wm. paul cont'd

And you speak of "the agent" as someone with sensibility, someone who really KNOWS something. The agent is the default person, the bottom feeder who cares for nothing, the made-up man

Aging

"The years have been kind to you."
"Maybe. But I feel as though they've been talking behind my back."

manipulating people

I can't still give myself a satisfactory answer to the idea of
manipulating an audience, and you ask why I've made no progress...

wm. paul

everything about him was mirth and a perfect understanding of how
contingent he was. I wished I could be so laid back. I had a debt to
seriousness, and still do. A certain flailing exposure to
everything, to apprehending (maybe controlling) it all. whereas he
has seen this as a job o' work. not much troubled if screenplays
never get made or get mangled, or unphased, rather. smart, sane
grounded way to live, has closure, makes sense. my way is a
bloodletting of sorts, and a huge turgid floe of stasis to show for
it. if I ventured into that land of mirth I would decry it as the
worst cynicism. I can barely refrain from judging him, but awareness
of envy gives the lie to that...

Rehearsals

Film about people gearing up for various events of different kinds.
Maybe a la ronde, connecting each one. actor, business mtg, break-up
etc.

Beggars

film about how philanthropy has been built into our system as the
only way to mollify or correct wrongs. The best and brightest become
beggars.

Hart fed me

cereal at the SPAM party at Meghan Boody's tonight. He was very
insistent on putting the puffed kamut and corn flakes right in my
mouth. First kind of interaction like this. He was also having a ball.

SYA 25th

Very moved by this reunion, though in the days following this took
the form of a deep sadness. These people were the repository of so
many memories that I can't share with anyone else, and so little
effort was made, or felt it seemed, on the part of others, to
recapture them. This probably has mostly to do with the fact that
most people have moved on, are preoccupied with their present, and
I'm a little exposed at present (as usual) out of the lack of updraft
to my current life, as I hope for more projects and muscle my way
back in a script I left nearly 2 years ago. It was also, I guess,
that few among them were my close friends, so I guess their need to
talk to me was that much less. Woody also came across not so much as
the principled, if a bit stiff, poetic icon that I remembered him to
be, and more of a fundraiser, which is after all the biggest reason
he would have been attending, the value of memories notwithstanding.
It's weird, but this general sadness I felt toward the group is
probably some ingenious displacement of the sadness I actually feel
toward myself for not having achieved. It's true that I haven't
compromised a lot and have been stubbornly staking my own way, but
that way isn't so far doing much for the world and in fact is largely
hypocritical as I struggle to scrape out a living off the good works
of others. I don't enjoy the esteem of anyone, have no recognition
for having done anything in particular, and in no way enjoy the
pyramidal profits of advancement in a chosen career. What I have
done at least is found love and started a family, without which I
know none of the rest would matter. Still I wish so much to have
connected more. I am aware that this big swoon of nostalgia rests on
something very sentimentalized--my view of the year has enormous
lacunae, the whole crisis of possible paternity (so ridiculous now in
retrospect) that worried me almost to paralysis for a good several
months has no real place in it. Or perhaps it's that second release
of independence that followed that alarm being passed that makes it
even more poignant. For the record, it was at Chuck's home.
Attending were Suzie, Eric, Barry, Giles, Chip & Kristin (now
married), Chris, Nat & Woody.

Book: To the Finland Station

I was captivated by this book as, I guess, an antidote for the sorry
state of the world. So much of the history of the idealism behind
revolutionary movements has been conveniently overlooked in light of
the ghastly history of the Soviet Empire. The equally ghastly
conditions spawned by capitalistic empires run amok have been
eclipsed by it. It may be that the urge to revolution is just a
component of the human spirit, maybe even an infantile one (in the
sense that it is not all providential and no less morally ruthless in
practice than the order it challenges), yet it was undeniably also a
response to unchecked power and the history of suffering that it
caused. The fervor, the ascetism, the sense of mission all of course
bring to mind the profile of the terrorist in today's world, and this
is perhaps why the goal of governments has been to rob terrorist
groups of even their claim to ideologies (the war is against
terrorism, not even something remotely salvageable, like "the
communist menace" of 50 years ago.) Any opposition is "terrorist",
the raison d'etre of such groups being death, chaos and ruination.
There is some mention made of radical Islam of course behind much of
it, but a pointed avoidance underlies it of ever trying to enter into
the mindset of the terrorist. This is a book about such a mindset,
only it provides a good look at the conditions of 19th century
capitalism that gave rise revolutionaries like Babeuf, Saint-Simon,
LaSalle, Marx & Engels, Bakunin and utopians like Owen and Fourier--
and the way rebellious thought converged into disciplined thought,
and that into the course of action eventually adopted by Lenin and
Trotsky. Written in 1938, and prefaced with something of an apology
by Wilson in light of the Stalinist nightmare, it nonetheless does
credit to the hopes and dreams of those who would not allow their
lives to bear passive witness to the decadence of a world order that
was destroying human dignity. Is there a similar way out of the
predicament today? It brings to mind the success too of early
Christianity in the late Roman Empire; as it offered a pure and
ascetic moral alternative to the abuses reigning over the human
population, co-opted though it was to be by those very forces.