October 23, 2008

Winter is back, and for a long time now I will start, or fight starting, each entry with “dark outside.”

The All Souls Movie Mavens went to Oliver Stone’s W at Cinnebar last night. It was a superb film, maybe Stone’s best, and one of those works of art which make you change your mind, or at least tone down your bombast, about something you were sure of. I went to see a movie that mocked President Bush, but that was not what it was at all. I went for a few laughs at a man whose works I hate almost uniformly, but saw instead an even-handed, compassionate (if not quite blind to the inanities manufactured by the subject himself) study of an individual whose multiple failures are clearly attributable to unlucky circumstance, bad company, and that rare and weighty thing one might call tragic conspiracy. A man who could have lived perfectly happy in beery obscurity chose all those things which would hold him up to the ridicule of history. I actually liked the George W Bush portrayed on the screen, liked the private man as I would some disaster-prone neighbor who always had to be rushed to the emergency room for trying to fix a moving lawnmower and the like. Real demonic forces such as Cheney and Rumsfeld keep their pitchforks and their leathern wings. I’m fairly sure it was not the film Stone set out to make, and that is all the more to its greatness.

I don’t know why people go around saying “You can’t change anybody’s mind.” Mine changes often, usually by art, sometimes by discourse. Of course, if I were a public person, this would be called “flip-flopping.”

SS peremptorily derailed the agreement Black Swan had with All Souls to produce the Jane Bingham Contest winner, and so far no one on the commission has challenged her. It’s the Episcopalian biddy strategy of asserting one’s little bit of power by delaying the clear will and upright energies of others, but it passes as deliberation and discernment, and its trenches are so deep my artillery can never hope to reach. Each time I try a collaboration I throw up my hands and say, “never again.” It’s not that I mind disagreement or controversy; it’s just that I mind when those things are to no end.

The fish man was here to clean and test the aquarium. He also added fish, and now the tank is as I had imagined it, aflame with gleaming bodies, pastel and neon, and watery compact Eden. I sit in the great green chair with the cats and watch. They gather in their shimmering clouds and watch us back.

Introduced to my creative writers the concept that preference is no gauge of quality. I don’t think they liked it. They’ve heard so often that things are whatever we think they are they that have begun to believe it.