A Day and a NIght with Movies and Cat

Another terrible malady has me in its grips.  Since I am still taking heavy antibiotics. . . I don't know.  It worries me.  I dream of health and energy returning.  It does not feel in the immediate offing.

And so the 4th went by without my seeing another person.  The day and the night passed around me rather than through me as if I were a rock in a river stream.

The cat seemed not to notice my illness and was happy to have me around.

"Aimez-moi, aimez-moi."

She will be disappointed today when I go back to the factory.  She cherishes our quiet life together, resenting any intrusions whether it be from friends or the postman.  Wherever I go, she goes.  And I have ruined her by giving tastes of my food at mealtimes.  Only dmall amounts, though, which really keeps her from overeating the dry food.

Last night she was extremely happy for I lay upon the big couch and watched two documentaries.  She snuggled and pawed and chirped like a bird.

The first was "Black, White, and Gray," about Max Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe.  Patti Smith is interviewed extensively as she was part of their threesome.  She is the only one who speaks very well of Mapplethorpe.  But the film is about Wagstaff and his incredible influence in the art world of the sixties and seventies.  If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it when you are between things.

The second was "Hubert Selby Jr.: It/ll be Better Tomorrow."  It was an interesting tribute but not such a good piece of filmmaking.  There is nothing gripping or even very informative about it.  I found it fascinating, though, that one of the Polish brothers, those same brothers who made "For Lovers Only," was interviewed in the film.

What I got from watching them both, though, is that a lot of artists, musicians, and writers are dumb.  Just plain dumb.  The interviews are filled with cliches and the sort of convoluted statements that end up meaning nothing, full of "likes" and "ums."  It reminded me of the interviewing of athletes, each of them using the same pat phrasing.  It is obvious that many of the people in the films talked to one another and validated that "artist talk."  Even the poems that Patti Smith read fell like dead plums.  You had to be there.  It was the zeitgeist.  It was the time.

You may be tiring of the movie reviews, but that is all I've had for weeks now.  I am short on experience and conversation.  Once I'm well again, I will tromp from equator to pole taking photos and getting stories.  But my trips have been scuttled for now.  I must hunker down and suffer through what needs to be done.  Sometimes it seems impossible.