It's Just A Ride

Been listening to a lot of Bill Hicks lately.

Here's the thing about Bill Hicks that a lot of people know: Bill Hicks came off often as an angry individual. Here's a thing that may have been less obvious: Bill Hicks didn't want to be an angry individual.

Hicks saw a lot of beauty in the world, or at least he tried to. If his act is anything to go by, he found it hard to deal with the things he didn't find beautiful.

Now, see, that's a viewpoint that I can feel a kinship with.

There's a lot of wonderful stuff here in the world, but I've been having a rough time trying to engage with it.

So I watched the following clip. It's just a ride, folks.

The Fictions of Reality

I've been watching a lot of movie-length pieces about real people lately. By that I don't mean fictional movies based on real events, I mean documentaries and stand-up comedy specials, mostly. I use the term movie-length because I wouldn't necessarily call stand-up specials "movies," but for the sake of brevity, let's just assume that from here on out when I refer to these pieces of work as "movies," I'm talking about both documentaries and stand-up specials.

I couldn't tell you entirely why I've been feeling this particular kind of movie lately, but I think it has something to do with the tangibleness of it, the almost accidental complexity of real people. So often, our own motivations are so garbled and unintelligible that when we see movie characters whose goals are effortlessly defined it rings less true, no matter how properly unfurled those motivations are.

Basically what I'm saying is that the most well-written fiction doesn't hold a candle to real life.

More after the jump.

The False Dichotomy of Jokes vs. Serious Shit

Just recently I discovered that James Franco played a character named Franco on the long-running ABC soap opera general hospital. I found out about this at the supermarket, looking over the various magazine racks as I waited to buy, I don't know, Macaroni and Cheese. On the cover I saw James Franco and just stopped and stared for a few moments. Like many, I initially thought it was some sort of elaborate joke. After all, Franco is involved with that art meta-film project Erasing James Franco in tandem with filmmaker Carter.

So I decided to search for any clips of the events on YouTube. In a particular stroke of genius, one user did some quick video editing, so the only parts of any episode of General Hospital that remain are the parts that actually involve James Franco's character. Judging from the YouTube comments, it seems that these were mostly created to ogle James Franco who is, apparently, a hottie. It also serves to illustrate this blog post's point.