I just spent a long, torturous time writing about my trip to see the German filmmaker Ula Stöckl's "The Cat Has Nine Lives" (1968) yesterday. I'm not writing well. . . which means I'm not thinking well. Now I'll be brief. It was a fine film, "a time capsule" that captured the zeitgeist of the time as she said in the Q&A that followed. In the last iteration of this, I opined about the Q&A, and about the crowd that swarmed her afterwards. The writing, however, was snotty and as full of pretension as the crowd I sought to describe. I don't want to be snotty or pretentious. Ula is a fine and humble person, and there are lessons to be learned from that.
I don't have the energy or time now to write another piece. I'll just summarize. I've done nothing but sit in front of screens for the past two days. My eyes are blurry and I need yoga, meditation, and movement. And I need to rid myself of ego. It is a vile, Shakespearean monster.
I can't salvage anything at all from what I have already written. It is just shit. Maybe I can tell you later in a gentle and generous way.
I guess there is one thing I can pilfer. Ula said that people may not know what they want, but they know what they don't want. She said this in a positive way. I've always quoted Faulkner as saying the trouble with people is that they don't know what they want. I got the quote from me dead ex-friend Brando who was a master of knowing what he wanted. And people would follow.
"Ula, from where did you draw the idea about people knowing what they don't want?" I asked.
"Nietzsche, I think. I'm not sure. It was probably Nietzsche, though."
"Yea," I said, "one wouldn't need to be certain about that. Like Freud, Nietzsche was just in the air one breathed for a time."
Most people don't even know what they want for dinner. But. . . I don't want to be snotty.
See what I mean? I just performed the theory. I knew what I didn't want.
Huh.
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