4:00 AM: Keep your story straight

Not destined for a long one tonight. Not a lot going on. Paranoia, the usual mind tricks. It's not easy being this high strung, it's exhausting and hardly worth it.

You can guess what I'm alluding to.

I have a 1200 word paper due tomorrow. I ought to have written it tonight but for whatever reason I accepted a call into work, I guess because I am a pussy. I don't even know why I'm surprised when they call. It's been clear for weeks now that management is never going to get its head out from the nethers about scheduling. People being booked on their unavailable days, not enough people being booked at once. I compromised and came in for about 3 hours at the end of the shift because I wanted to eat dinner fist. Wound up working with Chantelle and Brad, it was basically fun times, and I didn't do anything but put product out for 2.5 hours and help some customers. I was supposed to go grocery shopping (B. handled it himself, apparently without incident) and that still would've had me a bit too wound up to really effectively do my paper. As it was, I came home after working for about 3 hours, watched the Daily Show/Colbert, procrastinated more, then read some of the readings I was supposed to quote.

Halfway through the reading I got tired and thought "Fuck it, it's 1 AM, I can do this tomorrow." I had some quotes written down and stuff. This one will not be my finest hour. I wrote my last Lit Theory paper before class, too -- it was a decent mark, and now I know how to recoup some marks onto it. Plus I more or less know what I want to say... it's just a matter of refraining from rambling.

It really shouldn't be that hard. Although I may take the liberty of skipping drama to get a couple extra hours with it.

I finished reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls today also. I have a love-hate relationship with that book. I'm fascinated by it and yet also mystified by the eternal perception of New Hollywood cinema as some kind of golden moment that was brought down in its prime. Biskind illustrates how it destroyed itself, and yet the narrative doesn't really encourage the idea (and maybe I'm the only one who thinks this) that New Hollywood was an aberration - a shot in the arm that actually revitalized commercial cinema. When art is commercial, all is well, and when it's not, it must fall by the wayside. It's totally Darwinian. And cinema more than anything is commercial and those who cry about it must not have understood what business they were getting into. Eric would probably ring my neck if he heard me talking like this but I think he gets the point, like, art is great, but if nobody wants it, is it art? Art that has value as entertainment, though... that stands the test of time.

But I'm just as much of an asshole as anybody.

My favourite quote in that book (probably) came from Coppola near the end, when he mentions Woody Allen. Allen has been making films since the late 1960's, continuously without break. Sometimes they're good, sometimes not, but he hasn't been inactive, ever. Only a few of the last 40 years have not featured a Woody Allen picture. And he gets his financing from outside the studio system (mostly, I think) and his films all feel distinct from each other yet also part of his oeuvre. So Coppola compares himself, negatively, to Allen, saying in effect, "I'm not that. I wish I were." And maybe by remarkable coincidence, Allen never got caught up in drugs and politics and nonsense like most of the directors named in the book. No controversy greater than marrying Soon-Yi.

I mean, I guess it just puts it all in perspective, you know. Allen the auteur, Allen the artist, Allen the entertainer. Left out of Biskind's narrative of course, because he is singular, beyond the trend, which probably explains his endurance. I think the problem was, the New hollywoodians lost sight of what art meant; they thought along the lines of "true art is angsty." The Conversation is art, but Annie Hall is also art (don't deny it) and fuck man, no matter how much everyone wants to deny it, Jaws and Star Wars are fuckin' art. Art doesn't have to be meaningful or message-laden. It just has to be good, and that's so subjective that when you start saying "This isn't art" you open up a can of worms by causing people to ask "What IS art?" and in return you get angsty bullshit that wants desperately to be art.

Because I say fuck art, fuck the pursuit of art. If art is authentic, it will come naturally, angst or no angst. I'd rather provide entertainment. I kind of think Half-Past approaches art because all of the pieces are there and it seems to glide smoothly, if I do say so. But it also has a lot of penis jokes (and the new play has even more, oh so many.) and I didn't really set out to say "Let me make a statement, an artistic legacy." I say: if it works, it's art.

But I may be too inclusive for some peoples' taste. But fuck 'em.

Which is funny, because all this has to do, in a sorta roundabout way, with my paper (Walter Benjamin* on discrediting mechanical reproductions - and therefore all films - as art) and my own current angst, which is for an artist.

In fact, having tied all those elements together somewhat loosely, I daresay that as far as SWP entries go, this one was a work of art. Well, it's all subjective.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

*That's Ben-ya-meen, not Ben-jammin.