basilwhite

X-Men 3 is in the works. Finally, we'll get some answers to all the unanswered questions about Hugh Jackman's chest hair.

Action movies owe so much of their formula to blaxploitation.

I've been mulling over how to minimize my anxiety.  I'm not willing to make the comedy career moves people are recommending: move to New York, quit my job.  For now I plan to limit my standup work to going to the writing workshop, no open mics, write some essays, take the David Sedaris approach. 

Maybe this change is a way of giving myself permission to stop performing.  I don't trust my motivations anymore.  Maybe I never have.  Putting my sanity first seems like the scary, positive change that would do the most good. 

I pick up the Washington Post Express on the way to work or read my stack of index cards with joke ideas, but nothing's ironic anymore. I view society and politics as the social fallout of the internal war each person has between taking what they want and appearing altruistic so other people give them what they want.

I resent my dysfunctional way of seeing the world more than I can ever remember.  I hoped that at this point in my life I'd get the payoff of generating some creative work by pouring my experiences through the Basil Filter. 

Alas, I think there's some essential depth missing from my work.  I don't make any more sense of the world than anyone else does.  Instead of art that connects my view with others, my work seems like clinical evidence of an illness or photos taken through a defective lens: "Here's the effect of the Basil Filter. Notice the warping and the missing information.  Next slide please."

Maybe sometimes people are born with bad chemicals and a little extra intelligence, which by themselves are not enough  to create art.  You need to combine the weird way you see the world with an understanding of how the world sees itself and you in it.  Then you have a bridge of art between two universes.  Or maybe that bridge is language and it's happening beween you and I right now. 

People have told me that they've connected deeply with what I say or write.  I beg them "How?" "Why?" because I want to expand that effect to the general population.  Tell me how to create art that connects with people.  Then I can use my filter to distill my experience into a form other people can and want to experience.