The Way to Fame

The mysteries and wonder of the creative process are not limited to those who by innate talent or arbitrary circumstance or some combination of both become successful. We can take successful anyway we want – the spectrum swings from being able to eat more than bread and cheese off the sole income from art to powdering your asshole with coke and fucking beautiful people. But is it only when you can rub two blank canvases together and sell the pair as an installation that one may call oneself an artist? Is it just to inhabit the state of mind that one is an artist to be an artist?

Of course not. Art is more than just a state of mind. It is a state of minds. Every artist touches themselves in the greatest feint of happiness and shyly mutters, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. Because even a wide as the widest circle of family and friends cannot buy enough of your work or show up at openings to make any human in being an artist. Not enough minds, y’ see. It takes a stranger’s opinion, an unknown quantity, to validate their deepest wish (see: creating something of influence and permanence and intangibility. See also: “Sticking it to the Man”). It is the kindness of strangers to care enough about the not-yet-art and top see value (perhaps with a red dot sticker) that has the inertia to begin the trajectory toward aforementioned artistic debauchery with the surety of the title ‘artist’.

(Note that not all ‘artists’ need to want to rim their assholes with coke or commit adultery – it is enough that the precedent has been set.)

And of course not all strangers are literate with art – apparently there are billions in ‘other’ countries that can’t even read – so it helps if the not-yet-art has some sovereign signifiers or features identifiable by the stranger-masses as acceptably belonging to the enterprise of art. I pity the fool who tries to claim the weather as their art (as inevitably someone will some day). Simplistic I know, but is any other sense of not-yet-art any more real?

So in the interests of safety and in a blatant attempt to exploit arbitrary nature of who makes it and who doesn’t, the time has come to publish a tome on a total unknown.

But I must digress momentarily to the concept of an ‘arbitrary nature’. Many may be tempted to – once it is known that outcomes are arbitrary – give up one the whole enterprise and take to the bottle. More fool them. Arbitrary does indeed mean random, but implicit to arbitrary is resolution. And a resolution means some course of action, some shunting of circumstances. It’s a numbers game. Increase the percentages. Like a lottery, the more ways you are open for the arbitrary (but inevitable!) thing to happen to you specifically you, the more chance there is that your particular circumstances will be shunted. Remember that word – shunt. So if you want to shunt, the only way is to whore yourself out to the milieu of coat-tail-riders that spin like satellites around the truly talented. Luckily most don’t know talent from bin juice so someone is always willing to pander to a little whoring. Whoring is not cheap, nor is it shameful. It is the oldest profession and its necessary to beat the urge to reproduce, and don’t artists want to be the last in the line of history, or at least have something of them survive to the last. So whore without reticence. Play the numbers. Aim to get shunted. And if you can, put it in a frame.

Who in this Brave New World can make things anew? The Artist! Who can draw blood from our modern hearts of stone? The Artist! Who can hear rhetoric and see a fluffy white clouds and a crocheted cosy? The Artist! Who can dress up terror in a snappy suit of grey tweed? The Artist! Who can see past the end of their nose to the end of their family unit? The Artist! Who among us can still box clever? The Artist! And all without drugs or hitting the bottle or scarring or little plaques on white walls that go so little a way to peeling away the layers – these are all Optional Extras. At root is the truth that like a succulent to the sun the artist must turn to the darkest corner of the human condition and there light a candle (or aim a blowtorch).

And no less an artist is s/he who shines that light in a button down outfit with a box of brownies to share. After all, everyone likes brownies. They look like the rest of the shit but that sugar hit sure does take the edge off.

Chewie Loves Leia

Indeed!

(and we all thought incest was her crime...)

“I Started at the Top…”

"...and I’ve been working my way down ever since."

I’m gonna say it. Just come right out there and say it. The opening shot of Touch of Evil is overrated. Technically impressive, artistically forgettable. There. I said it. And I have never been able to appreciate the rest of the film because Charlton Heston as a Mexican is so ludicrous (and massively offensive) in so many dimensions – especially given Heston’s latter-day real-life gun toting – that I can’t begin to comprehend how anyone made such a casting blunder, even in the studio days.

But enough of that…

There’s no doubting that when within the first decade of time in features you write/direct/act in such cinematic genius as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai, you are among the all time greats.

But where do you go from there?

Well, you voice the nefarious intelligent planet-eating cyber planet Unicron in the 80’s animation genius that was the Tranformers Movie. Few cinemaphiles would many reviewers would acknowledge the merit in this kind of role – especially for a giant of the medium like Welles. But not only is the film one of the truly brilliant of it’s genre, Welles lends a chilling menace and moral ambiguity to his part that confirms his versatility and downright genius.

And a decade earlier, in some of the most bruising and intriguing autobiographical moments ever committed to film, he made the obscure classic F For Fake.

Beginning ostensibly as a biopic of the great 60’s art faker Elmir de Hory, the film moves on to chronicle the rise and fall of fraudulent biographer Clifford Irving and the ‘art’ of the fake in general. Implicit along the way is Welles’ fascination with trickery, which blows out in the latter parts of the film to a categorical questioning of his own career and his part in peddling illusion.
The brilliance in the crafting of the film and the heartfelt immediacy of Orson’s confessions cannot be overstated. For this film jockey, F For Fake heralds the legendary status of the big O more than any other film. See it (and the Transformers Movie too, naturally…).

Letter To Michael Leunig...

Dear Michael, you smug fuck,

How many more centimetres of column space will it take before you will be satisfied in your mission to smuggle cynicism and your patronising superiority complex into the zeitgeist of the little ‘l’ liberal public under the cloak of cute and quirky insights.

I’m baffled at how you’ve seeped in so ubiquitously, but bravo for identifying a fault line in the bullshit firewall of the Australian upper-middle class. And bravo for exploiting this collective psychological weakness for wallowing to your own financial ends. Who else would’ve thought that selling us back our own neuroses and paranoia as harmless new-age witticisms would bear such fruit of fame and fortune. Who would’ve thought that such mean spirited and condescending triteness would be happily read as sincere insight.

How are you the self-anointed St Paul of modern society? With a depressed, impotent muppet and his duck? What gives you the right to illustrate our failings, offer none but the tritest consolation, while placing yourself so squarely outside the glass house? Do you really know any better than the audience you ‘illuminate’? If so, please for the love of god, don’t be such a grandiose fuck and spend your time doing something constructive rather than holding a filigree one-way mirror. Peddling cynicism and misery is not a career.

Nothing you say is revelatory. Most of it is actually pointless, and the rest is too fundamentally too mean-spirited to be worth taking on board.

I urge you Michael – kill Mr Curly and the duck and go and work in a shelter. Or at least shut the fuck up in the media. I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know not what you do. But that’s no excuse.

Yours humbly and curly-ly,
Trent Griffiths

What Atticus said...

A friend of mine told me that a bar we were going to had changed it's name from Plan B to Atticus Finch.

I thought, "Well of course. It's the same thing".

Atticus Finch - or some divine intervention like him - is the Plan B for all of us.

Plan A is to act like a tool, ignore any advice or help, dive headlong in on assumptions and half-truths, pre-emptively parade around like king shit while everything invariably fucks up behind us. We don't mean it - sometimes we're even deliberately lead astray by malign forces - but the mess doesn't care for justification or excuse. It just ripples around, poisonous.

Then we desperately hope for a transcendent someone to save the situation and our pride. A knight in shining armour; a superman; an Atticus. And as he passionately, defiantly cries "In the name of God! Do your duty", we might be tempted to believe in a deity, an omniscient being with Finch as it's messenger. But only for a moment. Because Atticus was played by Gregory Peck. And Gregory Peck prided himself played good courageous men who conquered evil in the face of impossible odds. Gregory Peck was a celluloid God. And Gregory Peck died of pneumonia. So much for God. So much for Atticus. There goes Plan B...

The first rule of Fight Club...

I've fucked every relationship I've ever had. Each of them could be qualified. Like Anti-Tyler to Marla as the back of his head is hanging by a thin strip of skin and Y2K is being hastened with homemade explosives - "You met me at a very strange time in my life".
But that's bullshit. It doesn't get any clearer, any more sure, any less strange.
I've been reciting in my head the lines I've given - the "reasons" - from over the years. Somethimes I can't remember, but I can guess.

• I don't need a mother I need a lover (because, heaven forbid, someone cares).
• It's just moving too fast (by my decree).
• I just don't feel like you understand me (or at least the version of me I'm citing now for the purposes of this excuse).
• I'm at a place where I need to focus on me (but actually need to get out of my own head).

Blah blah blash etcetera you know the drill...
Petrified.

Evening On the Ground (or Regret)

(Lilith's Song)

I've covered the best line from a love song ever written. I've heard a lot of Iron & Wine's work - a clutch of albums and a handful of EP's - and although he has a lyrical romanticism, I don't think Sam Beam will even be considered for entry into a love song category. Even fleetingly.

But dammnit, the man is a wordsmith. And on the final track of the cracking Woman King EP - dense with tightly wound, almost spiteful folk songs - he drops what I consider the greatest line in a pop song ever.

Evening on the Ground is a loaded song. To me it feels as though it is an exercise in self-loathing, shouldering and issuing blame because of the loss of love. It hints to me that the lost love might refer to a dead child. There is the explicit reference to "rocks and baby bone", but that isn't conclusive in the context of the song. But for some reason the repetition of the "broken lock"to a garden is so evocative of children. Anyway, literally or metaphorically, the lyrics are powerful.

Especially this line:

We were born to fuck each other

One way or another

I'm not sure why, but it reminds me of a friend Ionce knew - a girl I was very very close to in junior high school. She was fiesty and funny and cool-headed and had the biggest heart you could imagine. And she was beautiful. And I was in love with her. I didn't need to be with her, I just needed to be around her.

When my parents broke up and I was angry, angry, angry, I would stay at her house for a week at a time, sometimes sleeping in the spare room and sometimes in with her. We never hooked up, we were just there for each other. Or mostly she was there for me. She lived with her mum - her dad had disappeared years ago - and her mum understood our connection and opened her arms to me like I was her own.

Then we moved to a new school - senior high - and we started drifting to different circles. We tried to stay close, but when she dropped out of school (it never did suit her style), she disappeared from of my life altogether.

Then years later when I had just moved to the big smoke I saw her on the street. In the dodgy part of town. She looked strange - sort of drawn - but we were genuinely so, so happy to see each other. We went for lunch. It was wonderful catching up, being around her again.

She asked me to go shopping with her - she was a dancer and needed some new gear. I said sure. She lead me into a sex shop. I'd been in one before, but didn't know what we were doing there. She showed me six-inch plastic fuck-me boots and asked what I thought. I should have put two and two together before, but I was still shocked. She was stripping. "Dancing" she insisted it was. Dancing with no clothes on.

I pulled her out on the street and asked her to be straight with me. The mask started to strip, but she kept insisting she was living her childhood dream of being a dancer. Buying the line she had been forced to sell to herself, and that club owners and punters had happily sold her. I asked if she was doing drugs. First "no", then "sometimes", then "no more than anyone else does". If anyone else does it every day.

I realised that on some level she wanted help. And by showing me her world in the way she did, she wanted me to help. But she wasn't ready enough to actually admit that she needed help, let alone accept it and make a fresh start. And I was a nineteen year old student, a dumb kid new to the city with no money of my own, and no balls to be the strong one.

I said I had to go. She asked me for my number - she wanted to hang out more (to try to lever herself into a new direction?). I didn't give it to her. She started to break down, the mask gone. She never wanted this, but she didn't know a way out. I didn't know what else to do. I walked away from her.

It is the greatest single regret of my life. I still don't know what I would have done. I wish I'd done something.

But I guess we were born to fuck each other one way or another...

SWEENEY TODD: The Battle of Impossible Bone Structure

Stunningly sumptuous staging, breathtakingly beguiling bloodthirst, compelling characterisation, beautifully black...
Mrs Bonham-Carter's production of Sweeney Todd is about as perfect a rendering of this bastion of Broadway that anyone could ask for. Even the warbling imperfections of Johnny D's singing voice and piercing shrill of Helena are folded so beautifully into the texture of their characters and the mis-en-scene that to Lindsay-fi them would have been criminal.
But the problem still remains that this is a musical. And the time it takes to get to the point in musicals is so fucking arduous. The spoken parts of the film romp along at a crackingly engaging pace. Then someone starts to trill and the whole thing grinds to a halt. A colourful and well-montage'd halt, but grinding nonetheless. For the time it takes porcelin-boy Anthony to warble to us the extent of his love for the comatose Johanna he could have robbed a guv'ner, hired a hit and disposed of her protector the Judge. Get on with it!
Admittedly I've never been a fan of that particular sub-plot. Altogether to much waving of silk handkerchiefs and sterile indignity for my liking. The grot and grime of the Sweeney/Lovett mess is much more compelling.
Then there is Timmy B's casting. Brilliant on paper, but on screen... If you cast Johnny Depp as your money man - the living definition of ridiculous bone structure - for the love of God don't put Helena Bonham-Carter opposite him. It looked the whole movie like they were going to have each other's eyes out with their cheek bones. Then Jamie Campbell Bower as Antony looks as though he's taken one of Todd's blades to his jowls in an effort to mirror Depp's face-scape. Despite the colour and flourish and swell of the production, at times all I could do was stare in disbelief at the miracles of genetics in front of me.
Does that make it a good movie? No. But it doesn't make it a bad one either... Just one in which the big punches connected from unexpected places.

DEFIANCE In The Face Of CRUSHING LONELINESS

I realised something. That everything I did today - and every other day - is in the quest to be loved. To have love.
The jobs I have had, the friends I keep, the money I have spent and coveted, the places I've travelled and every single other action of my life is an effort to be loved more. To continue to be loved. Yet in every way I have ever been active in my own life is also a reminder of the crushing loneliness of experience.