And, as he lay, he looked across the hall to the row of women; scarcely observing them, his eyes passed from one rapt face to another, until in the lowest place but highest by a handbreadth, Helena raised hers to meet them. They gazed at one another, unknowing, seperate, then running together like drops of condensed steam on the ewer, pausing, bulging one against the other, until, suddenly, they were one and ran down in a single minute cascade. Helena trotted on and Constantius bestrode her in triumph.

Constantius had done something unprecedented and unpremeditated, something for which his talents were ill suited; he had fallen in love.

- from Evelyn Waugh’s Helena

I have never quite got over the fact that “acting” for a man — and I’m afraid still do you think, that a really, proper man — is sissified and vaguely ridiculous. I will do this film with Ponti and Loren out of sheer cupidity–desire for money. I will unquestionably do many more. But my heart, unlike yours, is not in it. The French have a word for it, what I am and it is called “manque,” meaning a failure of desire.

…I am everything “manque.” An actor manque, a philosopher manque, a writer manque, and consequently an intolerable bore. (Not manque, I’m afraid.)

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.

If the art you make is not in this tradition, don’t you some day have to ask yourself why you bother with it at all?

(My grandmother will always introduce her best insults with, “I’ve got news for you,” which is what I want to write right now, but frankly it just does not pack the same punch on a screen.)

Anyway, I think I was going to say something about the only way to not be depressed is to bully yourself into gratitude for like, everything, at every second, in every direction, for all of time. I guess the summary is enough. I also wish the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal” did not embarrass me even when I am alone, tucked away in an apartment with just a dog and a cat, both of whom do not care to read much.

My favorite radio show host, for example, is always going wild over the fact of us walking on the moon. And when he does, I too am like holy fuck. We have walked on the fucking moon. There is a moon. That some one has walked on. There is gravity. Gravity is such a mindfuck. There are tides that have something to do with this moon that we’ve walked on by some mechanism I can’t quite bother to understand. The ocean is outer space. Et al, on and on.

Alternately:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock, and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their fall import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all. It will take mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And, when he casts about for it, he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential—there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

- from Mark Twain’s The Death of My Wife

I know [because] that was the case with me.

Well then case closed, I guess.

Not to have a ‘Mac Attack, but like Lindsay was saying, “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” Maybe it’s the legacy of “the personal is political,” but it’s silly to pin this endemic human failure, a deep stupidity that was never born and will never die, on the moment it was finally turned into a war cry. That wasn’t really what had been meant anyway, that’s just what it would eventually unfold itself to be. It makes everything boring. It is soooooo boring. It is a void of curiosity. It is so fucking boring.

(Seriously. This man made me, and he has now too broken me.)

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.

Somehow related in my own head, an elegant and sinuous reading of the color black by Paul Le Farge in Cabinet, well expressed by a Robert Flud illustration which very much took me. Below, the 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser).

There have been a couple brief moments where I have tried to make music with other people whom I admired.  They were always incredible both technically and intellectually and I was always crippled by my own embarrassingly inept attempts to contribute.  Unfortunately, I may have a mush mouth, but I could never manage keep it shut despite knowing nothing more about music than that I like it; there were two songs I loved so much, I got real ornery about covering them no matter how ill the tribute turned out.  The songs were so excruciatingly true and raw, even the most unmusical asshole couldn’t mangle them too bad.  One was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God,’ and the other was a Townes Van Zandt track.

I just now read somewhere it was his favorite, which I cannot help but feel like a silly validated little goose.

But like I was saying, Townes.  It’s been almost 4 years since I could even take in one of his records the whole way through.  It makes me laugh at myself and the way I can so neurotically squirrel away anything I write or make out of shame when the only thing that’s ever mattered to me in art is truth, earnestness, urgency, compulsion–in a way, a real ugliness.

I feel no connection to slick or neat or hidden or any deliberate sensibility of control.  Ugliness, being the antithesis of what’s exalted, has always felt to me too grossly human for glamour. For that reason, this song feels like a knife in the gut.