November 14, 2005

• Cos he can't make decent movies anymore. The fire for art is a young man's game, only very few either keep it bottled til older age, or like Bill Burroughs, always have it. He got success too early. Gotta have something to fight against. Look at Lucas, look at Coppola. Gotta have something to prove, something to fight against to create something good. Passion doesn't come from comfortable living. Great artists don't live comfortable.
• I agree with Chyren one hundred percent about fire in the arts being relative to wealth. I think that it is most obviously true with musical artists. Tracy Chapman, for example, can't write about the kinds of things that she was able to on her first album. Springsteen observed this in his song "Better Days" when he observed: It's a sad funny ending To find yourself pretending To be a rich man in a poor man's shirt And I think that it would be true for people who write and direct like Spike Lee and Woody Allen. But I don't think that it is as true as it applies to directors. To use my previous examples, Lee and Allen are probably better directors than they used to be, but they do not write screenplays on the same level they used to. Look at Clint Eastwood's movies. He seems to be a better director than he ever was. He is not coming up with the stories/screenplays, however.
• Also, his eyebrows.
• Scorsese, that is.
• Observe the double usage of the word "observed" above contained in the observation I make which can be observed from any computer observatory that is connected to the internet as I observe it.
• At least he won't be making that Taxi Driver sequel.
• "Observe the double usage of the word "observed" above.." Remember: you still have more skills with language than the President of the United States of Amurka.
• De Niro says, "I was talking with Martin Scorsese about doing what I guess you'd call a sequel to Taxi Driver, where he is older." Ahh... where he's older. I was gonna say.
• The fire for art is a young man's game, only very few either keep it bottled til older age, or like Bill Burroughs, always have it... You're telling me that it's a young man's game but old men can have it too. Yet, mysteriously not all young men have it. Hmmm. I detect ass talking! Great artists don't live comfortable... Myth. I suppose Alessandro Papetti isn't a great artist? Or Pablo Picasso? Or Jack Shadbolt? Please, lecture me on the demons that torture these "poor, pitiable" artists. People take anomalies such as Van Gogh, Bacon, Mishima and Hendrix and blow them out of proportion as representatives. Why? Because people love a tragedy, ask Shakespeare. Also: José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Michelangelo, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Igor Stravinsky, Mick Jagger, Frank zappa, David Mamet, the list goes on... Suffice it to say that there are fucked up people in all walks of life. Too many young artists think they need to suffer in order to be successful because of this myth and it's sad that people continue to perpetrate such romantic bullshit.
• You're taking one element of what I said and focusing only on that. I said that *very few* keep the fire until old age. I would argue the names you mention are among the very few, if we measure the number of artists in the world. You don't 'need to suffer' you just need to be *real*. You can't be real earning a shitload and eating at fancy restaurants being lauded by the cognescente. You don't, however, have to die in a filthy garret like Chatterton.
• You can't be real earning a shitload and eating at fancy restaurants being lauded by the cognescente. I yearn to test this strange hypothesis.
• This is a wise decision. As I like to say, Scorcese is among the American greats in his failures. I mean that in the best sense. But he really hasn't measured up to his greatest work, namely Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
• The director... says he is getting old and does not want to spend his time making the big pictures demanded by Hollywood studios. That's been obvious for at least the last ten years. In today's Hollywood the great directors are expected to justify/nullify/redeem all the hack-helmed shit by making these huge spectacles of bloated importance. All the studios want is an important name on the marquee anyway; profundity by association. That's why so many of these event films are historical and/or biopics. Hollywood loves its nostalgia, and going back a few decades lends an fleeting illusion of importance and timelessness to even the most shallow films. It's been sad to watch Scorcese come to terms with this; an aging DeNiro replaced by younger, progressively less convincing alter egos, shoehorned casting concessions- uh, wait, what was the question again? Anyway, I'm Kent Brockman, and that's My Two Cents. [Straightens papers, looks for Danish.]
• I said that *very few* keep the fire until old age. Grandma Moses didn't start until old age. You can't be real earning a shitload and eating at fancy restaurants being lauded by the cognescente. Jeff Koons. Your qualifier ("be real") is too subjective to argue. What I had issue with is your genralisations: The "fire for art" is not a "young man's" game. It is the game of any person with a subjective and symbolic identification with the world. Even the rich can have this, contrary to popular belief, rich people aren't "soulless" and neither do they lose their "soul" at the point of becoming rich. Popular art is the objectified appreciation of creative talent. Whether or not someone "has it" depends on whomever decides and more importantly - how much money is exchanged for how many hours of labour.
• You can't be real earning a shitload and eating at fancy restaurants being lauded by the cognescente. The "fire for art" is a pretty superficial gift if it can't survive money and ass-kissing. If anything, art has a tough time with "happy and sorted out" which obviously does not go with sudden money. If anything, it fucks you up more because it plays hell with your support system and makes a lot of people around you want to suck up your money and time like junkies. And what's real, anyways? What's less real about wealth than poverty? It's not real to an observer who is not also rich, but that has no bearing on what's real to the individual whose life has changed. It seems to me that 'real' is a codeword for 'like me'; and in that context is much less about who has changed circumstances and more about those who don't pulling the ol' crabs in the bucket routine.
• I would argue that a smaller film, in which the auteur had the freedom to use a camera more like a pen than a committee-driven all-dancing steamroller, was a lot closer to some fairly modest definition of "art" than the bloated pieces of crap the studios tend to gift us with (largely for budgetary reasons) these days, but that's just me. Also, Luis Buñuel.
• I would argue that a smaller film, in which the auteur had the freedom to use a camera more like a pen Enough of your "pen-is central" theories, already.
• Mine's pretty central. I won't speculate on yours.
• Mine's right in the middle, buddy. *points to centre of forehead*
• Altman has died :-(