I saw The Fabelmans yesterday, and it was very nice. It was a complete dramatic film of the kind I have stopped expecting from Hollywood. It made me appreciate the life of Stephen Spielberg. When I was a kid he was the director the grownups were all raving about. As I got older he seemed more and more boring and he became a symbol of conformist mediocrity and apathy to me. But this movie about his life is so good that I can appreciate him as a person and I want to go back and look through his catalogue to see if there’s anything else there as genuine. I don’t know what it means but it gives me a sliver of hope for Hollywood, although I still think it’s a cesspool maybe there could be a few interesting people in it. There’s no doubt that Spielberg is a good director and I’m inspired to attempt to write rationally about film again, to confront the absurd horrors of the movie business and try to pick out those few examples of civilization that yet remain. We’ll see if this works. But for now at least I started this blog entry, which I plan to develop over time – an experiment to see if there’s anything meaningful to say about movies in these days when the industry seems so utterly devoid of life and conscience.

A darkness is pressing against my mind, but it’s beautiful. I’m very tired now. I wanted to write something to see if it would make sense tomorrow, or next week. My guides are eclipsed.

And now a day later I feel fantastic wanting to grasp every atom of bliss I felt tonight and preserve it forever, and what I want to preserve is the feeling of freedom from the oppressive hostility of the human race. Long ago I wanted to be a rock star. I mistakenly believed that rock people were cool people. Now I have enemies waiting out in the night to catch me. I have things to analyze tonight but I think I’m done just remaining silent about everything. I’m going to start taking little swipes at the public, testing the waters for whatever complete artistic gesture I might make in the future. I want to keep everything in balance, but what I really want to find out, what I’m experimenting with, is ways to make art that will make my life this beautiful all the time, so I never have to come down. How could I preserve the joy I felt tonight? I can’t tell the complete story because so many details of my life are private, but I can push the edges. What do I say that changes who I am in this world in such a way that I get more happiness, more magic transportation? At least I’m addressing the issue, trying to formulate a solution to the problem.

Dustin looked surprised. “Didn’t you know Warren hates us?”

“No,” replied Graylyn, “I always thought he was desperate to have sex with us, way too much of an asskisser.”

“Well he may be that, too,” said Dustin, “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t despise us and plot our destruction. But I guess there was no reason for anyone to tell you, and obviously he’s never talked to you around me. Do you remember Stereo Hut?”

“That funky place in the mall?”

“Right, back in junior high, Warren was trying to impress everyone that he was going to get into computers and make millions of dollars, but it was all bullshit. He’s too dumb, he just thought he’d figured out that you could find secret codes to everything and rip everyone off. All that ended when he tried to rob Stereo Hut. He looked at the alarm system on their door and found the model. Then somehow he got the instructions for it. He made a big deal out of taking us down there and showing us the Bang & Olufson Beocord 9000 in front of the clerk. At the time it was the coolest tape deck in the world. He wanted to make it look like we were after it so he could say we stole it. Then he tried to reprogram the alarm system and come back later to open the door, but he didn’t realize that it notified the police when changes were made and the whole thing was on camera. I’m actually the one who explained to them how he got the instructions off of the old bulletin boards we had been on together. He tried the usual trick of saying that I had got him involved in something shady, but he was too stupid to understand all the ways you can prove who has accessed something like that. He got in huge trouble, but of course his family kept it all secret. Freshman year he came back saying computers were boring and since then he’s been all about the movie business.”

This is the dialogue of the night the Sickies define themselves as a set at Easton Academy. Early 1980s, haven’t decided if it’s before or after the First Party at Stubby’s.

Dustin: Well, I think of us as a set, and if we’re not then I’m a hopeless failure, socially, so …

Drake: Dustin, if I have a set you’re in it. That’s definite.

Dustin: All right, then man (and they shake).

Drake: Chuck, I would have done that with you…

Chuck: No, man, this is totally the way it needs to be. I am in your set, but I couldn’t start anything because of my family. I’m basically dirt that my family owns, like any of their fucking skyscrapers, but now that you’ve started it, hell yeah! All for one, one for all!

Trish was petulant. “I don’t understand why you won’t just try a Sex on the Beach, not even a sip?”

Dustin was stubborn. “I don’t like to change my drinks in the evening. I’ll try one the next time we’re at Stubby’s, I promise.”

Trish, frustrated, “A Sex on the beach is just a Cape Codder with orange juice and peach schnapps.”

Dustin, “Look, it’s not about the ingredients, okay? It’s about how I feel about what I’m doing. When I was growing up in New England, every evening my father would prowl around the house with a Cape Codder in his hand. It was just the coziest thing, you know, the lamps would be turned down, and there were all these dark windows around us, barely keeping the night away, and the ocean whispering eternity out in the dark, and the TV would be on, with my sisters enraptured in their pajamas and my parents presiding on the couch and my father, always with this blood red Cape Codder in his hand. We were from New England, and this was the drink of our men, and this was how we drank it, snuggled up cozy in the half-light with our families, watching TV and grumbling about the dismal fate of America. So I just have this visceral feeling that as long as I’m drinking a Cape Codder in the evening, I’m doing the right thing, I’m not breaking any rules, I’m not even really drinking alcohol, I’m just staying the course. To drink anything else would violate the family honor.”

Trish raised an eyebrow. “I just want to state, for the record, that I think it’s absurd that at this moment, you have just actually had sex with me on a beach, that very beach of Lake Michigan right out there, which you know your great uncle the Episcopalian bishop would detest, but you will not take the smallest sip of a drink called Sex on the Beach because it would be breaking the rules.”

Dustin shrugged. “It’s my way.”

“Like Mr. Spock,” Drake chimed in.

“Exactly.”

Drake “I don’t care that he said it, I care that they believe it.”

boomer: “You just don’t understand, this country is going back to the way it was.”

Graylyn: “I love Catholicism. I was a princess in a former life and I loved going to Church and seeing all my wonderful subjects arrayed around me.”

Angela: “Do you know why I’m going to be a social worker? It’s because I have one. You didn’t know that about me, did you? I had to see one freshman year when my brother knocked out two of my teeth.”

Chuck: “My family has been Republican since the Civil War, but my father says the party’s gone bad now, with all these televangelists coming in. We went from being the largest creditor in the world to largest debtor in the space of three years.”

Mr. Crown “If America falls apart tomorrow, there will still be banks and real estate. And you, young man, are in real estate.”

[experiment]

“Fuck literary theory,” sneered Drake, “I want to write literature. Literature means respect for the past, for the creation of God, for the meaning of human experience and all the thousands of people god chose to say things that would carry forward the progress of the human race. Respect for literature means respect for history, for society itself. Now we just don’t have it anymore. There’s just Pynchon and Delillo left, and after that nothing. Academia killed canon and the publishing industry has killed everything that isn’t entertainment. I want to be an American writer. I don’t want to entertain people.”

“What do you want to do to people?” asked Chuck impatiently.

“I want to gouge out their eyes and skull-fuck them.”

Graylyn: That sow Phyllis Schlafly is against sexual harassment laws because she says virtuous women will not be harassed. Do you have any idea how disgusting it is to be a woman in a country where a miserable piece of filth like that is being taken seriously? We’re responsible for the continuation of the species, but if human garbage like Phyllis Schlafly is in charge, what’s the point?

Drake: “I haven’t written anything serious in a year.”

Graylyn: “It’s just because everyone’s waiting for you to say something now and you can’t do it without saying goodbye to who you were. You just have to choose something. Artists have to choose. I did it years ago and after that I never slowed down!”

Drake: “Gray, you did that because your family was supporting you, and because you’re a painter. You’re not confronting the world, you’re seducing them. I can’t do anything but shock them. You can use all your experiences to paint. I can’t use any of mine. I can’t write a word about sex without worrying about what your parents will say. I can’t write anything about the government without my father breathing down my neck. I can’t even afford to think about the government because I’ll come up with something that will piss him off and I’ll have to go around for a week keeping myself from writing it.”

Graylyn: “So keep it a secret. I kept lots of things a secret. I painted everything my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to. I showed it to you and the Sickies. Later I went back I found a way to compromise.”

Drake: “But that’s what’s killing me, Gray. I am allowed to write whatever I want. Father told me he knows children in my position get disgusted all the time. He’s going to let me get away with anything, and because he’s going to do that nothing I say is going to mean anything. He’s going to allow me just enough rebellion to feel open-minded, and then he’s going to yank my chain the way he always does, and everybody in the world is going to know it. “Hello world, I’m a new writer of the ruling class and I have permission from my father to write all about sex and corruption but really I’m just a sideshow freak like Brett Easton Ellis. That’s already come up for me, you know. One of the professors I met was telling me I could be serious, and he used Ellis as an example.”

Graylyn: “Okay, so you don’t have enough now. Just wait. Be patient.”

Drake: “Gray, I can’t do it. I can’t just be patient. I have to make a break.”