The Headmaster’s Ritual Slaughter

When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart, my school’s headmaster used to haul me to his office, flog me, and then while I wept contrite tears, he would tell me with a sinister flash of his ceremonial gown “I trust you, boy, as far as I can throw a grand piano.”

At the time, I felt beyond worthless and would walk around in a daze of flat keys only hitting a high note when I walked into my English teacher.

With hindsight, I now see the headmaster’s appraisal of me as a bit of a compliment. The “couldn’t be trusted” remark I have put to good use as a writer.

And I do take some pride in being compared to a grand piano. It commands attention, does a grand piano, and only the most accomplished masters can sit before its ivories and play masterpieces. It’s big, bold, with all that action going on behind the lid as felt-covered hammers strike steel strings.

But I still do have these recurring dreams in which I behead my headmaster with a piano string, toss his corpulent body into a deep lake, and watch it sink like a grand piano nobody will ever play again.

Let’s Rough It Up

Helium. I think writers need some of this. I know I do to help me float above the tedium. Because life gets tedious. And life can sometimes appear like it is designed to kill your dreams. I’m not trying to be mawkish or sentimental.

We all have our misery, our hopes, our fears, our anxieties, our failures, that little bit of the authentic in us that desperately wants to get out and which reality wants to keep down. We’re like fragile soap bubbles floating around, seeking to merge with another, but more often than not, colliding, and popping in a spray of iridescent sadness.

You’ve got to fight for your right to be a writer. Although I suppose anything a person loves takes a certain amount of crazy fighting to keep.

And you’ve got to kick-in the TV as a writer. I’m not talking about the actual TV (although you could if you wanted to). I mean the fabricated channels of thought and emotion we let become our prime time. That’s anathema for a writer; to just passively sit and flip through the channels, letting the TV drama of thought and feeling take over.

Here, this is what being a writer means to me. And I’ll let Aleksandar Hemon tell it to you: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

Fuck, yes! That is what the world is, and it’s an authentic feeling, an authentic idea. It’s not sitting between the daze and the haze of reality, but going into life, slipping through the cracks in the pavement and finding the grit to produce a pearl of the dream others have passed up on, but artists keep alive.

“I happen to think that an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment.”

Stand & Deliver

I didn’t watch the Oscars. In my opinion, Billy Crystal is peeling wallpaper from the 50s and needs to be painted over. They need to get someone like Sacha Baron Cohen; he would lively the damn thing up.

And the winners are about as predictable as spirits at a table-tipping séance.

And the movie stars strut and prance about like Norse gods who pretend that Gotterdammerung is a series cancelled by Hollywood.

But my real reason for not watching is that I’m starved for a sense of the mythic when it comes to movies; starved for a performance that I can talk about with rapture for years to come. And so many movies now are more about narratives than images, which is good. But when did a visual art form decide it could steal all the thunder from books? If I want great stories, I’ll go to a book.

What I want from films are surrealist visions, offerings of Dali, Bosch, Klimt, Picasso, Bruegel, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Harry Clarke, Max Ernst, Alfred Kubin-like images; a stunningly visual montage of frames that makes you gasp in awe and wonderment. And I’m not talking just blockbuster, but images that make us see the world differently, like the way that old French filmmaker Georges Méliès did with his movies.

OK, so there’s that movie with George Clooney, The Descendants, about a father and his relationship with two teenage daughter. I have 2 daughters, although they are not teens, but I know this story, even though it’s not mine. What I don’t know, though, would be a story about a father living with the ghosts of two dead daughters, say, or a father with 2 android daughters, and it could be this surreal, decadent, dreamlike movie.

Why do movies not create a visual bang? They have the technology. Imagine a movie that was like a dream? Who’s making those?