Knifethrust of Thought

knifethrust — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:12:26 +0000

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

knifethrust — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:00:04 +0000

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

knifethrust — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:47:37 +0000

“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.

knifethrust — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:33:15 +0000

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.

knifethrust — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:26:12 +0000

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.

knifethrust — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:25:48 +0000

Oxymoron: new movie

knifethrust — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:13:37 +0000

I’ve just been realizing how easy it is to imagine I’m being funny after my sense of humor turns acidic and petty. At such times I’m only making fun of people instead of exploiting situational and attitudinal distinctions. The latter is something that requires empathy (without which no human understanding is even possible, and what is the good of a brand of humor that doesn’t induce understanding?), honesty and diligence.

KT0000

knifethrust — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:12:07 +0000

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?

KT0001

knifethrust — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:11:07 +0000

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.

KT0002

knifethrust — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:10:07 +0000

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.