Wednesday 7/20/22
Wrote an op-ed yesterday on push-ups and heat, fixed it today. Pretty much all done. One more read will do it. Wrote a story yesterday called "Speak Into the Mouth." Wondered what I had. Described it to someone, who said it sounded mind-blowing to them. I didn't know. I mean, I knew. But I didn't know exactly what I had yet. Do you understand the difference? I worked on it again today and then I knew what I had. It's a major, radical work. The story for our times. I've written that story a number of times now, if that makes sense. "Eyejaculator" was another example. I'm creating so far beyond the bounds of what has been done or what anyone has thought possible with fiction. I know it. I know it as I'm doing it, before I'm doing it, when I'm about to do it.
Ran 3000 stairs yesterday and did 200 push-ups. Ran 2000 stairs today and did 100 push-ups. The heat kind of got me today. I need to be doing a better job on the stairs. Push the numbers up some. As for the push-ups, I can tell that my arms are bigger.
Started two Halloween op-eds, one on Nosferatu, the other on the holiday as the most honest one we have, especially now, which I'll finish soon. Wrote another story today. Started another. Pitched a Halloween idea on Philly Joe Jones.
It'd be difficult for me to overstate how much I hate Jordan Peele's movies. There is nothing there. It is all manufactured. Fake fake fake. A product of these fake, empty, vapid times, when you can get people to believe anything, if enough of them are also pretending to believe it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the intrinsic, actual value of the item in question. Those films won't even be a footnote eventually. No one is going to watch them in twenty years. Ten years. They'll never be spoken of, never remembered, because they have no value outside of what they can do in this age where nothing is real, where it's all about other things. He's not working with anything. His films try to hide that. That's what they aim to do--not connect; they try to hide their paucity of ideas. Technique. They do this with vagaries, meant to be "deep" and "thought provoking." Classic deflect approach. Then you're the dumb one if you don't get it, or think it's stimulating, so you play along, and you also get your Woke points. Do you realize how important that is to so many people? Other people not thinking they're stupid is huge. That's far more important to them than actually being stupid, because they don't address that. They don't try and improve their minds. But they are desperate to have other people think about them a certain way, even if there's absolutely no truth in what that is. That's nearly everyone. And you get credit for being a good, socially aware person--even enlightened--while being the ball of ass that you are, who never puts forth the effort required of true goodness? Bonus. That's the Jordan Peele platform, or recipe--or what the whole enchilada is predicated upon--as such. You can call it whatever you want, but that's it right there. It's funny, though, to go on Twitter and see people also pretend to be film experts. It's the ass voice, of course. People are so empty and broken, that without their ass voice, they might never interact with another human again. They have nothing else. The ass voice isn't actually anything, so they have nothing anyway, but they require this illusion in order to exist, which they're barely managing to do even in this most limited of fashions. These are typically the people who talk about how great Jordan Peele is. They are also people who have lived sheltered lives, and have experienced very little art or cinema. They have no standards, because they have no expectations, no points of references, no soul-shaking experiences with real art, or even competently-made entertainment. I saw this one person saying, "I know it's a hot take, but Jordan Peele is the greatest horror director ever. How many horror directors have three great movies?" Plenty. Peele has none. But then you get these other people who want to pull rank with their ass voice, and they're like, "Slow down, my guy." Then they list directors, again, like they're an expert in film, with their counterargument, which is really just a way of saying, "No, hear me with my ass voice!" It's all recent shit, with the vintage selection being John Carpenter. Come on. John Carpenter? He's the Eric Rohmer of horror. Slick, surface, passable--just--but also mostly a big "whatever." I mean, I own The Fog on Blu-ray, but it's pretty risible. There are 1000 B-horrors better than it. Someone mentioned Hitchcock. Wrong again. Not a horror director, and really the closest he got was 1927's The Lodger, and none of these people have seen that. Psycho is not horror. The Birds isn't even horror. Hitchcock was a thriller guy. He wasn't going for horror. I see this stuff, and I think, Pick up some books, you lazy fucks. Watch some films, you slothful blobs. Throughout film history. Get off your proverbial ass and explore a little. It's like nothing exists before their terrible memory happened to kick in. Here's a name: James Whale. See? We're done here, with the whole "name a single director who has three great horror movies." I truly detest this world. The vapidity. The shallowness. The glibness. The lack of anything real. And it's also narcissism. People assume that nothing good happened before they were born. I was eleven, twelve, thirteen-years-old when I was exploring. Tod Browning. Beethoven. The Beatles. Chet Baker. All well before my time. Because I wasn't some arrogant twat who thought the world began when I did. And I wanted to know. I didn't care about the year. Old? New? Fuck that. Why the fuck would anyone care about old or new? What's that even mean, really? You should care about what is the best. What matters. What has actual value. Not manufactured pretend value. There's no fucking time stamp on reality, man. It doesn't expire. It's not some milk in your fucking fridge.
Here's last night's Downtown segment on the radio version of Gunsmoke.
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