–*At least two bombs went off, though we can’t discount that one of the building echoes might have been a third or a fourth bombing.

–*Several Saudi nationals were taken into custody.

–*These Saudi nationals were then booked, tried, convicted and hanged after a speedy jury trial by day’s end.

–*The chief suspect is Mohamed Atta.

–*Marathons were invented by the Egyptians.

–*Boston is located in the great state of New Hampshire.

–*Every foreigner who fled the scene of the blast is a suspect. Only foreigners who ran toward the blast are in the clear.

–*Abe Vigoda is dead.

–*It wasn’t a bombing, it was just a fallen scaffolding.

–*It wasn’t really tax day, since you can always file an extension.

–*The Boston police cannot determine at this time if they have arrested a suspect.

–*The Boston police have been holding a mysterious man in an iron mask for 34 years who is thought to be President Obama’s twin brother, the man who can prove Obama was born in Kenya.

–*A conflagration later reported at the JFK Library was reported, but it was uncertain whether the event was a mechanical fire, an explosion, or just readers’ passion for books.

–*The New York Post‘s source is a woman named Lennay Kekua and The New York Post deeply loves her and believes she is The New York Post‘s soul mate.

–*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad likely factors into this story somewhere;  The New York Post is just trying to find the right paragraph to stick him in.

–*Test X180 with fenugreek extract and ginseng will improve your performance on and off the field.

–*According to Boston police, Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism allowed America to feel good about itself again.

But eventually I’ll have to. I’ll have to explain to him how people hate and use violence to achieve political ends, that they are capable of extreme thinking they can’t give voice to and must demonstrate with force what they can’t do at the ballot box. Writers and artists sometimes don’t give themselves enough credit for their existential advantages–the fact that they have a means to express themselves. A voice to shape their environment, even if it is to an infinitesimal degree. Even if it’s through a painting in a garage that nobody sees, or a piece of music unpublished or a poorly traveled blog. But the crippled, politically disenfranchised soul who can bomb a peaceful sporting event using pressure cookers filled with nails is the sort who makes violence an expression of what he’s otherwise impotent to say.

We all have extreme beliefs. But we have to absorb other people’s realities. We have to embrace freedom. We also have to recognize when freedom becomes tyrannous in and of itself–an infinitely regressing obsession with perceiving barriers. No matter who this person was, he or she has a perception problem and perceives that he is in some way not free. Some people walk down the street with endless freedoms and still see nothing but a jail.

I can’t yet tell my son that it’s statistically very unlikely that he’ll ever be hurt in a tragedy like this. Or that terrorists are rarely that successful and that people tend to react disproportionately to rare events because of fear and make irrational future decisions prompted by statistical outliers. (The Atlantic has a good article on this.) I remember after 9/11–there was a lot of argument that New York, having been attacked, would immediately be attacked again. Specifically, by nukes. That fear even roused the sage Warren Buffett to decry imminent nuclear strikes on D.C. and the Big Apple, which made people take notice of course, even though he’s a investor, not Nostradamus, and, if you know anything about his investing philosophy, it has nothing to do with predicting trends. In fact, his prediction was an anomaly for his  philosophical and financial temperament. I told a friend frightened by Buffett’s prediction that the 9/11 attacks actually proved just how desperate our enemies were. It showed, demonstratively, that they had no nukes. Nor bombs. Nor guns. They had to come up with an almost impossible plot, one that could have been frustrated at several points (and partly was over the skies of Pennsylvania). If the entire plot had been foiled ahead of time, let’s be honest, many of us would have derided it as hopelessly cartoonish.

Of course it wasn’t foiled. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t rare. According to some psychologists, my child is only going to be as anxious as I am about this and the horrible other news that has come down this week in Congress and West, Texas; these days, every attack, explosion and school shooting makes me anxious. I can’t yet impart to my son the wisdom of statistics. Instead I have to absorb the wisdom of forbearance and tolerance and critical thinking and feel confident enough about my world that I can make my confidence his.

And he liked large-breasted women. A lot. Enough to write dialogue for Russ Meyer vamps and to give films like My Tutor three stars, which is about three stars more than it deserved.

But even though I loved Sneak Previews as a child (remember “Dog of the Week,” S&E fans?) and the successor shows as a teenager, I soon grew out of Roger Ebert the TV star and grew to love and be influenced by Roger Ebert the writer. For anybody sensitive to language, for whom the written word holds endless pleasures, Roger Ebert wrote spare, wonderful, epigrammatic lines free of pomposity and pseudo-intellectual BS. He didn’t need three-dollar words in every sentence to cover up some intellectual insecurity about his job. He was too busy navigating his emotional reaction to film in commonsense language with razor-like accuracy and a journalist’s power of observation. He could tell you with one line of e.e. cummings poetry why the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t work. He could tell you with a quick, effortless, snide comment why something that had pretended to art had failed so miserably. He reminded me all the time what Charles Bukowski said of all writers: If they can’t write a simple line like “The little dog walked down the street,” they probably can’t write at all.

This golden gutted instinct was not on display, necessarily in his few, very strange attempts at screenwriting for Meyer, which went from Shakespearean verse to shit and back again. Of his lines from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of those I have never been able to get out of my head is “E’er this night does wane, you will drink the black sperm of my vengeance.” And I do not mean that as a compliment.

But his prose is as cutting, feeling, compassionate as Hemingway’s, just as concerned about what made cinematic emotional sense as real emotional sense. You learned to appreciate his idiosyncrasies, including his inability to say anything bad about his favorite stars even when they’d done bad work. And you might also notice if you read his oeuvre for a long time that he was maybe a bigger supporter of Lesbian sex in film than Lesbians themselves might feel comfortable with.

I could look up all his barbs to Siskel on YouTube. But I prefer to share some of my favorite lines from Roger Ebert, the writer, the guy who showed you that if you wanted to express yourself about life and art and movies, and where they meet in screwed up ways, best to write from your heart.

A selection of Ebert:

“What idea or philosophy could we expect to find in Apocalypse Now–and what good would it really do, at this point after the Vietnam tragedy, if Brando’s closing speeches did have the “answers”? Like all great works of art about war, Apocalypse Now essentially contains only one idea or message, the not-especially-enlightening observation that war is hell. We do not see Coppola’s movie for that insight–something Coppola, but not some of his critics knows well. … Coppola also well knows (and demonstrated in the Godfather films) that movies aren’t especially good at dealing with abstract ideas–for those you’d be better off turning to the written word–but they are superb for presenting moods and feelings, the look of a battle, the expression on a face, the mood of a country.”

“In Blue Velvet, [Isabella] Rossellini goes the whole distance, but [director David] Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character. What’s worse? Slapping somebody around or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?”

“All those years ago, when 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released, I began my review with a few lines from a poem by e.e. cummings: ‘I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.’ … 2010 is very much a 1980s movie. It doesn’t match the poetry and the mystery of the original film, but it does continue the story, and it offers sound, pragmatic explanations for many of the strange and visionary things in 2001 that had us arguing endlessly through the nights of 1968. This is, in short, a movie that tries to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.”

“The Muppet Movie not only stars the Muppets but, for the first time, shows us their feet. And if you can figure out how they were able to show Kermit pedaling across the screen, then you are less a romantic than I am: I prefer to believe he did it himself.”

“Watching [Robert Altman's] Nashville is as easy as breathing and as hard to stop.”

“Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories is a deliberate homage to 8½, the 1963 film in which Federico Fellini chronicled several days in the life of a filmmaker who had no idea where to turn next. The major difference between the two films is that Fellini’s movie was about a director bankrupt of new ideas while Allen’s is a movie by a director with no new ideas.”

“When Hubert Selby Jr. wrote the book that inspired [Last Exit To Brooklyn] 25 years ago, it was attacked in some quarters as pornographic, but it failed the essential test: It didn’t arouse prurient interest, only sadness and despair.”

“In [Personal Best], Mariel Hemingway plays plays a young, naive natural athlete. … Patrice Donnelly, as a more experienced athlete, tries to comfort the younger girl. In a dormitory room that night, they talk. Donnelly shares whatever wisdom she has about training and running and winning. They smoke a joint. They kid around. They arm wrestle. At this point, watching the film, I had an interesting experience. I did not already know that the characters in the film were homosexual, but I found myself thinking that the scene was so erotically charged that, “if Hollywood could be honest,” it would develop into a love scene. Just then, it did!”

“From the moment [in Black Widow when Debra Winger and Theresa Russell] meet, there’s a strong undercurrent of eroticism between the two women. We feel it, they feel it and the movie allows it one brief expression–when Russell roughly reaches out and kisses Winger. But Ron Base, who wrote the screenplay, and Bob Rafelson, who directed, don’t follow that magnetism. They create the unconvincing love affair between Winger and the tycoon to set up a happy ending that left me feeling cheated.”

“I approach Heathers as a traveler in an unknown country, one who does not speak the language or know the customs and can judge the natives only by taking them at their word. The movie is a morbid comedy about peer pressure in high school, about teenage suicide and about the deadliness of cliques that not only exclude but also maim and kill. Life was simpler when I was in high school. ‘Teenagers don’t have any trouble with it,’ the film’s director, Michael Lehmann, has said of the movie. ‘It’s always adults that are shocked.’ This statement is intended, I assume, in praise of teenagers. Adulthood could be defined as the process of learning to be shocked by things that do not shock teenagers, but that is not a notion that has occurred to Lehmann.”

“I know, I know: He’s trying to demystify the West, and all those other things hotshot directors try to do when they don’t really want to make a Western. But this movie [Heaven's Gate] is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.”

“Your Movie Sucks.” [A book title]

“[Van] Heflin, as the guy with the bomb in his briefcase, is perhaps the only person in the cast to realize how metaphysically absurd Airport basically is. The airplane already has a priest, two nuns, three doctors, a stowaway, a customs officer’s niece, a pregnant stewardess, two black GIs, a loudmouthed kid, a henpecked husband, and Dean Martin aboard, right? So obviously the bomber has to be typecast, too. … What Heflin does is undermine the structure of the whole movie with a sort of subversive overacting. Once the bomber becomes ridiculous, the movie does, too. That’s good, because it never had a chance at being anything else.”

“We sense that in some ways [Hannah and Her Sisters knows the characters] better than they will ever know themselves. And to talk about the movie that way is to suggest the presence of the most important two characters in the movie, whom I will describe as Woody Allen and Mickey. Mickey is the character played by Allen; he is a neurotic TV executive who lives in constant fear of death or disease. … If Mickey is the character played by Woody Allen in the movie, Allen also provides another, second character in a more subtle way. The entire movie is told through his eyes and his sensibility; not Mickey’s, but Allen’s. From his earlier movies, especially Annie Hall and Manhattan, we have learned to recognize the tone of voice, the style of approach. Allen approaches his material as a very bright, ironic, fussy, fearful outsider; his constant complaint is that it’s all very well for these people to engage in their lives and plans and adulteries, because they do not share his problem, which is that he sees through everything, and what he sees on the other side of everything is certain death and disappointment.”

“[River's Edge] is the best analytical film about a crime since The Onion Field and In Cold Blood. Like those films, it poses these questions: Why do we need to be told this story? How is it useful to see limited and brutish people doing cruel and stupid things? I suppose there are two answers. One, because such things exist in the world and some of us are curious about them as we are curious in general about human nature. Two, because an artist is never merely a reporter and by seeing the tragedy through his eyes, he helps us to see it through ours.”

“One day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.”

“Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull is a movie about brute force, anger, and grief. It is also, like several of Scorsese’s other movies, about a man’s inability to understand a woman except in terms of the only two roles he knows how to assign her: virgin or whore. There is no room inside the mind of the prizefighter in this movie for the notion that a woman might be a friend, a lover, or a partner. She is only, to begin with, an inaccessible sexual fantasy. And then, after he has possessed her, she becomes tarnished by sex. Insecure in his own manhood, the man becomes obsessed by jealousy — and releases his jealousy in violence. It is a vicious circle. Freud called it the “madonna-whore complex.” Groucho Marx put it somewhat differently: ‘I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.’”

“I am trying to imagine what it would be like to write this review [of My Left Foot] with my left foot. Quite seriously. I imagine it would be a great nuisance–unless, of course, my left foot was the only part of my body over which I had control. If that were the case, I would thank God that there was still some avenue down which I could communicate with the world.”

And last, but not least, my favorite line from Roger Ebert, from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a line so silly you can’t help but think of him now sweeping heaven’s floor with his panache:

“This is my happening, and it freaks me out!”

RIP

It’s about marriage equality. And it’s about time.

–*He heads off to the Room of Tears to don his papal vestments and remove the cleaning ticket.

–*To prove he is infallible, he must predict tonight’s meal, which must then be served.

–*He can pick out 10 people from the crowd and canonize them on the spot, hopefully a few hot chicks.

–*He should make up with a few new completely arbitrary and physically painful rituals just to win the respect of any cardinals who did not vote for him.

–*He must get even with Don Barzini and the heads of the other five families as he baptizes his nephew.

–*He’s got to pray a lot in front of a lot of important statues, keeping the language specific so that it doesn’t look a little superstitious maybe.

–*After inspecting the papal apartments, he must observe in Latin, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”

–*After hour six, maybe he could lighten the mood with a little joke. How about remarking at Castel Gandolfo, “None shall pass!”

–*He must thank Harvey Weinstein.

–*On Thursday, he must blame the preceding Pope for the failed economy, as per tradition.

–*He must give a speech adhering to tradition and resisting outside forces of modernization that corrupt our souls–like premarital sex and fiduciary transparency at the Vatican bank.

–*He should set to work on a 20,000 word ex cathedra encyclical taking a stand on eros versus agape, tradition versus modernization, or the Beatles versus the Stones.

–*He should take a ride in his new fancy ass car.

–*Sugar doesn’t make you fat when you’re infallible. He should eat like a pig.

Well, this sure is a surprise. No, please you don’t have to stand up for this. I am in the bosom of my peers, and right now we are all winners. Of course, all of you are of the highest caliber in your fields. Ben Affleck, you are a double threat. Triple if I note how many babies you have. Ha ha. Just kidding with you there. Jessica Chastain, you have come out of nowhere in the last few years like a hurricane and just blown off our windows and doors and roofs and foundations. You were the moral center behind Zero Dark Thirty and who wouldn’t torture those bastards to get Bin Laden? I would. There are times when a self-righteous meltdown is totally justified both onscreen and off.

Jennifer Lawrence, or if I may, J. Law, I think you’re only 15 or something and here you are beating out Meryl Streep for awards. Scripture says,  “A child shall lead them,” but I think it also says a child will hand their asses to them on Oscar night. (No offense, Isaiah 11:6.)

I’ve been pretty fortunate to have worked on my script for so long when it was in the development stages with somebody who knows Steven Spielberg. This was a labor of love you gave me this Oscar for, and though I sit before you now, gleaming trophy in hand, most of the gleaming I’ve done over the last few years was born of the tanks of sweat coming down my glistening forehead and neck as I struggled over this thing I called “Piece of shit” maybe 1,200 times. The original draft is covered with blood and stomach acid.

When I first broached the idea for the screenplay with my agent (who is not at CAA, by the way), he said that my idea was more than a downer. It was also truly hostile. I had to ride that compliment for three more years alone as I worked through draft after draft and honed the script that you all know now to be a story of a man caught between extremes. My film was about the audacity of the human spirit in a world where everybody is a scorpion capable of fucking his own face. A world where people who called you their best friends and toasted you at your wedding one day could turn around the next and divorce you like an ax-handle turd and tell people you were on lithium for two years in the 90s.

I know that you are all, my peers, on the same page with me tonight when I talk about the kind of integrity I mean. Tommy Lee Jones. Ang Lee. Adele. All of you people of great sensitivity know. You who record human emotions like a photographic plate burns at the kiss of sunlight. You, my peers. Jack Nicholson. Helen Hunt. Daniel Day-Lewis. You who like me also likely know how loathsome it is to even be touched by other people when you have to brush by them in a supermarket. We who have the tender emotions of artists carry them like open wounds and yet must constantly suffer these indignities and miseries and beclown ourselves for people who are not fit to eat after us at Denny’s.

When you tripped after receiving your award, J Law, you said, “Aww shucks, you’re just giving me a standing ovation because I tripped.” When we both know what you wanted to say: “You all want to kill me. I can smell the hate from up here.” Sometimes I feel as an artist that the only safe place I have is up here on this stage with this award, yet tomorrow I will have to walk the streets alone among savages and dogs. Jennifer, you and I are safe up here. But for how long? For … how …  long?

Ben Affleck said when earning his producing award for Argo that you can’t hold grudges when you’re in Hollywood. How right he was. You must not ever show people all the horrible grudges you hold. You must instead hold them in until they make you sick with ague-y tendons and malignant formations in your pancreas. You must turn those grudges instead into fantasy on paper–specifically the fantasy of watching your enemies die in horrendous pain and bloodshed while suffering the beatings, fistings, garrotings and other degradations of Salo. You must put these fantasies on paper, waiting like a crouching tiger until the day you can make them real. Yes, right on the money, Ben Affleck. Believe me, frere, I know exactly how you feel after your Oscar snub, the pain like a fresco of freshly painted coral sticking to the insides of your stomach muscles. Yes, no grudges. Wink!

So yes, Academy, now I thank you. I thank you vile pigs for the validation that can no longer nourish me because it is too late in coming and can only sustain me the way eating pieces of notebook paper sustains an anemic. Yes, Academy, please honor me now and pretend that it is the sum of pain and humiliation and tawdry nights of loveless intercourse with streetwalkers. This is my valediction. Ang Lee says namaste, but I say kiss my boots you worms. All of you bow down and feel the sole of it on your neck and then watch me stick your patronizing Oscar up your effete Range Rover driving asses! I take your love and hand it back to you as abuse! How do you like that? Fuck this award! Fuck it!

Also, I’d like to thank Harvey Weinstein and Sid Sheinberg.

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

–*You are fashion forward and you were snubbed in a major actress category.

–*Somebody rolled you up in a carpet and tried to kidnap you, and after you escaped, you thought you could own the rolled up carpet look.

–*Your water just broke.

–*You are truly curious about which appendage might fall off without blood circulation.

–*You are trying to embarrass Ryan Seacrest.

–*You are in violation of networks standards and practices.

–*You look best in bias cuts and 40 weight motor oil.

–*If Joan Rivers wasn’t abusing you, you wouldn’t know who you are.

–*Your ombre hair extensions make it highly likely you cheated on your SAT.

–*Shiny shiny I am 12.

–*The L.A. County Sheriff is aware of your movements.

–*Whale bone corsets in the early 1900s led to multiple health problems in women and why are we better than they are?

–*If it can hold my bait and tackle, it’s good enough for these Hollywood big shots.

–*You were comfortable enough with yourself and your success to wear a tie-dye and jams.

–*Your plunging neckline is a pleasing distraction from the fact that your movie defended codified torture.

–*I am Russell Crowe, and I am not afraid to go outside my comfort zone and take all of you with me.

–*I am Sally Field, and if you are a TV host who tries kiss me without my permission, I have a battery of lawyers who will crawl up your ass and start removing the contents like the crew from Ben Hur Moving Company.

–*You are comfortable around both couture and medical trepanning equipment.

–*You are a 31 in the legs, which means nobody makes anything for you and you do not deserve to be here.

–*She was an angel.

–*No she wasn’t, she was a bad mom.

–*Yeah, she abandoned her kids.

–*No she didn’t, she tried to get them back.

–*Yeah, by kidnapping them. Drug addict!

–*Yeah, and her music blows.

–*This was a senseless tragedy.

–*If by “senseless” you mean everybody saw it coming a mile away.

–*You guys don’t know her pain. I know she kidnapped her son, did drugs, forged prescriptions for OxyContin, drove drunk, overdosed while pregnant, jumped bail, neglected her children and murdered a dog. But are those things worthy of judgment?

–*Rest in peace, Mindy.

–*Rot in hell, Mindy!

–*I don’t believe the hate I see on the Internet.

–*I don’t believe the hate I see on the Internet and I am only three years old.

–*Dean Cain is hot!

–*The church is very strict about suicide and she will not be saved. Love, Pope Benedict (ret)

–*The Second Amendment is the law and nobody can change that. Just try.

–*Look, Mindy never did anything to me personally, so I guess I’ll give her a pass.

–*I wish I could just hug those two children close to me, feel their little hearts beating against mine, fondle their hair, whisper to them, “It’s OK. It’s OK” while I explain to them that their mother was a drug-addled screw up.

–*Why does Roger Clemens get to be involved in EVERY scandal?

–*I don’t know. I trust Dr. Drew implicitly and I still think he can save her.

–*I do not trust the liberal media! Mindy is alive!

–*Whore whore whore!

–*You are an evil pig for saying that.

–*He’s just trying to get a rise out of you and her fans.

–*Don’t tell me who I can call evil.

–*Fuck you!

–*No, fuck you!

–*My sister looks like Mindy McCready.

–*Good, maybe your sister will kill herself.

–*You’ve got to be pretty messed up to make Tom Sizemore look good.

–*When I think of those poor children, it just gets me thinking about my own life and my OxyContin additions and the outstanding warrant I have and my constant fear that the police are going to break down my door any minute. And I just think of those poor, poor children.

–*When I got in an argument with my boyfriend about going out with the girls, I put on “Guys Do It All The Time” by Mindy to rub it in his face. And when we broke up and got back together, I had to play him “Ten Thousand Angels” to let him know I wouldn’t fall for it all again. And when we did get back together and broke up again I played “You’ll Never Know.”

–*Is there any question about why he left you?

–*I don’t know, I’m pretty smart about these things. I think this had something to do with the 9/11 conspiracy.

–*An ecclesiastical question: Is that dog going to hell?

–*I never met Mindy, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and blame myself for her death.

–*Death diminishes all of us. Even Mindy McCready’s death. I think.

–*Her Web site headline is “I’m Still Here.” Will somebody please do something about that?

–*Satin Satin Satin!

–*The spelling is “Satan” you dipshit.

–*Mindy, you were let down by so many people. Your mother, your father, BNA Records, the father of your first baby, the judges, Roger Clemens, the parole board, Dr. Drew, Vivid Entertainment, the father of your second baby, the Arizona police, the Tennessee police, Capitol Records, Dean Cain, Drake Berehowsky, The View, the makers of Darvocet. … So many people let you down.

–*You all need help! There is so much hate here.

–*I hate you.

–*I hope you rot in hell and Satan himself gives you a punji stick infection and drinks blood from your skull you impotent wuss. And I hope he pokes your eyes out and eats them like marshmallows that he roasts over licking hell flames before putting them down his gullet and then I hope you can still see with them as he shits them out into fire shit … We love you Mindy!

–*I hope for Mindy’s sake, comments are going to be disabled soon.

–*Comments disabled.

As a box of raisins

You didn’t call me.

To offend a wizened grape

Is to offend me

Your hand as empty as a box

Of juice; I take the rain

Like I take the noise of children

Every nickel lies so forlorn on the tray

Bitterly remembering every grudge hugged

Come let us transact coffee and steam

Let us make a league of the offended

Dividing the milk of kindness

Until we are all even

–Eric Rasmussen

Unless …

If for some reason one of you, my regular readers, got it in an e-mail, maybe you could send it to me. Better yet, you could repost it in the comments section here. Maybe I would still find it funny. I don’t know, because I can’t read it anymore. I can thank Word Press and their new interface (or something more sinister) for that.

Please, WordPress, do not lose my blogs in the future. Get your tech ship right. You don’t want to make me as angry as MySpace did.