Knifethrust of Thought

“So much remains in our hearts and minds as unrealized suggestion.” —Andrei Tarkovsky

Whenever I’m getting ready to start a new writing project, I feel the way I imagine a tire feels swelling with air.

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.

Oxymoron: new movie

People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?

Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.

People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated.  Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.

When you’re taking a shower and you find yourself thinking, “You know, there’s more than just soap and water running out of this stall.  My life’s going down the drain, too,” it is time to begin playing with yourself.

Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat.  Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles.  Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out you.

Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics.  Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?”  On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth.  Aha, I thought.  A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade.  (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend.  I bleed red.  I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)

Depriving a teenager of idealism is like not charging the battery of a car before you turn the ignition key and step on the gas.  The car can’t go anywhere, and you flood the engine.

Some people sabotage their own pretensions to individuality through the fear of being perceived as different.  Collections of such people agree to be different together in meticulously codified ways.

If you trust the words of people who say “I tell it like it is,” you not only don’t trust your own judgment, you don’t have any judgment to trust.

Educators seem pretty ignorant to me.  They want to keep little Johnny from knowing anything that might upset him.  And stupid me, here I always thought the purpose of education was to teach little Johnny how to handle problems, which include being upset, yes?

How often does a commodity prove as satisfying as the packaging and hype compel you to imagine it is?

A young girl coarsened through preoccupation with adolescent sex lowers the value to the species of Natural Selection.

If you believe that Liberals stand in the center while Conservatives occupy the far distant fringes of the right, reflect on this: Thinking “Hitler” all the time and never thinking “Stalin” when the subject is political orientation is like evaluating the humor of Laurel and Hardy without Hardy.

I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20^th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right?  Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence.  Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.

Whatever happened to harmonic dissonance?  People seem oblivious to their not even having tried to merit the lofty attributes their egos require them to ascribe to themselves.