to write this; then I thought about my Vancouver fan base (3 people) and I just felt guilty. Maybe this will help. I have COVID PTSD -- you probably do too, there are 'after effects.' For me it's the incurable longing to be at the epicentre of a group. Writing this brings back nightmares of a year and a half alone -- for an unreprentent ENF on the Briggs-Myers scale (yes me and Oprah Wnfrey) you need followers, you need someone to inspire -- to be in a room with, not a million miles away-- not someone that you never see and who sends you emails once a month (thankyou Vancouver fans not that I’m not grateful!). But here I am, doing it. I’ve almost finished writing a book so I may need this again. So I might as well get started. How are you? Obviously, I don’t know, and I don’t care. Yes, I do care. I sincerely hope you are dealing with your COVID PTSD -- at least better than I am. You might be desperately wanting crowds -- like me, or perhaps fearing them, or you could be recovering from a COVID breakup or suddenly deep in a new COVID union, or just happy as a clam doing laundry, getting fat -- yearning for another lockdown. My biggest fear; that it will happen again -- the threats are a kind of pathology. It’s all for our own good, I know, it’s all about getting people vaccinated - but Jesus Christ how are you supposed to live under this kind of pressure? The government is not only our parent but a supremely dysfunctional, no abusive, one -- pulling out the rug from under us at every other moment. I recently saw two wonderful movies, and yet they just made me mad because the reviews were so friggin’ lousy — I Care a Lot and Flag Day. Well of course Sean Penn is going to get bad reviews. He's an asshole in real life. But the quality of an artist's work is in direct proportion to their ass-holeness. (Sorry about that, but it’s true.) The more of an asshole — child molesters and Nazis go to the top of the list -- the better the art is. Sorry, it’s just a rule. (Like ‘wear a mask’). Flag Day is a film about an asshole, made by an asshole, and you've got to give Penn credit for that. The reviews are typically screwed up. Apparently the movie is not 'woman centred' enough for most critics. Sean is apparently promoting it as being about the character his daughter plays, but it’s really about the character he plays. How narcissistic. Well, duh. Anyway the film is about Penn’s character: a ‘flim-flam' man, a gangster shyster with a helluva charming personality -- I laughed out loud several times. The hypocrisy of all this is amazing, we’ve been enjoying The Music Man for years, a musical classic about how wonderful a supreme asshole is -- a manipulative liar who takes everyone’s breath away. What’s really scary about the reviews for Flag Day and I Care a Lot are remarks like “These people are so unappealing; why would you want to watch a film about a bunch of people who are so evil?” Are you nuts? What were you expecting -- a medieval morality play? And you rooting for Jesus? Can you think of anything more boring than a play, novel, or movie about good people? (At least The Friggin’ Bible -- an okay novel, by the way if you haven't read it -- has Mary Magdelene and Pontius Pilate.) I Care a Lot is quite another matter; it’s a homophobic, auteur, thriller — it reminds me very much of Basic Instinct, we haven’t seen a ‘lesbian killer’ of quite this ilk for awhile. Rosamund Pike has the devilish heroine down pat (even the bad hairdo— very accurate, most lesbian killers do have bad hairdos, by the way). Run, do not walk to see I Care a Lot because you get to watch two really sexy, evil, women kill people -- it’s something we all love of course --but in movies it's mostly men who get to be killers (unless they are comic book heroines)— well actually I should say who get to be truly effective at anything— so in that way this film is revolutionary. But one can’t ignore the blatant misogyny of it all, which I enjoyed, because it was so vile, and quite alarming. The film gets away with murder the same way the heroines do, because it’s supposed to be about greed and corruption. Anyway, if you can handle the usual sexy, cliched, misogynistic lesbian-phobia there’s lots of other juicy stuff here too. First there’s Diane Wiest, who is a saint as far as I’m concerned, an incredible Woody Allen actress who should be in everything, and thank God she’s not dead. Then there is Rosamund Pike’s hairdo. Then there is Peter Dinklage — I am assuming he is what is saving this movie from total damnation, because he is a short person in a huge part, which rarely happens. He’s also a juicy actor, and juicily naked at one point (I’ve always had a thing for midgets -- I know you want to hear -- I've never had sex with one, but I almost did once. It was like that thing that almost happened with Rudolf Nureyev -- I wanted to, but all I would have been thinking about during the act would be the specialness of it all, and there would have been shrinkage. (Shrinkage with Dinklage.) Anyway, this movie too, is apparently not rosy and cheery and moral enough for the puritanical Americans who have been watching and who are complaining that it has nothing redeeming to say. Jesus you are not in church, you are not in diversity training at work, you are not listening to your boss or the Chairman of the TTC giving you the requisite COVID lecture, you are watching a work of art, it’s not supposed to be supplying you with information or with the soothing sense that you are a really good person, it’s supposed to be screwing up your brain. That’s what art does. It leaves you wounded and panting, just like that guy with the giant-you-know-what who bursts into your room at the baths and suddenly plunges it into you at top speed, and you barely have time to check for a condom (but, of course, you do). You know what I mean. You always know what I mean. Because you are me. Or I can imagine you are. (By the way, it's good to be back.)
