Entry 6:

Dear Phillip,

I don't follow baseball much (to put it diplomatically), but I sure do remember Fear Strikes Out. It's the great movie of adolescent crack-up under pressure, and back in high school we used to watch it every time it came on TV, waiting for the moment when Tony Perkins finally starts climbing the fence, the psychotic equivalent of Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" number. Karl Malden never did better than as the all-American dad who only wants his son to be a great ball player like he never was. Terrifying.

When it comes to the paper, I usually plunge right into the politics; it's as if I couldn't wait for punishment, whether it's mobs of Dayaks decapitating their neighbors in Borneo or mobs of Republican congressmen symbolically cutting off the wrists of office workers with carpal tunnel syndrome, Afghani theocrats using missiles to destroy ancient art, or American theocrats figuring out how to incorporate organized religions into the federal bureaucracy (a concept rich in satirical possibilities, if only the prospect weren't so dismal). Only then to the consolation of the arts ...

I like what you wrote about continuity versus slice-and-dice. Ah, spatial integrity ... this is when I really start to feel like a cultural dinosaur. I think the feeling began years ago, the first time I realized that the quick cuts in music videos not only displeased me aesthetically but made me feel bad physically (sort of like that underground strobe light movie back in the '60s that forced the Filmmakers Cinematheque to post a medical warning on the danger of seizures). It's a weird symptom of this cultural moment that the sustained gaze could have become a more or less obsolete concept. I love movies where you actually get a chance to look at everything, whereas the game now is usually to convince you, through rapid movement, that you've been shown something even when you haven't. In Gladiator they don't dare hold the shots because you'd start to notice how fake everything is. By contrast, a while back I saw Visconti's The Leopard again and was just knocked out by the sheer presence of the world, of space: those incredible protracted scenes out in the country or at the ball. Remember depth? We shall not see its like again. (My favorite Mel Brooks gag is the sinuous, incredibly prolonged Hitchcockian camera movement in High Anxiety that ends with the camera breaking through glass. Now it seems like a joke from another world.)

Pollock I liked, mostly for Harris and Harden and Long Island. Dramatically it left me with that slightly empty feeling I usually get from movies about artists, as if something crucial had unaccountably been left out. He drinks, he paints, he stops drinking, he paints better, he starts drinking again, he paints worse, he dies. Well, I suppose it has a classical simplicity.

Best,
Geoffrey