(50) Things I've Learned
11:53am, September 19
1/
The ship on the screen is not flying over your head. Something else is happening.
2/
On that subject: some people don’t have imaginations. That’s not a value judgment against them, just an observable truth. They can’t understand a thing until they see the actual thing, because they can’t imagine a future state based on what is currently known or expected. In a lot of instances, this is fine. When it comes to voting for a demagogue — or approving the plans for a bridge — it leads to considerable trouble.
3/
When the human race respected experts, the above was less of a problem than it is now. If one couldn’t imagine something coherently enough to make a decision about it, one could presumably assume that those with greater expertise were “on it,” and therefore the right people were making the right choices based on the right field of view. We’re no longer in that era, though, so. Considerable trouble.
4/
The universe is, broadly, a good place. We’re lucky to be here, adapted for the purpose. Good things are happening all the time.
5/
We’ve actually come a long way. Try watching an episode of Survivor or The Simpsons from 2010 if you don’t think so. We’ve actually come a long way in just this short time.
6/
You get a lot of soul mates, not just one. There doesn’t have to be a limit on them. They don’t compete with each other. They don’t even have to be people. It’s nice.
7/
Everybody’s gotta do the airport run at least once in their lifetime. Otherwise what are we even here for
8/
Always be cleaning.
9/
Never get in a situation where Cabot fucking McNenly is whining to you for the thirtieth time about how much he didn’t like The Phantom Menace. In fact, after a certain point, it’s time to make clear you don’t give a shit about anyone whining about The Phantom Menace, or anything else.
10/
You have no idea how someone else uses their phone. Don’t make assumptions.
11/
One time about fifteen years ago I was doing a hike up a small mountain with some friends of mine, and I forgot my bottle of water in the car, which is basically the biggest mistake you can make while conducting a hike of any great length.
Anyhoo: this small mountain was fully enshrouded in a bank of clouds when we were on our way up, just basically a white cloak of condensation sealing off the rest of the world, and a strong rivulet of runoff was passing our path at one point — so, thirstily, I just drank straight off the mountain face. My friends and I were pretty convinced that this was going to lead to my death; in fact, we started calling this runoff “the deathwater.”
I don’t need to tell you: the deathwater tasted great. I do need to tell you: the deathwater eliminated my then-ascendant head cold almost immediately. I also didn’t so much as sneeze again for over three years.
12/
Blade Runner, Beau Travail, Distant Voices / Still Lives, and Ikiru. Laure standing up in the tub. Amy Madigan flipping on the lights. Luke going after his father, beating him back, the camera tracking to the left.
13/
Speaking of mountains, it turns out you really can climb one one step at a time. The trick is to look at the totality only rarely. This applies to writing, too.
14/
If you want to find something, use your eyes.
15/
There’s a weird but understandable thing where we think artists have the same creative interests and intentions in their art that we have as people who consume the art. I try to remember, as often as I can, that there’s no actual reason to expect this.
16/
You’ll never love a movie more than your favourite movie from when you were seven.
17/
Trans folk? Braver than the Marines.
18/
Life’s for using things, not keeping things.
19/
There’s no control group for anything you have to do about yourself, because there’s only one you. You can’t experiment with a new medication or process or treatment, for example — you can’t make any change in your life at all, really — and report accurately on whether it’s had its intended effect, because you’re comparing current lived reality against your own memory; and you can’t control for all the other things going on that might be having an impact besides. This means you can’t say with certainty if any lever of change you have pulled is the reason for the change you believe you’re experiencing.
This isn’t meant to worry anyone; it’s just something to keep in mind.
20/
If you ever need proof that Americans are obsessed with themselves, do one of their crossword puzzles.
21/
I just find disasters funny. Trivial disasters, obviously; nothing life-threatening. Missing a ferry. A web site that blabs a lot of secret information unexpectedly. Extremely stupid people running in circles. I enjoy laughing in the face of small-stakes apocalypse, and hope I’ll enjoy laughing at the big one too, when it comes.
22/
Moisturize!
23/
You can learn the only thing you need to know about a man by how he speaks to the cashiers at a Wal Mart.
24/
When you’re writing about a movie, always spare a bit of time, a sentence or two, for the filmmaking. That’s advice from Roger Ebert c/o Matt Zoller Seitz, and it’s hard as hell.
Movies confront us — or me anyway — with story, and it’s easy to think those stories are the (only) point. Then there’s the whole pleasure-of-looking thing to get past, re: the visual experience; the frenzy of the visible, and it’s easy to think admiring that is equivalent to admiring the (entirety of the) craft.
Story, and shots, are two pretty high hills to walk over just to get to the part where you can look back and think through how all of it was actually done and why — how the movie is an artwork, and not just a 2-hour timekiller. But it’s back there, beyond those two hills, that the thing really becomes a thing worth having.
25/
There’s gonna come a point where it’s no longer really advisable to jump off things. For me, this point came around age 44, near a small chain-link fence in the Don Valley. It’s better overall to prepare for this point well in advance.
26/
Every single day you’re gonna have to grapple with your privileges, your inherent biases, your inherent clumsiness, your addictions, etc. It’s not really an “optimize and move on” sort of a deal, this. The second you think you’ve figured something out is usually the day the ground falls out from underneath your feet.
27/
Time is a resource, and not an infinitely scalable one.
28/
“We are all different people all through our lives and that’s okay. That’s good. You’ve got to keep moving — so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”
29/
It’s just a show. No one is trying to trick you. The point of watching/reading/encountering a story is not to figure out what’s going to happen before it happens. Relax. Grow up.
30/
Never trust the TTC to get you anywhere on time, or anywhere generally.
31/
When I was in high school my English teacher, Mr. Waldron, taught me that between the author and the reader there is a third piece of writing, the one we make together, our experiences meeting one another and drawing a whole new thing. Pretty sure he was cribbing (openly) from other thinkers — that might have been the Northrop Frye lesson, or the “only connect” one — but I think about that all the time. The third artwork.
32/
One time me and Price rolled into a shitty Italian family-style restaurant in a big-box mall somewhere in those horrible United States and ordered ourselves a couple of plates of pasta, not realizing that the menu’s notable quirk — wherein pasta was ordered “by weight” — meant dry weight, not cooked. We went on to riff on about fifty other things we might order once we finished scarfing down what turned out to be two salad-bowls full of fettuccine alfredo.
That’s definitely the hardest I’ve ever laughed, or something close to it. What’s crazy is, we were hungry again the next day.
33/
Jobs are pretty silly. At the least, the way we think about them / do them / have settled on them as a precept, are pretty silly. There’s nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about your job, but for the most part, people who are really into their jobs are weirdos.
34/
In a crowded field, the “Can’t Someone Else Do It?” election campaign in The Simpsons episode 9×22, “Trash of the Titans,” is the most precisely accurate thing the series has ever articulated.
35/
In a crowded field, Benicio del Toro saying “...maybe?” to Finn’s “you’re wrong” in The Last Jedi is the best thrown-away line delivery of his career. That's probably the most useful line from the entire Star Wars saga, too... but in terms of sheer day-to-day repeatability, “You stupid little astro-droid!”, delivered in Super Battle Droid voice from Revenge of the Sith, takes the taco.
36/
Two completely distinct times in my life, I was so lost in my own daydreams about a movie idea that I walked straight into the women’s washroom. I should have realized what this meant a lot sooner than I did.
37/
What I’ve worked out since is, you can do what you want with your inner voice. You can listen to it, not listen to it. You can assume the outer voices are better/smarter/righter, or not. There’s no one refereeing this game. Consider that a warning.
38/
Roland Tembo was the best character in the entire Jurassic Park franchise. At the end of The Lost World, his last line is “I think I’ve spent enough time in the company of death.” And then he’s never seen again: he sticks to his decision.
39/
When I was in California the time before last or the time before that, I went on a tour of the Paramount backlot with Demetre, back when that was still a thing that one could do in Hollywood, back when Hollywood was Hollywood. You know the drill. I think it was just us on that tour with a family from somewhere in the middle of the American Experiment, or maybe there were a handful of other people too, but the point is, one of the standing sets we toured through was the living room for the sitcom Two and a Half Men, and when the tour guide explained that the stairs to the second floor, featured prominently in the middle of the set, did not lead to an actual second floor — that they in fact led nowhere, because this was a three-camera sitcom and the second-floor set was actually sitting next door to this one — the family from Arkansas or Idaho or whereverthefuck were gobsmacked.
I do not mention this to shame them or make any kind of point other than one about how people consume and understand media. Those of us who have even a marginal working understanding of how the moving image is made probably understand things like sets and editing and visual continuity and whatnot. I try to remember as often as I can that there is a much larger proportion of people in the world who probably don’t think about this stuff at all, and thus treat all the media they consume — sitcoms, dramas, reality TV, the news — utterly credulously: as recordings of real life, which are built and intended to tell them The Truth.
40/
Don’t put grease down the drain.
41/
One time my lover and I set the bed on fire in the middle of sex, and in the chaotic tomfoolery that followed, a lot of charred and not-charred down feathers were released into the air and they rained down on our overagitated, sweat-stained bodies; and then the feather-rain stopped, and the fire was out, and everything was normal again. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life thinking about that held moment — feathers dancing in the air, to the absolute delight of this person that I loved, and myself — and how no moment like that, once passed, can ever be captured again.
42/
My first job was at a shoe factory called Swing Shoe, and one of the first things I had to do in that factory was be the guy at the end of the assembly line who jacked a single nail out of the heel of each shoe to free it from its mold. Awful job, especially for the uncoordinated — the tool could easily slip, and flay the skin off the knuckles of the hand holding the shoe.
The guy who did that job most of the time, I mean before and after I was there, was this Kramer-looking geezer called Bob. When I stood in for Bob, I noticed two perfect footprints in the concrete floor of the factory, worn in over years and decades of Bob rocking back and forth hundreds of times a day, to retrieve each shoe from the line.
43/
It’s just generally and overall better to talk about things you like than things you don’t. Once I noticed that, my life got a lot cleaner. Common cause, commiseration, trauma bonding, I get it; we’re social animals. But still. A lot cleaner.
44/
Doing the thing is the thing. Having done the thing is not the thing.
45/
Generally speaking, the decision to fancy up your subtitles with a bunch of crazy fonts and animations does not indicate the strictest confidence in the more important aspects of your cinema.
46/
The water must flow.
47/
You can easily drive a Smart car up a scree of loose sand in the absence of any usable road, deep in the hinterlands of Sardinia, if you have experience driving and parking such cars in Toronto’s winter.
48/
Money, on the whole, isn’t real. Jobs aren’t real. Responsibilities aren’t real. Really, not a lot of what we think is real is real. We’re playing Monopoly here.
49/
The hardest thing to do in this world is to live in it; to enjoy what you have, rather than grasp for what you want; to be here now, rather than (my challenge) carving out what’s next, or languishing in what was. I’d also say, if you can find the means to know yourself, that is the greatest thing. Just my opinion.
50/
You’ll almost always wait too long to get in, and wait too long to get out. That’s just human nature. Still: try.
