"Werner Herzog Comes Through."

We went back to the scene of our last auto-da-fe, Bryant Park, to once again witness Werner Herzog in fevered conversation with an unknown property, this time a so-called geographer and artist name of Trevor Paglen.

I'd been in the library since before two, working in the Jewish Division. It was freezing in there, since they had the AC cranked up high as it'd go. I emerged into what was probably a balmy evening shivering. Met wife on the steps -- in fact, by the lion who is called "Patience" - and shrilly remarked "Christ - let's go to H&M and buy a jumper."

We went to get a seat in Bryant Park for this free event "under the stars" and there were no good seats close to the stage, although there was everywhere evidence of that dastardly practice of seat saving.

Here is a sight of humanity as it really is rather than how it loves to think it is; craven , vicious, sneaking, conniving. In a word: seat-saving. It is like this when you alight on a bus and everybody it seems is sat on the aisle seat, jealously keeping the window seat vacant. And these are nominally "grown adults". There used to be one bloke on the coach to college, the Wallingford to Henley route,  who did this every morning . We made fun of him.

This day I got in protracted arguments with two people on the subject of seat-saving. I said, "It can't be done." They said, "It can. It is." My first combatant was a leering, jaundiced-looking Spanish female to whom I said, "You cannot save seats in these United States. This land is your land; this land is my land. From California to the New York islands. From the redwood forests--"  She laid out across the seats and defied me to move her. She was full of Zuccotti Park green bile and defiance. I had a great urge to tip her off the seat. She would have me call the police. Shouldn't leave unless it were in chains. I said I would find a friendly gendarme presently and went off, fuming, looking for a higher authority with whom to plead my case.

In Bryant Park you might as well plead with the granite face of the squatting statue of Gertrude Stein for all the good it'll do you.

I shall say little of this undignified to and fro that after all diminishes me.  I got into a further, more protracted ruck with a liberal-arts wealthy hip grandmother-type, Blythe Danner with a colourless pencil-line moustache and bobby-soxer's pony-tail, who was sitting with pursed lips (sucking pensively on her bleached moustache) tapping away at her laptop as I berated her. Pretending to ignore me as I hectored her, sounding for all the world like my father.

"I almost hate to interrupt your blogging," I said. "It seems a genuine shame. It's a loss to the Western Canon. But I know you," I said. "I know you of old." (I resisted the urge here to sing "You Jack of Diamonds") "I say that I know you and I do. You pledge faithfully to NPR and Channel Thirteen. It's sort of a principle with you. You subscribe to the New Yorker and you are a regular at the 92nd Street Y. You simply cannot wait to see Zadie Smith in conversation with Chris Ware. You really are the life-blood of the arts in New York City, and I say that without exaggeration." I don't think I could have been much crueler if I tried (short of mentioning her moustache.)  I saw that I was nevertheless veering off my subject by broadening the critique somewhat.  I ended up perching like a leprechaun on top of the paperback that she had pedantically laid down to save the seat. I said, "There I have sat on your little paperback; now what for us, you and I, grandmother?"

Ha. It all worked out because the person she was saving the seat for phoned her even while I was sitting on the book that stood in so manfully for that person, and said they couldn't make it. There is a moral lesson embedded in this somewhere but it escapes me.

After a while of that gig-goer's delight, the sight of roadies bumbling about the stage while the pre-show tape blares loudly (this time playing Harry Smith-style old-timey backwater plunder), and after an award-winning female poet suffered us to sit through her humdrum Weltanschauung, Trevor Paglen mounted the stage and explained to us with humility and brio and unctuous charm how he was sending a sort of platinum-plated Viewmaster reel of photos up into the satellite ring around the earth, where it is supposed it will represent the Earth's culture to anybody who chances upon it for the rest of eternity.

It was interesting, if inevitably rather willfully Quixotic, but then Werner Herzog loped onto stage and disabused this man Trevor of all confidence he might have ever had in his project.

"Treffor, I don't believe in it," he rumbled, seconds after beginning. "It will never be discovered by aliens." With Teutonic logic he quite briskly proved conclusively that Trevor's project, years in the making, was folly. "It would take a spacecraft from the nearest galaxy hondreds of thousandts hoff yeahrs to penetrate our solar system; they would have to have generation after generation continuing the flight through space, inbreeding each time to produce a new generation of idiots..."

It was a convincing argument, even if I was meekly thinking (a keen reader of Fantastic Four comics) "What if the aliens can teleport by the use of an elementary wormhole?" (Herzog dealt with wormholes later.)



Herzog was on form. I was chary, not only after my last set-to with him at the Library (see previous post), but also having recently seen the extras on the Grizzly Man DVD which includes a deadly-dull documentary about the making of the film's soundtrack, which has such exciting figures as Richard Thompson, Henry Kaiser and Jim O'Rourke twiddling and noodling in a studio.

We see Herzog "sitting in" on the session, getting all sentimental over the female cello player. It even has Herzog wishing aloud that he could play the cello: "I vould giff ten years off my life to master the cello."

"Has this man never read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons?" I thought, in which excellent novel the nihilist Bazarov sneers at "a paterfamilias learning the cello."

On this evening in Bryant Park, however, Herzog was in a refreshingly pithy frame of mind. 

They were having problems with the microphones. As much as they talked, street hubbub from the restaurant nearby and the streets beyond us kept carrying on to the microphones. Herzog had a microphone on his lapel which he could only be heard on if he held his lapel up and lowered his head to it. Moderator Paul Holdengräber kept fretting about Werner's microphone, but Herzog was pithy about it. "I am fine in this strange position, Paul."

After freewheeling through an array of whimsical images that said next to nothing about life on this planet they showed a slide of a Paul Klee daub of an angel which had been ridiculously over-interpreted in purple prose by Walter Benjamin. When Herzog quite rightly laughed savagely at the Benjamin paean ( -- such laughter a blasphemy in Old New York --), the moderator, Paul Holdengräber, blurted out with weird animation that he had spent ten years of his life in the study of Walter Benjamin and his works, during which years he was an active participant in a menage a trois.

I couldn't see the relevance of this unprovoked revelation at all. 

Didn't want to picture the squalor in my young mind. 

Indeed, the audience could be heard to recoil as one, at this unnecessary nugget of "T.M.I.". 

The audience could be heard to think it would be a very good thing if the future alien visitors (but they can never exist!) are spared this particular piece of information about the sex life of  "The Libertine Holdengräber".

Then it was, I think, that we all thought as one: "Isn't it time for this night beneath the stars to pack up and go home? Isn't it time for the stars to go out and the universe to discreetly end?"

On the way home my wife said to me, "Do you think the menage a trois was with two men or two women?"
I said, "I think it was him, the cat and a houseplant."

"Unused Jokes" Or, "Backwork".

The "Unused Jokes" envelope is beginning to fill up. These jokes are ready-to-go, but they are (I predict) going to be boring to write out. They might also be boring to read. The convoluted mechanics of realizing the joke, of turning it from an idle rumour in my brain-stem to actual "physical" words on the "page," the actual "real-time" backwork involved, put me off writing these jokes down. I've got a whole new round of Dog the Bounty Hunter material around somewhere, unpublished (and so - to the greater world - unsaid), for the same reason: too much bloody backwork.

Still----

JOKE #1. Infinity Gauntlet: The Movie. Starring Klaus Kinski as Thanos.

JOKE-OID #2. Monkees Season Two Revisited.

I watched the last two episodes of The Monkees and then I watched the 1969 TV Special 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee.

The penultimate episode had a commentary by Mike Nesmith, who delivered it in a cool manner. Humility, remorse, chuckling at the excesses of youth. Nice. I was quite pleased because he confirmed some of the aimless ruminations of my previous "postings". For example, he recalled that the Monkees had indeed gotten cocky in the Second Season (he said they "gathered so much unwarranted power") that the character actors were required to carry the shows while the group rolled their eyes at their lines, ad-libbed badly and made their little peace signs. He said, "they would pretty much uniformly despise us or despise the show by the time they left."

DVD commentaries are often unintentionally funny. Nesmith was drawling about the show, then he'd get sidetracked on a subject and fall behind what was actually happening onscreen but he really couldn't give a fuck about that, you could tell... Incidentally, everybody on the DVD commentary tracks seemed to be compelled to remark, at some point, about Micky Dolenz's hair. The factoid that he had straightened his hair diligently in the First Season, but let it grow naturally curly in the Second. Everybody made this comment at some point. As if it were of some urgency that it be communicated to us.

Of all the things you could say... it gives you these sense that life, taken in the long view, is pretty boring, taken all in. As Emerson says, "Not much life in a lifetime."

Anyway Mike Nesmith was the only one who supported this factoid with some "local color" - he recalled how Micky would sit on the set with a pair of pantyhose on his head to keep his hair static and straight.

Nesmith was ruminating as the end credits came up, when you expect the DVD commentator to hush up and let the credits play out, but towards the last seconds he saw a credit for the man who designed the Monkeemobile and he burst out laughing at that: "The guy who designed the Monkeemobile got himself an end credit?"

Micky Dolenz had the honour of the DVD commentary track on the final episode. Micky puts the ADHD into DVD Commentary. The years since the Monkees have not brought wisdom to the Dolenz noggin. He's still hacking out the old hits. Night after night. Still Circus Boy in his mind. He makes Jerry Lewis in his prime sound sober and sagacious. The episode ends with a nice performance by Tim Buckley. Micky mused wistfully, as he watched it over over our shoulders, "I've been thinking of re-recording some Tim Buckley songs."

Yesssssss, I thought. That sounds like an excellent, commercially shrewd notion. Just what the world is crying out for right now in these difficult times: Micky Dolenz Sings Tim Buckley. The time is right. There is the threat of nuclear attack from North Korea. Time to hear Micky Dolenz's version of "Dolphins".

At one point, Dolenz was actually saying, "Oh wow. I remember buying that shirt. I liked that shirt. What did I do with that shirt."

Micky also provided the Commentary Track for the diabolically bad 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. That is to be regretted because this hour-long special was so confusing that I wanted a lucid explanation of How it came to happen and more particularly Why?, and I obviously wasn't going to get any lucidity from Dolenz. It was like trying to sit through Fata Morgana back-to-back with Even Dwarfs Started Small in one bonanza of boredoom [sic].

The alternative to Micky's rhapsodies was a commentary track by Brian Auger, who is a "pivotal" figure in the hour-long special, this inexplicable cock-and-balls story. Brain [sic] was so dull and earnest in his commentary ("the Monkees were splendid chaps... I spent Thanksgiving with Mike Nesmith and his lovely family... hem, here I believe they used a green lens to...") that I ended up sticking with Micky pumping out his fitful bilgewater. Betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, always pick Scylla. After all, it has a girl's name.

At one point, - from the mouths of babes and Micky Dolenz - our guide, our Virgil, just sighed "This is so boring." The other momentary piece of rare and candid clarity slicing through spiritual materialism on this hour-long paean to self-indulgence and obfuscation came from Julie Driscoll of all people, who archly turned to the camera and observed, somewhat redundantly, that the show had degenerated into an "UTTER BLOODY SHAMBLES."

JOKE #3. "Worlds Within Worlds, Mad My Masters." Or, "Cinema Studies PhD at UEA": Clip of Duane Lee Chapman watching Storage Wars on TV. It was a scene with Dave talking to the camera.

JOKE #4. Amazing Race. The navy vet, newly returned from Afghanistan, who unwisely elected to go on the Amazing Race with his wife, who he hasn't lived with in years, immediately on returning from the War on Terror. They squabble incessantly. They say hurtful things that they can't take back.

They really went wild. They possessed the much-desired "Express Pass" which they could play at any time in the race and which would automatically get them past any obstacle on one occasion. They were counseled to use it wisely. They totally wasted it on a momentary whim and then compounded their mistake by giving up on the next task (balancing full bottles of wine on their heads) in a fit of pique and facing the two-hour penalty. As H.P. Lovecraft would say, "They went mad."

JOKE #5. People on Jeopardy really don't think about what they're saying to Alex in the biographical section. They're too nervous. Today, Dave, the reigning champion, actually informed America that his '98 Ford pickup had 140, 000 miles on the clock.

The woman whose ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch-trials.

"Did he order the deaths of anyone?" Alex asked, eyes twinkling.

"Yes he did," she replied, chuckling helplessly.

Asterix Und Der Goths Mit Der Herz Aus Glas Mein Gott Leibchen

I just watched Herzog's Heart of Glass after several months of pronounced dawdling and dithering and evasion (watching Monkees, watching Dog the Bounty Hunter). These Herzog films are forbidding, not in a sense that they will be an intellectual powerball overload, but in the sense that they could conceivably be dull. They almost never are dull, of course (Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small notwithstanding); one wonders why the trepidation persists. Maybe it is the humdrum, unwavering nature of the opening German rural settings of his earlier films. The willful, defiant holding of the shot on the static mountaintop or the roiling mists (or the landing aeroplanes) beyond an acceptable point.

Maybe it is the dulness of the flaxen-haired towheaded German peasant in his shit-coloured smock. The image does not draw us in irresistibly.

I wearily work my way through the three Herzog box-sets I bought years ago on Shaftesbury Avenue, like a duty to the god Weltkunstkultur. Like I ploughed through The Monkees Seasons One and Two. Like I strove like a pit-pony through the Alain Delon box set my wife got me for Christmas. It's absurd; wasn't culture meant to be pleasurable?

It is of course a symptom of the times that we are so ADHD that to sit through anything longer than an episode of Justified is considered a travail.

The Delon box-set was on my "Wish List" so it's hardly my wife's fault, but still it felt like a purifying mortification for the deity of KUNSTKINEMA, sitting through these less-well-known Delon vehicles. The Widow Couderc. The Swimming Pool. Simone Signoret at every turn, imploring us with her sad eyes to invest our spirits in the project of Kunstkinema weltschmerz.

Nothing ever equals Delon's fine work in the Melville films, of course. Still these films were okay and I liked them and I did my duty by the Lord and I watched them. I mortified my flesh and I am a better upstanding Christian for it.

And Herz Aus Glas was a good film too. Not particularly dull. It has a beautiful soundtrack, with Swiss yodelling and medieval music; and when I listened to portions of Herzog's commentary track, and I heard his enduring and unfeigned fannish enthusiasm for the soundtrack, my slight vexation at Herzog as a public man evaporated. Herzog was not posturing here --- he was not feeding his self-ego -- his gaping Cthulhu Mythos -- his shrine to himself as his own hearth deity -- his own skull kept in a cabinet in his Hollywood home -- he was speaking as an unabashed enthusiast, and it was good to hear. A bit of sincere humility Christ Sake.

I even felt bad for some of the uncharitable unChristian things I said about him in a previous post.

(The fact remains that his attested ignorance of Nick Broomfield is the arrantest bunk.)

When I was watching this film I thought, of course, in my chronic comparing way, that the film was very similar to the beloved "B.D." Asterix and the Soothsayer (1972).

Heart of Glass was made the year after the German edition of this book (Der Seher) was published (although it appeared in serial form in MV-Comix from 1972 to 1973).

I suppose that M. Herzog will now claim that he has "never heard" of Asterix the Gaul!

IT IS TO LAUGH, NICHT WAHR?

Werner Herzog Says He Don't Know Nick Broomfield

THE TWO GREATEST LIVING DOCUMENTARY-MAKERS --- THEIR SECRET LIFELONG ENMITY --- LIKE LINCOLN AND JEFFERSON DAVIS IT IS SAID --- SIMILAR IN SO MANY WAYS AND YET DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED ON THE WORLDWIDE "FIELD".

I was at the Library last night, there for to see Werner Herzog hold forth on the subject of the death sentence. His interrogator on the dais was somewhat of the "Charlie Rose School" of interviewing: he was partial to interrupting mid-sentence, just as the subject was getting going. He coupled this was an uncanny ability to poise, mouth agog, in silence for agonizing seconds on end while Herzog fanned the air with his hands in frustration: he had finished his sentence.

The conversation, somewhat freewheeling, was definitely a "curate's egg" - the good parts of which included Herzog's outspoken endorsement of Vladimir Putin, which you could tell perplexed the liberal arts community of New York City; also his enraptured praise for the library's book deposits under Bryant Park. I liked, and appreciated, Herzog's instinct that this was in its way a "sacred grove." I who have toiled in these groves lo these ten years---

Forgive me if I wax pretentious---!

The less noble moments in the evening's entertainments included the peculiar passage of time, irrevocable and alienated to me now, when Herzog tried to discuss the mysteries of Mycenean Greek, aided only by slides showing a book on the subject. I noted with displeasure puerile notes and underlining on the text. I felt like I was attending one of my own university lectures back in the old country, with my various xeroxes on acetate upon the lightbox-- "ah.. this is Thoreau with a beard; now, this is him without." Some of our most intimate passions and pleasures are really untransferable to other humanoids, I must regretfully conclude.

Now Herzog fell to reading from one book after another of middling prose which he deemed exceptional. Here was one of those books "brilliantly rediscovered" by the New York Review of Books imprint & resubmitted for the pleasuring and edification of NPR-listening McSweeneys hipsters. Ensues a protracted description of an owl. The audience hushes and warbles reverently because they have been told that this is good prose so it must be.

Then Herzog's interlocutor woke up for a moment to read a fine quotation from il miglior fabbro, Ralph Waldo Emerson, comparing death with the end of summer. Herzog responded: "Yes, that was very beautiful. Now let me read from Cormac McCarthy." Followed a bemusing passage describing a bull on a dusty tract of desert. Red clouds on its flanks &c., --- or some such.

Bulldust: seems apt.

Another score agin was the little old lady behind me whispering "That's right" to certain comments Herzog made. Testifying. Uncannily, every time he earned this lady's endorsement, I felt that he was mouthing commonplaces and platitudes. I also felt like this little old lady -- or her clone -- doppelganger -- or let us say her tanist in the tribe -- let us be mythological since that was the mood of the evening -- has been behind me at every cultural soiree I have attended in this good city New York. She crops up like the proverbial bad shekel at Film Forum -- she is at the Met when ye would goe --

Enough about that jazz. The thing over, I went to get my book signed by Herzog. And since I must be who I am, I of course did not fail to have a brilliant question to put to him as he signed.

I should really have learned, over the years, that these exchanges with the admired writers and artists (or, as Herzog says he views himself, "soldiers") never go well. They are too busy signing their names to give my incisive questions the rapt attention and full consideration they deserve. There is a line of dreary drones behind me as I ask it. The situation is awash with potential for misery. But I think it is also the type of question I go in with. I always seem to ask questions of influence or shared characteristics with contemporaries, and these questions tend to irritate the people in question. They fly too close to the petulant ego.

Mein Gott, they fly too close to the sun!!!

(These questions tend to irritate people in general. At university, I was roundly upbraided by a senior academic for my persistent inquiries into the mysteries of influence. "Why influence?" he cried from his regular booth in the bar, slamming his tankard on the table with emotion. "Why not the clash of the valiant unwashed against the prevailing ideology?"

"I don't know, I just don't seem much to kyear," I responded [quoting George Arnold].

This as I was trying to claim Cotton Mather's influence on --- what --- the Uncanny X-Men?.)

(Then I was in Rapallo, too, among those who had known Pound on the lawn at Saint Elizabeths --- and I went to them and I was among them and I asked them each of them, Did Poundie ever speak of Artemus Ward? Did he ever speak of Mark Twain?" ["Did he ever mention me?"] )

(And again see also my question to Updike, as he signed my copy of Terrorist: "Is this your Catcher in the Rye?"

"Fuck off home, sonny."

I do not win them with these my questions.

I am always going to be the preppy guy with the horn-rim glasses and the tweed jacket irritating Dylan in Don't Look Back who doesn't know what to do when Dylan hands him a harmonica.

If I was ever to collect my "celebrity interviews" in a book, each actual interview would consist of one or maybe two lines, with the usual considerable preface and epilogue (or: "flummery") in which I made my excuses.

This time, in my defence, I asked the question which I would, after all, have liked answered. It wasn't abstract or arbitrary - I had been wondering it for some time, since seeing Herzog's excellent documentaries The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974) and La Soufriere (1977) several years ago and noticing a familiar tone and even methodology. My question was a good one, I maintain it, I say, goddammit, and the answer it got flummoxed me.

I asked him: What his opinion of Nick Broomfield was.

"I do not know who this person is," Herzog replied steelily through his permanently pursed lips. He'd signed one book for me, and, at my request, written To F_____ in it. However after this question, he most summarily signed the second book, notably without the gentle dedication.

I was slightly taken aback by his denial of Nick Broomfield. I said, "He's an English documentary-maker. He's made films on subjects quite similar to those in some of yours. For example, about the penal system."

(Herzog, this evening, was -- in his roundabout way -- promoting a cable TV series [? - it was never made quite clear] of documentaries about the eccentric characters who make "death row" their home. Nick Broomfield, as I thought was well-known, at least in documentary-maker circles, has also made films about people on death row and in jail, and in fact at all the stations and strata within the wider "worldwide world of crime" and criminal prosecution. I give you the superb Juvenile Liaison [1975] and its sequel [1990] about quaint English pre-teen delinquents and their treatment by the authorities. Then here is Tattooed Tears [1978] about a juvenile correctional facility in California. Here is the famed visit to Suge Knight in prison in Biggie and Tupac (2002). Then there are of course, most prominently you would suppose, the documentaries Broomfield made [1994, 2003] about Aileen Wuornos while she was on death row. )

I was taken aback, probably visibly, by this unexpected response, anyway. My expression bespoke bullshit.

It is well enough known that the worst thing one can say about somebody is that one does not know the cove. People say it and sometimes - perhaps even oftentimes - it is just as they say. But sometimes (perhaps even oftentimes) it is not so. Rather it is the most cutting remark one could make. "I don't know the puppy." "The coxcomb is a stranger to me."

Woe unto the person who says he don't know a man and he is then caught in the lie and it is shown ("thuswise:") that he knows the man.

After I had "explained" to Herzog who Nick Broomfield was, because of course he didn't know, Herzog repeated gravely the fact that he did not know who he was. He was quite at pains to publish the fact that he did not know this Broomfield creature. Even as I was leaving, he was saying for a third time "I do not know who this person you are talking about is, so I am sorry I cannot answer your question."

I was inevitably reminded of Herzog's "war-of-words" with Abel Ferrara over Herzog's film Bad Lieutenant New Orleans: Port of Call (a very good film, incidentally, and far superior to Ferrara's earlier film Bad Lieutenant). Or, as Borges described it, "two bald men fighting over a comb." In that instance, too, certain corners of the filmic industry doubted whether Herzog was strictly honest in his public claim that he had "never heard" of Abel Ferrara or the original Bad Lieutenant. But why might Werner dissemble?

Three words: ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE.

Some artists (of whatever variety), however personable and magnanimous and gosh-shucks they may appear in public appearances, can withal be extremely protective of their published selves and souls. One score I had against Herzog I discovered when reading Herzog on Herzog, a book of interviews with the great man.

In this book he is interviewed about his filmic career &c. &c. There appear in the text certain anecdotes that he tells which are almost word-for-word identical with his previous tellings of them in his (excellent) documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend (1999). For instance, there is a good line Herzog uses in that film about Kinski trashing a room so thoroughly that all the fragments of the furniture and contents of the room "could be passed through a tennis racket." This is a novel and illustrative description. He says the exact same thing in Herzog on Herzog (2002) which instantly halves the puissance of the original usage. I thought then, Wasn't the author of the book - who surely had a thoroughgoing familiarity with Harzog's films - vexed at being given second-hand chickenfeed?

When I hear somebody repeat themselves, repeat their best lines I should say, jealously devise and then trot out fine words for sundry occasions even, I think to myself: "strictly self-fashioning." People - at least those people we hold in high esteem - should not be caught so flagrantly in self-fashioning. Larry David does the same thing.

Don't they suppose that parties interested in their work might conceivably come across both usages, as I did, and feel a certain subtle deflation?

I believe the same egotistical preening is at work in Werner Herzog's insistence that he "don't know Nick Broomfield."

In the interest of "transparency," I must declare an interest inasmuch as I have been called egotistical myself, and I believe there may be truth in it. Even so I am perhaps egotistical enough that - were I to be interviewed on the scale Herzog surely is - I would endeavour to be ever-vigilant against repeating the best-loved lines and also the mock-casual-denial-of- recognition motif. Werner, you and Nick Broomfield were both guests in the documentary category of the Toronto International Film Festival in September last year. Did you not perhaps hear tell of him among your colleagues?

Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!

Egotistical though I may be, I do, and we must, travail against the tendency, rather like Emerson did.

I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

Funnily enough, I can pinpoint in my memory the first time I physically recoiled from somebody because I caught them in the act of egotistical self-fashioning, and that too was a gentleman of Teutonic extract: one J___ M______.

This J___ was a charming, excellent, guileful, gregarious, urbane, designing man, who overcame ye with modest charm,-- hooded eyes -- serpentine tongue -- but then would after a while over-egg the mixture and become unctuous - imposing -- and he would slip - his masque would -- and you would mark the chink in his works - the conceit beneath the modesty and the humble handwringing. ("The poor handwriting.") This phenomenon, when a man overplays his hand and exposes his vile, pulsing egotism, -- became known universally as the "J___ M______ Moment", indeed.

Since then I find myself more and more apt to recoil when the ego rears up - as it did last night, Mein Herr, in your avowed and over-said denial.

I hurtled away from this, yet another peculiar exchange with a cult director (see also: David Lynch, John Waters), and walked headlong into Paul Giamatti, who I grabbed him earnestly by the hand and told him he was "great in John Adams."

Only walking home, down at the turnstile in the subway by Bryant Park, did I think "I should have said how much I enjoyed him in Fred Claus!"