love others, but no longer hide behind them

the lesson of 2010.

the artist longing for the good work of doctors

the artist sees how valuable to be giving and helping people. this is what the artist aspires to. the artist who succeeds is that doctor. the artist who falls short is a miserly businessman hording the spirit of others for himself. it is dangerous path where only success is laudable, and anything less an inexcusable waste of your life.

the principle of always listening to new music

or else you fall back into the past, which is a marsh of dissatisfaction bored and greedy for your company
likewise new friends

the past should be like a glass of wine taken at the right time
not a bottle
or litter of bottles

nation of whores

i think of actors in movies pandering
so happy to have snagged a commercial
of young people volunteering to fight
everyone whoring
and yet whoring isn't so bad, intrinsically, it's the wrong metaphor,
because sex for whatever reason, if mutually enjoyed, is just emblematic
of engaging the world, of being social, of living exuberant life.
but literal need, to be driven to do something you hate
so profoundly that you'd appall your soul to recognize it
so you cauterize your soul, what soul you had
and numbingly take the slap or ass-tear
and beam at the cash reward as the only good
it's the direness of the world I cringe at
the wholesale wreckage that calls itself an economy
owners and self-immolaters finding it good enough.

i think of Lou Reed condemning George H for depicting
the Velvet Underground as a bunch of ghouls in FG
and Reed calling George a "whore"

and I wonder when that metaphor turned negative for Reed
or was he indeed the phoney and grey dead poser
that George implied

documentary about wailing about

the one dead whom you abused while alive. so much easier to live with dead people. reminds me of EP mourning the wife he assisted in destroying, and countless others

insight into the afterlife?

I challenged, crazily, when George died, ok, communicate with me, show me a sign, now that you understand me, understand everything. and of course nothing. and yet the crazy thought does enter my head that if there is any afterlife, any true metaphysics to this, that it can only be expressed through the only vehicle capable of expression, in other words, myself. The thoughts that enter there, the thoughts expressed, are these the communication. The hint of thought, coming as they do, out of nowhere, a thought I couldn't have summoned otherwise. Maybe this is truly it. A eureka moment came when I was sitting on the toilet and contemplating a revelation of envy, a confession of this loss, that I lowered my hand down and splinter drove deep under my fingernail drawing blood (from the toilet seat!). That's when the idea hit me with full force, that of course it's only what you yourself do that is the conduit of expression from someone in the afterlife. It's what you yourself do. And that, to me, does have meaning.

all his crowded thoughts

converged on the frenetic theme of self-loathing. how many different ways could you say "I've got a contribution to make, look here!" followed soon after by "I'm an undeserving no-count no-talent bastard"

always, when you criticize

ask yourself whether the criticism would just as easily (or better) apply to you. for the instinct for it after all didn't come out nowhere..

what's clear

is that we didn't have this warm and fuzzy time together in college. so let's just say we're a group of middle-aged sorrowful people wanting to reconnect on some basis, and let's make that basis our need right now, not some fiction

Spavined

Interesting words
The high water mark
Of opportunities to use them
Has it come
If so why waste
The time to look them up.

our narcissism as a country

having do with our, in the past century, have absolutely NO frame of reference. everything we have done has been VIRGIN TERRITORY. Brand new industrial technical society. It's not like we can look back 2000 years and say yes, this was done before, and we're just peaking between troughs. But of course it HAS all been done before, essentially, it's just that on the surface, with all our jazzed up stuff, it looks different.

fame as infection

self-regard wrested from self.
of course the alternative is isolation. think of conrad's nostromo--horrible didacticism but that image of losing sense of self adrift under merciless sun

art =

need
be crushed by the need, enfeebled, flee it, bury it
or meet it

chapters in film - bildungcinema

1. shyness
2. cowardice
3. greed
4. lust
5. dysfunction of the above
6. the city
7. the dogooders
8. the family
9. the country
10. the career

Movie: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

kept you strung along, but it had that kind of static mechanized quality of much of late Allen (last 20 years...) where the characters were ultimately looked down upon, judged on their folly, and simply instrumental to a worked out plot. characters never overflow it, control it. that said, it was very entertaining. Vicki Christina had something extra that's been lacking in many lately, including this one. Anthony Hopkins such a grotesque, maybe too close to home. it's funny, but I think of Mike Leigh and I think of Woody Allen, and while there's this huge level of caricature often in Leigh, he sears right through to something elemental so often. plot doesn't take the upperhand as much--more like Altman that way. all about behavior...though so much more discipline than Altman.

film capturing the moments of retirement

of various people. the weightlessness. the drear to follow

of certain friends on facebook

i say to myself, come on, they can't be that narcissistic, they can't they can't. not even shy about it, not even trying to ironize it, cloak it, they can't not disguise it...oh yes they can..

professional appreciator

laudable as that would be, cannot be one

Musical Chairs

film about midlife crisis, feeling an imposter, never installed, never fitting in

Loudmouths doc

Auctioneers, dance callers

Being right

The last refuge of the powerless.

The virtue of being right vs. actually achieving the goal. Distrust of manipulators...

how did one get from here to here

soft sensitive caring precious
to
knee-jerk carping alarmist hording avaricious

nyc as sentimentalization of money

self-congratulatory, emotionally extorting, hypocritical gloss-over brutality
creator of "despite the odds" stories of those who clawed through the bloody flotsam
triumph of the human spirit story
apologist for this seething mess

millionaire who intentionally falls for every scam

internet or otherwise in an effort to down in flames

film about a guy who loves gold

during the gold rush. really loves it, appreciates it. can't bring himself to sell it for any amount of money

bothered by mediocre critics and pretenders

but the thing that especially irks is that they cannot be circumvented by the energy and intelligence you have at hand. they are moving targets and to triumph over them you would have to simplify them, as any human being would have to be simplified. it would take more than the disposable energy you have, unless you made your project to combat mediocrity, and is that how you want your light spent? or spent creatively...

a film about certainty, IMpenitance, NO regrets

going to one's grave unrepentant & RIGHT! Unlike McNamara, who grieved his mistakes and the lives they cost, Donald Rumsfeld is driven like a rivet in rectitude and will die that way. because in his personal code that is the most important thing. this is the zeitgeist. the last refuge from powerlessness is in being RIGHT

the reason why movies fail to move

I think has something to do with the McKee-ization of cinema.
Everyone's got the formula down pat, the herky jerky elaboration of plot
So that the elements are an afterthought, plug them in
Kind of like how Henry Kissinger viewed people, or populations, whole countries
as elements of realpolitik to be manipulated
the currency must be a given, gotten out of the way
But it's cinema that's being done away with by this calculation
Things learned, discovered about human beings on the screen
Felt.
This I know and feel to be true, and hold out hope of expressing
The field is wide open
The soul hasn't been ministered to for ages and languishes.

movie: guy gets fired

only job listing is motivational speaker
can't do it
someone gives him a pill
transforms his personality
does it

the helplessness of liberals facing the tea party evil unfolding

has to do with some feeling that it's their fault. they took their eye off the ball during the Clinton years and let this unaddressed pain and its ignorant hateful expression metastasize.

Polanski's The Ghost Writer

In an interview he called it a film for adults. I think it was fun and suspenseful, a Hitchcock type of strength, but not for adults, not in the real sense. It's not a real film, just an entertainment, like Scorsese's Shutter Island was--in fact, they share a lot -- must be zeitgeist. Great filmmaking of course, just a stunt as entertainment, by which I mean stunted.

a celebrity

whose children have become screwed up porn stars just wants to lose himself in provincial Chekhovian world where nobody knows he's famous

fuckups

the comforting thought sometimes that others are too

forces militating against art in the world

are like thugs keeping doctors from ministering to patients in critical condition

Being Right, the last refuge

as the world burns, be unrepentant, never a misstep, never having been wrong. a kind of coccooning. everyone does it, from enviros to tea partiers. anodizing ourselves. anodyne more like.

Hyena Rule

Don't a be a hyena. A snickering wound licking scampering opinionator.

art as triumph over sex

finds a new relation that doesn't exclude it, but relegates it, calms it, says yes but there is more

the feeling of meeting an artist

and thinking you found a real person for a change. that must be the thing. something rocklike answerable to onesself.

Climate change makes everything you see around you "history"

reflections on a.pig

I watched the command performance of sweating and lyricisim and I thought, we were made to destroy ourselves. I mean people, humanity. & that that's what jazz eroticizes and rock makes explicit. We humans are a species designed to self-destruct. The self-possession of this middle-aged lawyer sweating his heart out with grim gravity of devotion toward "what moved me then" and "what I felt about the world then and still feel now, regardless of what you all think, of how I look, of whatever the hell is happening out there. I solemnize my passion this way. This is a statement about my hermetic detachment specifically designed to inure against ANYTHING, ANY kind of CATACLYSM befalling the world." The narcissist swan song trumps all. And I think this is the overriding mechanism at work in the mass denial taking place at the actual destruction of the world environment taking place now. It's not that people are ignoring it. It's just that it doesn't rank with the realm of the personal, which on some level knows and pays tribute to the fact that we are a kamikaze species. (I'm of course not speaking of everyone, but of enough people that the attitude determines the outcome.)

Smarts

That one wasn't as smart as he wanted to be. That other was smarter than he wanted to be. Both might their quietus make. Either too smart for his own good, or not enough.

from Wide iPhone: 646.620.5704

a judgmental couple

pointing out others habitually with the phrase "yep, going over the cliff, that one."

unregenerate

why is it so in the air
to go to your grave
unrepentant

something on NPR about voice and music

minor 2nds and minor 3rds in kinds of speech having exact paraellels in music

depression luxe

I'm not smart enough to be exquisitely depressed. it's a kind of intellectual boast I just can't claim

kids in prep schools today

8th graders, even college students--a steel-clad narcissism?

know thyself

in the city they argued imperiously shaking the walls
in the country they were puny and shrill
blinking to no effect under the cold night sky

Reserves

The kind of people who were out of reserves, of humor, compassion, even anger. Paper thin people who I couldn't bear to spend soul-sucking minutes with. The bereft room looking for a roommate on top floor overlooking Park Slope brewery. Marion of Carroll St a bit, though she was a little funny, a little wise, a little cute.

Sent from wideiris.net

my affinity with the Brothers K

was that everything filtered through our emotions first

Ken Loach

The director's job is to let the actor be as good as they can possibly be. If they aren't then the director has failed.

Always shoots in sequence.

People going down

grab for excuses
effuse accusations
grapple friends into a deathlock down

remember A. D. Smith said recently, the most productive time of life is that when you own responsibility for who you are.

blame, while it may be true, even therapeutic at times, drags like a g-force on your life

Ray Bradbury's "Dial Double Zero" film

I never thought to look for it til now, but this was the film I saw at Valley Forge Elementary, in fourth or fifth grade, that totally captivated my imagination and made me want to become a writer.

http://ia311038.us.archive.org/0/items/RayBradburyStoryOfAWriterByDavidL.Wolper/Ray_Bradbury-Story_of_a_Writer_512kb.mp4?RayBradburyStoryOfAWriterByDavidL.Wolper/Ray_Bradbury-Story_of_a_Writer_512kb.mp4

I judge everyone film

Squiggles

time is the coin of your life

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have,

and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful

lest you let other people spend it for you."

-Carl Sandburg, US biographer and poet (1878 - 1967)

Sid Arthur

scion of world's largest supermarket chain world's wealthiest family sees suffering, unable to act, upon death of parent, sets out to make a film that will spend every last cent. in spite of himself, becomes icon of new religion in america

working for love

"You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love." Henry Drummond

stable emotional life

means what. no overweening suffocating love

always infuriating

to him was that if there was one thing this guy had a firm handle on, it was his own mortality.

Short idea: The Article

you are a love of my life, he says. only later does she reflect he said "a"

Movie idea: House Swap

Country to NYC and vice versa - parallel stories, complications, converge at end

Mediocrity

When one habitually goes against one's heart of admiration to destroy
it and is left directionless, chasing after any least effulgence of
praise, like an addict. And the defense of this behavior is to tout
onesself a social animal simply alive and responsive to that
imperative. The social being and the ideal lover needn't compete to
annihilate; in the most complete person they combine.

from Wide iPhone: 646.620.5704

Movie: Scam

A guy who tries to fall for as many scams on the internet as he can, one after the other, with the goal of trying to bankrupt himself as soon as possible.

Movie: Troubled Water

Norwegian film. Ok, so it's a various obvious construct for high melodrama. It rounds itself out in a very anticipated catharsis. Yet still very moved by it. Reminds me of that script I ground myself down trying to make work, when I was so low all those years ago, about the kid drowning in the swimming pool unable to be saved by his older sibling because parents locked in him the bedroom, playing out to Pergolesi's "Stabat Mater". I really wanted high tragedy. Opted instead for Park Tragedy, a strange, ironic, dislocated tragedy as subplot to the tragicomedy of human relations, an experiment that may have worked better if some of the acting had shored up better. That was 17 years ago... NYC can be an oblivion machine... now where am I. praising films I should have long ago done as well or better at.

film idea: the signature

close-ups under glass of people's signatures. whisper down the lane aesthetic. how is it they devolve. when in one's development is the apogee?

creep away from NYC

You must creep away from New York
Not run jump and trumpet
Or you will be yanked and dragged
Back, feverish with doubt.

Movie: Shutter Island

very last line was my favorite part - a little raging bull i'm the boss twist.

Movie: Shutter Island

Hitchcock meets Agatha Christie meets Kafka meets Synecdoche, NY

The moral upper hand

If you play the moral upper hand too much, your child will surrender her own faculty for it, in effect making you her moral calculator.  Rather than independence this leads to seeking another to take over the role when she moves on.

Xtraord

You're habitually mad because people don't behave in more extraordinary ways to you...


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anagram for my name

Rebuking Vet

when became this carapace with waving crab arms?

never be on computer

when a kid is around - resolved.  this priority is horrid and regrettable.  change it now.

Marriage Vows - Oct. 2, 1999

Marriage vows between Kevin and Rebecca - Oct. 2, 1999

I vow to protect you from all enemies of your passion.

When your eyes rush to the horizon, I vow to watch your footing.

I vow not to let our days stack up like dishes, compact and uniform, but rather like well-chewed artichoke leaves flung with gratitude in a gay heap.

I vow to know the magic of your mind, and to make mine known to you, unbidden.

I vow to be game when you are more adventuresome than I, and patient when you are less so. When you must, I will see you off to go alone. But together, I vow to forever go with you where we haven't gone before.

I vow to nurture your gentleness and protect your quirkiness and help you emerge forever as yourself.

I vow to be attentive to your knees.

I vow to swoop down on each lesser thought or feeling with the keen unflinching quick of the instinct that first brought me close to you.

I vow to endure all dangers with you, and to protect you.

I vow in my closeness to you, never to excuse, never to defend, any estrangement from life in the world around us.

With this ring I encircle you. I vow to be honest and faithful and to be naked before you, for the rest of my life.

the self-worth vortex

avoid it.  too often any predicament or interaction at all starts whirling down it, with increasing force in the descent.  the times when dad can focus on a problem without this entering into it, he's masterful, but 95% of the time he's in the vortex, a maelstrom.  i don't know what percentage of the time I'm in it, but it's mighty high i'll wager.

Bah Humbunk Ay-YAH!

is, according to Hart, what the King exclaims while killing the monster to save the princess.


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