Day: July 2, 2011

Eight days ago Jezebel posted Kathy Griffin‘s very well-told story about running into Michelle Bachmann. Griffin’s money question was, “Were you born a bigot or did you grow into it?” Bachmann’s reply: “That’s a good question. I’m gonna have to get back to you on that one!”

Please, God — let Ms. Bachmann become the 2012 Republican nominee for president. Chris Matthews said a couple of weeks ago on Real Time with Bill Maher that he believes she’s going to beat Mitt Romney in New Hampshire because she stands for something and really speaks her mind (however dubious her mental determinations may be) and is not a phony. Please give us Bachmann…seriously. Talk about a gift from Heaven.

Last night I paid to see A Better Life — paid! — for the second time. (My first viewing was at the Santa Monica Aero on June 7th.) It was playing at Arclight #11, and after the show — totally sold out, by the way — director Chris Weitz and star Demian Bichir dropped by for a q & a. And then they were swamped in the lobby outside for photos and chit-chat.

Damian Bichir in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life.

A second viewing doesn’t diminish A Better Life in the least. If anything it seemed to play a bit cleaner and stronger. I wrote on 6.8 that “it’s genuinely moving, if a little too grim and deflating at times.” Well, the grimness and deflation were gone last night and replaced by a kind of dignity and austerity and emotional truthfulness that’s really quite rare in mainstream movies today. I realized this during my first viewing, but perhaps not fully enough.

“I fell in love with [the script] the first time I read it,” Bichir tells Vanity Fair‘s Sasha Bronner. “It was so powerful and so well written. No gimmicks, no Hollywood tricks. It was the real thing. And then the character was one of those characters that you’re looking for in your life. That’s a Hamlet, that’s a King Lear, that’s one of those bigger-than-life characters, that’s Travis in Taxi Driver. It’s many, many characters in one.”

What a nothing Friday…I’m sorry, Saturday this is. Nothing happening anywhere and hot out to boot. I might as well just go to the club and do some laundry and then take a nap. Shine it. Jett flew out Thursday night for a visit but he decided to go to Las Vegas today with a platonic girlfriend so it’s just me and the cats and my Blurays. That and a plan to visit with friends and go to The Tree of Life again. And then a scooter ride for an hour or so.

50 years ago Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. A.E Hotchner has recalled the novelist’s final days in a 7.1 N.Y. Times article:

“What does a man care about?,” Hemingway asked Hotcher. “Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them.”

Hotcher visited Hemingway visited him in June 1961. The novelist had been succumbing to what seemed to be paranoia and had been talking about suicide (and had attempted it once or twice) and had been undergoing shock treatments. Hotchner asked him, “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?”

“What do you think happens to a man going on 62 when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself?,” Hemingway replied. “Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?”

“How can you say that?,” Hotchner replied. “You have written a beautiful book about Paris, as beautiful as anyone can hope to write.” He meant A Movable Feast.

“The best of that I wrote before. And now I can’t finish it.”

Hotcher told him to relax or even retire.

“Retire?” Hemingway said. “Unlike your baseball player and your prizefighter and your matador, how does a writer retire? No one accepts that his legs are shot or the whiplash gone from his reflexes. Everywhere he goes, he hears the same damn question: what are you working on?”

The truth? If you’re a writer who’s 62 or 52 or 32 or 42 and you feel you’re really and truly past it? Unable to write well or feel or give pleasure or just live in a way that feels honest and robust and complete? I don’t know. It’s a tough one to answer. I do know if you’ve written well before you can write well again. I’m better at it now than I was five years ago, and certainly ten or twenty years before that. How could Hemingway have unlearned what he knew so well, and did so well in his prime? Maybe it was the booze. It often is. Alcohol and other substances certainly did in Hunter S. Thompson, who went out the same way.

The wondrous and eternal thing about writing is that you never stop getting closer to the best you can do. The process never ends. The light is always just up ahead.

What Naval submarine captain knows enough about the price of recreational drugs to compare it to the cost of high-end cigars? Even if such a man exists, is it likely he’d share this knowledge with a subordinate officer? The cultural frame of reference behind Gene Hackman‘s remark to Denzel Washington is obviously not Naval, but that of wealthy, jaded Hollywood filmmakers. And that’s why it’s cool.

Edited by Jermain Odreman (“Jermyx“) of Venezuela.