Sorry about the image; it's just an old photo of something I saw in a parking lot. I didn't have any visuals ready for this post, because, instead of making drawings or collages, I spent all of yesterday complaining about time and fate.
Dear diary,
I love movies. But we don’t even watch movies anymore—I mean, we only watch old movies that I already know, over and over. So what happened to cinema? Why is it bad, and even the good films are bad? Well, if you’ll let me get a word in here, I’ll try to answer:
See, in order to make a film, you need lots of money – it’s not like writing, where you only need a pencil and paper, which cost less than five dollars apiece. And actually you don’t even need to buy those objects, for poems can be composed entirely in the mind, by thought alone, and thought is free. This, incidentally, is why many poets employ rhythm and rhyme: it’s not just a stylistic choice; it’s a mnemonic device...
But I was intending to answer your question about why movies are so awful nowadays – let me try again:
As I was saying, in order to make a film, you need lots of money; and the people who invest their money in filmmaking, as time ticks on, are less and less willing to take a RISK. This whole country – the U.S.A., where movies had their birth and met their death – is like a giant casino. Now money-folk want a return on their investment. (They never do anything just for the fun of it; whereas poets never do anything just for the cash of it: poets care zero for returns; financiers care zero about fun.) Think of the Star Wars franchise. The very first film, from 1977, subtitled A New Hope — that movie was just one vast risk: there was no expectation of any return on investment. But now the latest film in the long line of sequels and prequels, whatever it’s called and whenever it’s released, is nothing more than a guaranteed return on investment: the element of risk has been entirely factored out. Risk is eliminated.
And all movies are exactly the same nowadays. They have the same problem as the aforesaid space opera. Even great directors end up having to compromise too much. Some measure of compromise is (or at least can be) a good thing; but too much compromise ruins everything. Only one in a million total compromises will succeed with those who have eyes to see; just as pure artistic freedom can be a losing proposition – although freedom is less likely to botch artworks than money’s cold feet, a dash of obstruction can often work wonders.
So all the movies that have been released in recent years, ever since that moment when I lost interest in cinema, are weak and bad. Even my favorite directors now just kowtow to power. There’s no chance of another Robert Downey Sr. coming along and making another Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight. Even though the advent of the Internet has allowed non-professionals to experiment endlessly, nobody seems to want to contribute genius to cinema – everyone’s concerned rather with craftsmanship, with improvement of their technique. Nobody cares about possibility, potential. No movies are worth watching, none: they’re all trash now. Cinema is dead.
It’s fun to write like that—dismissively. Cinema is dead. Music is dead. Painting is dead. Bold statements, fun to shout; but impossible to prove or disprove: empty momentousness. And they leave you with the picture of something expiring, so it’s like a gunshot scene from an old western movie: the hero clutches his heart and collapses, signifying that the Life Force has left him; and you squint to read his name tag, which says: FINE ART.
Yet what if there is a good film out there, by a good filmmaker who’s intent on making good cinema? Then that soul’s work is bulldozed over by my harsh prophecy. Who cares; we’re all gonna die eventually anyway.
Again: I prefer text, as a medium. I contributed earnestly to the experimental region of text, and then wise people declared text to be dead, and they directed the multitudes of readers to relinquish their literacy and take up TV-watching instead. So the masses became sports fans and rock music aficionados and fashion experts – anything to avoid reading poetry.
Radio was invented around the turn of the century, I think – around the year 1900. That’s why Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, which originally appeared in 1855, didn’t become the national religion: it was eclipsed by radio. And the earliest motion pictures appeared at about the same time, but they were silent at first, out of deference to their sibling, radio, so it wasn’t until after 1920 that they ganged up and murdered radio and stole radio’s soul and stuffed the soul inside of cinema’s corpse. And this happened right when Finnegans Wake got published; James Joyce’s masterwork. So that’s why THAT is not the religion of the world, and we have perpetual warfare instead.
But, as I told you last entry, I’m still in the middle of waiting for the results of our home inspection. (I’m changing the subject now because I’m bored with the above cinemoan = cinema + moan.) We accepted a bid, an offer; but before the buyer can officially own our apartment, the place must undergo an inspection; and one of the elements of that process is the Radon Test. The guy from the company that put the Radon Detector in our bedroom is returning today to take his baby back. So here’s what I say:
If it turns out that we have record-high levels of radon coursing through our living quarters (which I suspect will be the result of this analysis), thus exponentially increasing my chances of getting lung cancer, then I, a lifetime non-smoker, will officially regret never smoking cigarettes.
Plus I will legally change my name to Bryan Radon.
Actually, if I must take up smoking, then I’d prefer pipes. Our old neighbor Mr. Peterson smoked pipes, and his tobacco had a vaguely cherry scent, which I always appreciated. He was old when I was young. I don’t remember much about him. I remember his wife’s name was Ingrid; yet I can’t recall ever learning the old man’s forename, the name that Mr. Peterson was given to distinguish him from other members of the Peterson tribe, and which could be used as an address of familiarity. I guess I’m admitting, unintentionally, that I was not very familiar with Harold Peterson. (Just now the name came to me.) But I still would like to write some words about the man, because he and his wife, poor Ingrid, were our next-door neighbors (or rather back-door neighbors, because the back of their French door practically abutted our deck) all thru my teenage years, until I infiltrated high school.
As I remember them, the Petersons were a quiet couple. And now that I’m old with white hair and a long curly disheveled blue-gray beard plus a yuge fat belly like Satan Claus, I can fully acknowledge how discourteous my parents were to their neighbors the Petersons; for the Petersons’ back door, a sliding French glass patio door, was situated about three horsegallops from our house’s basketball court (a foursquare patio with a makeshift hoop); and I would go out there, every day throughout my teen years, without any concern for the peace and quiet of other longsufferers, and I would bounce the ball on the concrete and shoot and miss – hour after hour I would sully the atmosphere with the sound of my dribbling, for the basketball makes an obnoxious bonk each time it slaps against the pavement; moreover I would play late-twentieth-century rap music from a boombox that I had set on the deck’s top step. Our deck was maroon, I now recall. So I’m sure I provoked the Petersons to shut all their windows, even on the nicest of Spring days – especially on the nice days, because that’s when the odds were best that I’d want to “practice” my rapsketballing.
Maybe this is why, today, I so loathe the nuisance noise of my own neighbors’ children. They remind me that I was just like them, long ago. And I hate the feeling that the world is repeating itself. If the world is going to repeat itself, it should choose a better groove: the whole “offspring of careless parents annoy their aged neighbors” routine should be retired.
Yes, but, to get anything in this world, you need lots of money; like I explained earlier about the cadaver of cinema. And to get money you need a job, and to get a job you need either an “education” or an entrepreneurial spirit. (I’ve repeated all this before, I know: it’s my common refrain – so if you’re not a fan of my fussing, don’t read my Koran.) Now if you go the “education” route, you end up in debt, because school costs more money than you’ll ever earn at the job that you attended school to acquire. So it’s best to inherit an entrepreneurial spirit. That means that you’re comfortable lying to people about this or that. For instance, if you find a piece of foil, and you fold it into the shape of an aeroplane, and offer it to a passerby for a billion francs, and they pay you, and then they grow bored with their purchase, so they take you to court in order to get their money back, and you slay them, in cold blood, right in front of the judge – that’s the entrepreneurial spirit in action.
Sorry to be flippant; I’m just not interested in this avenue.
When is Summer over? It’s July now. I can’t wait for Autumn. I hate Summer and Winter. Yes, I’ve said all this before, too—how I wish that the Earth would alternate between Spring and Fall, forever. It’s such a deep, sincere yearning that I can’t stop repeating it. August comes after July, and then we have September. I think, at that point, the schoolchildren’s vacation will be over and they’ll be forced to return to jail. Then I can get back to smoking my pipe in my lawn chair. No more rap music.
I wanted to say chesterfield but went with lawn chair instead, because...
What if I were to develop into my old neighbor Mr. Peterson, so that I actually BECAME the man, like a reincarnation, and we shared an identity: What would we be thinking? Well, for my part, I’d be thinking: I hope that the Rays move out soon. God I hate them. Their eldest son Bryan spends all day on the basketball court missing shots and blasting rap trax: I wonder what, if anything, he shall amount to. What skills does he possess, that might commend him to our casino-capitalist economy? (HINT: None, zip, zero, zilch, nada. Nil, zippo. Synonyms for nihil.) I’ve never been able to figure out why Doug and Rita, his parents, chose to purchase Bryan from the Spirit Guides in the Spirit Realm. For all babies are displayed in cases, in their pre-birth days, in the Spiritual Supermarket, for parents to browse. And you pick up a lad or a lass, and you ask the vendor “What’s the deal with this soul?” and the vendor answers, “This one will be mostly troublesome – a skinny dork in youth and then an old fat white-bearded immoralist in his declining years – essentially a decadent; good for nothing, and you’ll regret it.”
So now I see the couple forking out a handful of foreign banknotes to purchase the babe. Did they not listen to the salesman? I suppose they think they’ll be different from every other failed marriage: they will raise their children right: they will produce good members of society, who will speak only when spoken to, and drive nice cars.
Also: why do people want grandchildren? Did you ever notice that?—how human parents desire grandkids?—Why! That’s stupid. You have one child, who disappoints you; and then you think you can mitigate this disappointment by urging that child to reproduce yet another child. Where is the reason in this argument?
Ah, I see: No reason. Now I love it. I never considered it from that angle. Grandparenthood is a dada prank; a pataphysical affair. You say: I fucked up by bearing children; therefore: Fuck it, let’s have more kids. “Wrong” and “right”, like the meaning of any words, are determined by usage. If you do wrong, then just keep doing more and more wrong until the whole world is flooded with your awful decisions—THEN the world’s inhabitants will have no choice but to interpret their hellscape as heaven. Nobody dares accuse God of crafting an imperfect existence. There’s something of the true artistic temperament in this line of argument. For, say I make a failed painting – now what? The answer is to make another painting. You’re bound to stumble upon a masterpiece someday. It’s not just an addiction like any other, this madness of creation. No, it’s like panning for gold. Nobody ever went hungry during the gold rush.
And we’re always inventing fake organs, to prolong the reign of whoever might not deserve life. Whenever I see a fake spleen, a fake tongue, a fake uterus, grown in a lab by scientists with the intention of replacing that particular organ in a body that needs it, I think: Why can manmade brains absorb vats of vodka in a storage house but Science Itself has no interest in curing homelessness?
To make a house, all it takes is a box with a pipe installed to carry saltwater, also a slop vase, and a mirror so that you can admire yourself all day. Science is not interested in such simple solutions. If it can be done, science must be dragged, kicking and screaming, to do it. Then, after easily accomplishing the task, Science’ll ask if it might be permitted to go out and play. So I’m here to warn you: Do not allow Science recreation. It could ferment into Poetry.
*
(NOTE. I give the following text-fall as a postscript, even tho it’s really a separate, unrelated entry; since, after its first couple thots, it degraded into an advertisement for my own books, and I feel uneasy about that type of self-promotion. Thus I am relegating it to sidecar status, here below, rather than posting it on its own.)
P.S.
When people gather together to study the Bible, they begin with a reverent attitude—they become hushed and extremely “pious”, and then, when the text is read, no matter what its content, it is interpreted in a light that is most favorable to the dogma of the church. So if it were a Rorschach test, every blot would look like “Jesus saves”, or “God is good”, etc. I’m speaking of how things go down in my sweetheart’s family; my own family doesn’t read the Bible—they just say they believe it, and that it was written by God; and then they read other books that make its purported message less intolerable. But I say:
Why would you read a book if you already know what you’re going to conclude about it? And why would God write something that has a meaning fixed beforehand? I’d rather read the Bible with a fresh attention, ready for anything; with a clear mind, free of all expectation. I’d rather let the text surprise me. It’s true that sometimes certain portions of the Bible end up saying things similar to what the church teaches; but, more often than not, the stuff that I find in it is startlingly deviant. But when I point out these different passages to the churchgoers, they tell me that I’m not reading with a proper mindset: they say I must “get my head right” before the Bible can teach me anything. In other words: become prejudiced. Pre-judge what you’re about to encounter in the text. To this idea, I say:
Who struck upon the “proper attitude for scripture reading” or the “correct, godly interpretation” in the first place? That ancient soul scanned the text with a blank expectation, and the text’s meaning filled that blank with this interpretation, which led to the church’s doctrines. Therefore it’s not only permissible to read the scripture without prejudice, without “piety aforethought”, but it’s even necessary that each reader clear her mind of cant—for the alternative cannot be called reading: it’s rather roving one’s eyes over words and mentally highlighting fragments that match one’s preconceived notion.
And yet, what if a churchgoer tells me: No, Bryan, the first correct interpretation of scripture was given by God himself, thus you’re wrong to say that we mortal humans should wrestle with the text’s meaning—God paved the way for us, by telling us what to think about his words. Now, to this, I say:
You’re almost making me fall in love with this God of yours, because I’m thrilled by the idea of composing a text that interprets itself insistently, even wrongly—that’s what I, even I, tried to do, in my very own scriptures, the best of which is La Man, whose final section is labeled “The Moral of the Story”; and also my (Un-)Holy Bible contains, among other texts, two full books: the first is called Perchance to Sleep No More – after writing that pamphlet, I felt dissatisfied with it, so I thought it’d be funny (& maybe even end up “rescuing” the lousy effort) to write a whole nother long tome that incestuously “interprets” its precursor, the same way that the churchmen’s so-called “New Testament”, mostly via the Apostle Paul’s epistles, tries to illuminate the supposed TRUE MEANING of the Hebrew Scriptures (Tanakh), which, for this purpose, they rechristened “The Old Testament”, in a fit of desperation. By the way, my own purposely overlong self-interpretation is titled The Teller Chases Her Tale. At least I think that’s what I called it—it’s been a while, and my memory is hazy, due to idiocy.
But my point is that if God really did this same thing—that is, if God indeed composed a holy scripture and then later composed his own interpretation of that scripture—then God is wackier than we thought. I repeat: I’m warming up to this God.
But a written interpretation still demands to be READ; and what we’re talking about, with regard to the church’s advice to “approach the Bible only with a prefabricated opinion about its aim” is a mental stance arrived at by priestly direction, as opposed to textual study; so if you’re telling me that God’s only true self-interpretation is distributed exclusively by the priests, then after laughing loud and long I say: Nice try.
And with Moses I shout “Would that all the people were prophets!” (Numbers 11:29); because each soul is equal to the soul of a priest and need not bow under anyone else’s authority. If you persuade me, I’ll accept what you say; but you must persuade me: do not tell me I need to believe you on account of your position. Titled professions have never moved me. But I’m easily persuadable, cuz I’d rather believe than not. That’s why I also shout, with Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself” 43):
I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over,
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths,
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between
ancient and modern…
The problem with us atheists (I still consider myself an atheist) is that we’re too darn honest. Too truthful. We need to dissolve ourselves back into the…
Ah my tone suddenly seems too preachy, so I’ll stop here. I only meant to expose the fraidy-cat way that my in-laws read their own scriptures; so I’ve done my job. As Officer Duke exclaims to Officer Sunshine, in the movie Wrong Cops (2013), “Boom: job is done.”
But I wish I had the time and energy to continue fleshing out this idea of atheists manufacturing their own religion, I mean an official religion with a god, so that we can get in on the game; get some of that tax-free loot. Instead I’ll end with a quotation, like a well-behaved writer. I think Harold Bloom says, in his essay “Freud’s Concepts of Defense and the Poetic Will”:
A person tropes in order to tell many-colored lies rather than white lies to himself.
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