Letter

Before I settle onto my barstool I already know about my neighbor’s diabetes. He’s detailing the limits of his diet to the drinker to his right. Then he reproduces a bit of hockey game play-by-play. When the bartender asks, the man not only tells the date of the game, but the starting time, and select highlights from the box score. This is Raymond the Great. Though we haven’t yet been introduced.

His monologue is occasionally interrupted by questions from the bartender or the drinker to his right, but for most of the hour I spend at Simon’s, Raymond talks at a steady clip. He also drinks four Christmas ales, asking himself before finishing one whether to order the next and answering yes, promising each will be the last.

Raymond’s been a dishwasher most of his life. At IHOP, until getting laid off, then, for the past dozen years, at Rivers Casino. He lives with his brother, who is also a dishwasher. I think they’ve always worked the same places.

He’s turning sixty in a few weeks and is busy planning a big blowout. All his friends will be there. They’re gonna close the bar that night for sure.

He shows me the cap he had embroidered in honor of the Chicago Wolves’ Calder Cup win in 2008. He likes it except for the fact it doesn’t say ‘World Champions’ like he asked. I say he should take it back and have them redo it. He agrees, then goes into play-by-play from some other broadcast. A few minutes later, he mentions the cap and how it doesn’t say what he wanted it to say again.

The man to his right has left and the bartender’s all the way down the bar, so it’s just me and Raymond holding it down by the door. He thanks me for talking to him. I say it’s my pleasure.

He sings in the choir at his church whenever he’s not working Sundays. He knows a lot about pipe organs. The pastor at his church is the one who christened him ‘Raymond the Great’ for his knowledge of church music. He goes on and on about how many pipes the one in his church has, but I have no memory nor interest for figures. I just like that he’s so proud of his nickname.

I don’t know how to leave things with him, so, when he goes to the bathroom, I leave without saying goodbye. 

I hope whatever he gets for his dinner doesn’t make his diabetes worse. 

—Listen to my epic talk with musician Emmett Kelly.

A lot of filmmakers started out as painters.  Maurice Pialat seems to’ve been more tormented by his failure at it than most. But then nothing is easy in his world if his movies are to be believed. Others like David Lynch and Julian Schnabel have found ways to continue with both mediums. Pialat said if you can’t be a genius at something, then why bother. It’s an extreme position, but given the movies he made, I’ll take his word for it. 

I wrote about Pialat a few times before. Most recently, a year and a half ago. He’s again front of mind because I recently bought a crummy European DVD of his last film, Le Garçu. It’s the only one of his features unavailable in this country. According to Wikipedia, he was unhappy with how it turned out and wanted to reedit it, but never got to. It came out in 1995, four years after Van Gogh; he was dead a few years later.

It’s an older man’s story about the insecurity of being a late-in-life father, involved with a far younger woman. The little boy in the film is his own son. Pialat’s stand-in is played by his frequent leading man, Gerard Depardieu, a few years before that actor’s slide into full-on lunacy, typified by his friendship with Vladimir Putin. It’s a movie that would pair well with Abel Ferrara’s recent Tommaso. Whether this is your kind of thing, I can’t say, but it’s definitely mine. Few filmmakers portray the wars between women and men more accurately than Pialat. What keeps him from sliding into misogyny is that he’s at least as hard on the men in his movies as the women. The man Depardieu plays in this final film is a real monster. Takes some courage to show yourself that way.

There are very few references to Pialat’s time as a painter online. The pictures in this letter are the only ones I could find. There’s also a shitty untranslated video of a memorial exhibition. What sticks in the memory are the hideous oversized wooden frames on all the little paintings. A bad frame can destroy a picture. Even in the sloppy camera pan of the video, I can tell that whatever quality the work has is obscured by its presentation.

Pialat made my favorite Van Gogh movie partly because of his own intimate experience with oil painting. There are certain things that can only be related from firsthand experience. 

Unlike the raging, crystal-clear power of his films, Pialat’s paintings look a little tentative. He was still feeling his way toward a way of working that was his own. He never made it, but that’s all to the good, because otherwise we would not have his movies. Looking at Schnabel’s non-film efforts, I think more painter-filmmakers should follow Pialat’s lead. There are only so many hours in a day and so much creative energy one has to expend in a life. It’s probably best to choose one and give that your all.

This, coming from someone currently attempting to do three things at once, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass, giving out advice I can’t follow myself. It’ll all shake out in the end, and the lesser things will be forgotten, one way or the other. As much as I love movies though, the idea of making one never got past the daydream stage. The level of collaboration and compromise necessary made it a nonstarter. I’m just not a team player.

Would Pialat have been better off as a painter? Unlikely. Know any happy painters? His paintings only matter to his friends and family, whereas his films are for at least a few others. Those who want to see what people are actually like rather what they want others to see or how they wish they could be.

—Listen to my talk with Gil Roth and look out for one with Emmett Kelly on Wednesday. Subscribe to hu u no at Apple and all the other places.

—I reviewed a new Jim Broadbent flick.

You say you hope I find what I’m looking for, on your way out the door. You tell me you can’t be what I want you to be. That I’m in love with love. I don’t understand half the things you say. They seem like ideas you throw against the wall to explain to yourself why you’re leaving. They don’t have much to do with me or my feelings.

I don’t mean to say you don’t care about me. You do in your self-involved way. Can anyone actually see or feel into anyone else? We have relationships with projections of others for the most part, I believe.

By making yourself the bad guy you feel better about ditching me. You think you’re softening the blow. If anything, you’re making it worse. Because now, not only am I alone, but if I believe you were shit to begin with, that you don’t deserve me, or whatever, I then have to admit I’m a bad judge of others. If I’m so great and smart and cool, how could I make the mistake of getting involved with someone like you?

You left all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into that little yellow car here with me. I have to wake up every day in this graveyard of our marriage. Some days I want to throw all your shit out the window into the backyard and make a bonfire. Would that exorcise the demons you’ve left in your absence?

Then you call and say you miss me. But you don’t want to work things out. You just want to wallow in the sadness of failure. The way you describe failing again at a relationship, this time with me, after a series of failures with other men, sounds like a setback on a resumé or your goal/career arc rather than a human interaction with someone of your own species. This failure is like a work project that didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. You’re taking responsibility. The buck stops with you. Like no one else on ‘the team’ could do anything to salvage the thing in the end.

I’ve never worked in an office so I don’t have the language or training to make sense of my life in corporate terms.