Knifethrust of Thought

“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.

Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.

Oxymoron: new movie

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.

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.

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.

If intentions equaled actions, we’d be having pie-in-the-sky for dessert tonight.

When a politician opens his mouth, it’s not a coin I want to shove into the slot.

We’ve only got a little over 900,000 years to get it right.  The anthropologists say a dominant species of mammal endures for a million years.  Our prognosis is not very bright for dying with our integrity intact.

Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it?  Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off.  I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.

People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.

Perhaps the multiculturalists have a point.  What entitles us to the arrogant belief that Western Civilization is the way to go?  We ought always to seek to better our condition by learning how other cultures do things.  Let’s adopt the educational standards of the Ivory Coast, the culinary hygiene of New Guinea, the judicial-system fairness of Saudi Arabia, the religious tolerance of Sri Lanka, the imaginative television programming of Mongolia, the political liberties of Myanmar, the urban sciences of India, the high-tech infrastructure of Tajikistan, the after-school programs in Brazil, the foreign affairs genius of North Korea, the child-labor policies of Bangladesh, the social justice of Zimbabwe, the common-ground ethnic togetherness of Cyprus, the engineering ingenuity of Samoa, the freedom of dissent of Iran, the sell-your-daughter-into-prostitution ethos of Thailand, the marital relations of Pakistan, the pollution-control zeal of Mexico, the table manners of Micronesia, the philosophy of the Eskimos, the University-studies rationale of Azerbaijan, the cinema of Malaysia, the musical sophistication of Easter Island, the anti-corruption policies of the Philippines, the comedy sketches of Somalia, the legislative shrewdness of Rarotonga, the contemplative politics of South Korea and Taiwan, the relaxed code of leisure of Japan, the public defecation facilities of China, the rationalized traffic control of Ecuador, the fine art of Borneo, the literary distinctions of Tierra del Fuego, the prisoner-rehabilitation policies of Turkey, the pluralistic harmony of Rwanda, plus clitorectomy, and we’ll see how it goes.

Hollywood celebrities who “make statements on politics” resemble fart-cushions.

If dogs, cats and budgies didn’t exist, men and women would despise each other.

I must have come from another galaxy.  I happen to enjoy fruitcake.

Training a camera on a politician yields the same effect as when you add milk to Rice Krispies, including the post-crepitational sogginess.

Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways.  But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses.  The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely.  (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.)  The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife.  Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again.  After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you?  I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”

That our politicians are self-advancing amoral opportunists is disheartening; that they are imbeciles is downright embarrassing.

If you want to have some good, uncomplicated slack time, cultivate an amoral scoundrel as your companion.  He’ll be very entertaining, introduce you to some fascinating people, and catch most of the checks out of vanity.  Warning him you don’t trust him with your woman or your wallet will take the pressure off both of you, erasing ambiguity from the relationship.