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.

What is genius? What makes a person truly valuable and luminous in this world?

For me, genius is at heart a generosity. It is the mind that can process a whirlwind and pass it on to you in a whisper.

The basic cartoon of genius around here is probably Einstein, for instance. I’m looking at my copy of “The World As I See It” right now. Why him?

Here’s why.

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

I think anybody who has an attachment to nuance and the mechanisms of experience (I guess we can call that poetics) will always struggle with the real, quantifiable relevance of theory. Its efficacy in general. If you’re still reading this, 20 to 1 you’ve got a sermon in your head that’s been rehearsed no less than four zillion times–and goddamn, you and me both are flat tired of it. I think we can leave it at this: you’re right and you have the right to exist.

But don’t ever forget your humility. You are only part of a machine. A goddamn leviathan, maybe. But you’re nothing without every other tooth of every little pinion working every single gear.

I almost never see things from the same angle cinematically as Roger Ebert. But from the very moment I began to understand the profundity of the written word, I thought to myself, “That’s a man doing something important.” And, as I’ve been lucky enough to ripen in both the pre and post-internet world, there isn’t so much levity anymore in my sense that he’s the last Great American Journalist we’ve got; no pretense, big-hearted, and full of grace.

Also, while you watch please cast your mind to that scene in Miller’s Crossing.

Misty felt that life was a battle. You had to fight and think. You had to hack your way through life with your intelligence as a machete cutting down what obstacles you could. You were born knowing nothing: you had to fight for what you knew.

- from Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time

I’m amused that nobody seems at all to hear the voiceover commenting on manufactured vs. organic intrigue. I think that says it all about what passes for style these days, doesn’t it.

(via Beach Black)

The point is, I saw two popcorn movies this past weekend. Big end-of-summer jams, District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. The ham fist of that excruciatingly inept alien allegory knocked me into some hard existential mourning. I walked out around 20 minutes in, waited for my family in the lobby. It failed not only because it was obviously written by a mediocre mind, but it had an agenda. It had the pretense of an “indie” production when it was no such thing at all. It wanted to make some point, except the only point I could see was that the capacity for human cruelty is so heartbreaking and endemic, bring on the exterminators. That’s cute, the whole apartheid/xenophobia angle, but the fact remains that no aliens have yet come, and it is just us, mostly without grace, blindly righteous and blithely ruthless. What a bummer.

I prefer the universes Tarantino creates. His characters are not without brutality, but they have grace. And I do mean that in the theological sense. I think maybe the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Miss Alabama Whirley do a fine job of showing you what I mean. I could not count how many times I’ve watched this film. When I think of being in love, of beauty in the world in spite of…, I think of this right here:

I mean who, with any taste at all, does not share this thing?

Sellers was the king of self-erasure.  He would become entirely who he was directed to be for his audience.  When the audience was not sufficiently large enough–say, family, women, his children, friends–he would feel he was no one, nothing, someone with out self.  But that was what he wished was true, what he wanted to be true.  He wanted to be tragic, misunderstood, hollow so when you tried to aim your finger at the monster, there was nothing.  Just shadow.

He hated himself.  So he inhabited others. 

He said, “Me?  There is no me.”  Here, you can see him confess this himself.  To Kermit the Frog.  In a Viking’s helmet.  It’s the truest thing he’s ever imagined so he tells it to a puppet.  Even the puppet wants to change the subject.

Follow that public confession with Richard the III’s soliloquy accompanied by musically tuned chickens, however, and top it off with “Shave and a Haircut”? Well that is just genius.  The liminal gray space between comedy and tragedy, the truest of the true. So there’s a conflict of interest here, isn’t there? “It’s all part of life’s rich pageantry,” isn’t it?

I wonder how much of it is, about the self.  When he was swaying between lucid and senile moments just before his death, he often would confuse himself with Chase.  He fought to make that film, he loved it fiercely, it was like his epitaph.  One whose name was writ in water, yet again.