out the side of our mouths as one mediocre, sanitized non-opinion is by now an established tradition. I can think of few things uglier than the insistence to choose polite silence over empathy, which is what that is, that whole thing about “the n-word,” as if that might expunge the whole wide world of the whole idea and the responsibility we all owe to it.

But like I’ve said, I don’t get hysterical about much anymore, because so what, really. All I can do is make every effort to never, ever be so baboon-assed embarrassing. I’ll fail, but surely with more grace than these kissing fucking cousins.