1. If someone were to ask me why I got into the cinema field I would start by talking about the camera as a mechanical object and invention and physical thingamajig manipulated by people in geophysical space. When you turn the camera and sound gear on the gods prick up their ears and pop their lids. If somebody asked me how I got into being me I would talk about dissatisfaction with human administrative systems straight down to the central nervous one. Cyborgs and adaptive machinic beings spoke to me. As a dope-sick booze-kicking monster in young adulthood I liked that I couldn't get into trouble in the mostly ever-peaceful hospital, but I liked even more that I was plugged into machines and that things about which I had only casual knowledge, a mere inkling, were being rhythmically pumped into my bloodstream. I once had a blood transfusion. It took a long time. Nothing has ever felt more like a break from my own life. Do graduate students and genderqueer kiddo renegades still read Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto? Remind me to ask one who isn't a robot or my obvious better. Did the snows of Kilimanjaro plant that double slug action up Ernie Hemingway, toe on trigger like a doe go figure? Does the blasted apart self finally relax? What happens to the obliterated skull of Vinnie D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket (1987) if not the profound and restful dispensation of long-withheld gustatory satisfaction. Eat your own brains, shit for brains. Gladly! 🤠
2. Were you ever aware that looking and poking around were the first ways in which we all cheated? For you as I see you now: it is not a lie if it is a lie of omission because you dance around saying the thing and later in the week have much less to say and five years later you have nobody to talk to and don't know as such where you even are or what "Wednesday" means. Watch Alan Arkin in his own directorial debut Little Murders (1971), the best American film of the early 70s counterculture after Altman's Brewster McCloud from the previous year (R.I.P. Shelley), adapted from Jules Feiffer's monumentally great play of the same name, and watch him do a perfect job of a scene he told the executives and front office people he didn't want to do (as an actor, because he was directing, and that was a lot), and watch him not do the scene or even stay still for it, falling into language he's losing like the room is almost forgetting where it's placed him and him forgetting like forgetting were a trampoline he's rapidly and blithely and stammeringly approaching without hope of not busting some damn thing or other on his intimate person. Then watch Alan Arkin with James Caan in Freebie and the Bean (1974) and tell me how the fuck it's a thing. It was a hit, it is a masterpiece, and it is shockingly impolitic (especially by our not-so-going going standards). Holy trifecta.
3. In the beginning there was a lie. God said, wait, what? He started digging around. Off to the periphery somebody got killed and God looked like an idiot because he was digging around elsewhere, eating a bagel, this being the Jewish God you see, asking pedestrian questions of old matrons who knew instantly this cockamamie buzzard was out of his league. When I think about and ask about the Jewish God and his vengeance and his convoluted twisted sense of humour, I think about the great Mel Brooks and the incandescent Anne Bancroft and I ask myself how it is Mel Brooks seduced Anne Bancroft. I wish my dear departed pal Paul S. were here to hold court with that deep, dark, dirt delightful. If you had an improv group this would be a juicy scene study. How would I instinctually approach it. Basically, I imagine that Mel Brooks is well aware that Eve has done her business with the apple and is pleasantly avoiding letting her have her sick and twisted comeuppance in a straightforward manner and he finds himself at a delicatessen and there's Anne Bancroft and of course he has all this material to work with respective of smoked meats and such. 🐹. If I were going to pick up Anne Bancroft in my hopelessly goy fashion, I'd tell her I adored her in that Jacques Tourneur Dave Goodis adaptation with Aldo Ray and then I'd add that she seems like the kind of woman who could stand still for just about anything not having yet met her better.
4. For the entirety of my life I have observed clearly that people don't treat one another at all good and that there has been no cessation to this highly disagreeable phenomenon, not even for a minute. But, as Elliott Gould keeps saying as Rip Van Winkle Philip Marlow in Altman's The Long Goodbye, "it's alright with me," and of course it is...as long as it is glancing. When you start to really see how selfish and mendacious people are, in grade school or whatever, it becomes clear to the ones with cunning, the we with the wherewithal, that you can let everybody lose their faces where they've set them for the time being and circumvent the whole room...which is precisely what magic and misdirection are on the scale of a whole room. Rip Van Winkle Philip Marlow, for example, runs into trouble in confined spaces he hasn't had a chance to case in advance, Gould having the improvisatory genius to go full minstrel/blackface unprompted when the character he's giving his guts and shoes to has finger print ink on his pincers and a bunch of mouth-breathing pigs in his face. You can tell this utterly phenomenal actor is improvising when you watch the scene. You are reminded how dull the cinema would be if it were all flawlessly premeditated. Watch his shoulders and the angle of his jaw in relation to the camera. Watch him see the idea and not miss a beat. For a split second he loses his scene partners and they are themselves ever so slightly thrown. We know that art makes increasingly complicated accidents in order to finesse itself indefinitely, but we should also strive to apprehend the simple fact that to be able to notice the right kind of accident in a crowd of things going all manner of haywire is to already have a solid line on how to make a go.
5. You can't find me. I didn't ever have a chance to occupy any place. It wasn't up to me. If the sky's the limit, I said, I bottom out right here and right now. In judo you want to use the mass and inertia of the opponent against the opponent. I am growing very static and futuristically possible imagining taking earthly judo so much further. What is the possibility of a future that is already communicating with us and which was even before that the obvious precondition for our talking about it, just like God is (whatever God is, or can be) the precondition for denying God? The future in particle physics is enmeshed with the gross mismanagement of the now and there isn't any clear way out of the labyrinth. A friend of mine in the university days who really loved Jorge-Luis Borges and Umberto Eco told me that the labyrinth was once bad but then the labyrinth began to move and incorporate moving parts, so nobody was ever even solving the puzzle they were solving moments ago, and in this context naturally I imagine everybody too frantic and desperate to recognize the ground they are losing or have lost. Those who aren't and never won't. We have a reference for all this in the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, a veritable audio-visual cartography of slippy-slide topsy-turvy labyrinthology, and maybe especially the most lowkey important movie of the 20th century (in the spirit of Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Spivak), 1978's The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, a highly mischievous and dizzily erudite masterpiece testimony to the principle that if you have to sell your uncommonly brilliant movie and you think people are daffy cunts, you hit the audience hard with the first concept and then you make them chortle and even barf laughing with the second (conditional upon how much that Stoli they all done drank goin' in).
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