The Connection

"You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human." 

 Susan Sontag
 "A Letter to Borges"
quoted by Jonathan Cott in his new book, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale.)

 photo from Truffaut's film version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

They connect us to the past, to the many dimensions of our past, and to the future, by which the past is given meaning beyond itself.  They connect the unknown, the hidden and even furtive parts of ourselves to the many dimensions of our world, and of the universe, in the present.  They make connections, which is the very life of the mind...  Some ways of being more fully human.

Remembering Spalding Gray

 I last talked with Spalding Gray at Wildberries Marketplace in Arcata on the afternoon of his last Center Arts performance here. I’d had dinner with him in Pittsburgh (along with six or eight others) several years before, where the general conversation was high-spirited—at least until he quietly observed that he couldn’t laugh anymore. He didn’t know why. He just couldn’t.

 But when I ran into him at Wildberries he smiled broadly and spoke with enthusiasm about the Humboldt landscape. It was January 2001, just months before he suffered major injuries in a car accident, including brain damage. In this film about his life, Spalding Gray says that the years leading up to the 2001 accident were the happiest of his life. Three years later he was dead, presumably by suicide.

 Spalding Gray virtually invented the autobiographical monologue, although he preferred to call what he did “poetic journalism.” Several of his monologues became feature films, including Swimming to Cambodia (directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987) and Gray’s Anatomy (directed by Steven Soderbergh in 1996.) Soderbergh and his team assembled pieces of video—monologues, interviews, reflections—into a kind of posthumous autobiography, with the help of Kathie Russo, Gray’s widow.  It's called And Everything is Going Fine (Criterion Collection.)

 There are gaps (notably in the years of his greatest celebrity) and the portrait that emerges may or may not be accurate (there’s emphasis on death and suicide throughout.) But the contours of his life and career are here, from childhood obsessions to the fatherhood that started those happy years. (His son wrote music for this film.) Between them were the yearnings and penchant for seeking extremes, and then the need to construct monologues about the resulting experiences.

 In the film he says that at a certain point he got tired of talking about himself, and sought ways to talk about other people. I witnessed him one sunny afternoon in PPG Plaza in Pittsburgh, soliciting stories from an assembled audience. He was a careful, caring listener, and people responded. Later he told some of these stories with as much pith and power as he told his own.

 This DVD includes an informative “making of” extra, in which Soderbergh owns up to his cowardice in avoiding Gray after his accident. It also includes Gray’s first monologue, “Sex and Death to Age 14.” Although chaotic, it had his signature emphasis on details as well as the humor and honesty (and the poetic inventions) that he would learn to structure in his later, more mesmerizing works.

 The film’s title comes from a monologue in which Gray talks about his father’s attempt to create the perfect suburban home, but even though “everything is going fine,” there was always one more thing to buy or do to create the completely protected life.

Blue Movie

I've seen Page Eight something like 5 or 6 times now. It was first broadcast on the BBC and PBS in 2011, although I believe the first time I saw it was on DVD in my Bill Nighy period.  In any case I did catch it on the PBS rebroadcast last year.  Last week we got the DVD from netflix but I didn't send it right back.  I watched it a few more times, at my computer, on the cave TV..  Finally mailed it back this morning.

Why was I obsessed with watching it?  It's an excellent drama, written and directed by one of the contemporary greats of British stage, David Hare, and featuring great actors in excellent performances: the ever watchable Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz, plus important roles played by Michael Gambon, Judy Davis, Alice Krige, Felicity Jones, Ralph Fiennes, Ewen Bremner and Marthe Keller.  It's an absorbing story, about British intelligence in the post-9/11 era.  But I realized all of that didn't add up to the total reason for my obsession.

First I thought it was because it just looked good.  But why?  Then I realized: because it's blue.

  I began to consciously realize this by the images that came into my mind when I thought about it.  Then last night I looked at it with this in mind, and it's absolutely true.  The dominant color by far is blue.

It's blue damp misty streets, blue-gray skies, blue-green structures and the lighting within them. Blue walls, blue cars. For the first part of the movie everyone is wearing blue, so much so that it resembles one of those color episodes of the 1950s Superman series they filmed to work in black and white as well as (later, when TV technology caught up) in color.  Bill Nighy in particular always wore a blue suit with a blue tie (sometimes blue and white) and at least once a blue shirt.

Eventually a few other colors intrude.  A couple of the women--conspicuously, the fascinatingly evil character Judy Davis played--wore red. (Red, white and blue would fit with a main theme--the "special relationship" with the U.S. in the Bush years as corrupting influence on the UK.)  There was a black tie event in the woody brown interiors of Cambridge University.  The Rachel Weisz character gets a earthy brown sweater.

Color palettes are important to some filmmakers.  Woody Allen hates blue--he favors browns and greens.  I saw a movie recently that ruled out almost every color except brown and green.  That I can't remember the movie tells it all.  I don't like brown and green.  I like blue.  More than like--I was ecstatic.

I happen also to like the music of Page Eight---jazz, a little James Bond, some Satie-like piano.  I would place it among my very favorite films (or TV films to be precise) except I'm bothered by the assumption in it that torture yielded real intelligence--I've seen no credible evidence that it did, or does.  There's a nice moment at a meeting when a woman (played by Holly Aird) mentions this, and Bill Nighy's character agrees.  They exchange a glance; later it turns out they've been sleeping together.

But the fact that I can't absolutely defend it as a great film worth watching over and over doesn't keep me from seeing it over and over.  The performances, the music.  But mostly, it's blue.  

P.S. I'm not the only one who liked this movie, by the way.  It was an immediate hit in the UK, and two sequels have been ordered up.

Big Deal on Ross Street

After a Christmas that involved waiting out cyclonic winds before setting forth on a 6 hour car trip, and a return on a bus with a driver who wasn't really sure where we were going--aided by what might be described as in person crowd sourcing--New Years was quiet.  New Year's Eve I was the only one awake as usual, watching Charlie Rose ask inane questions about Shakespeare which nevertheless elicited interesting answers when I heard a few distant firecracker pops to note the passage of the old year.  Then the Day was spent in an epic Scrabble game and watching a lovely old Italian comedy I don't think I've seen since college, Big Deal on Madonna Street.  It's a kind of neo-realist comedy, a 1958 spoof of caper films, with a working class crew in Italy.  Their goal is a pawn shop safe but they wind up with pasta fazol.  Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale are part of the ensemble.  A nice way to end the day and start the year.

My mother was born in Italy, and her family and the community of their friends who came over together were all a major part of my young life. Plus, when I was growing up in the 50s, there were prominent Italians in Hollywood, in music and sports: the era of Sinatra and DiMaggio. There were even songs on the hit parade in the Italian language.

But it's been downhill since then. For years now, Italian Americans have been defined by the pop culture version of the Mafia. A collection of Italian language songs was advertised on TV as "Mob Hits." I found it all so insulting and demeaning that I don't care how "well done" the Sopranos was, I was never going to watch it. And I'm sure not going to watch "Jersey Shore," yet another stereotype that has nothing to do with my experience.

What I did watch however was a wonderful film story, made in Italy, about a group of characters who were adolescents or young adults in the 60s, and following them into the 21st century. The English title is The Best of Youth. It was made for television, but was also released in theatres, usually shown in two parts, each 3 hours long. (Available from netflix, etc.) But it is worth the time. It's one of the best written, best acted, most beautifully photographed stories I've ever seen. It was very special to me because I understood the common expressions in Italian--I think the dialect was close to the one I heard mostly as a child, but for much of my life. Even the body language was familiar--I've never felt so attuned to the people in a film before, not even an American film. Everyone should see this, but especially Italian Americans who feel like they have to be fugitives from the prevailing insulting stereotypes.

From Synedcoche, New York, an unusual film I just saw on video, described in the post below.

Synecdoche, Synecdoche

I just saw a video of the film Synedoche, New York, written and directed by Charles Kaufman (who wrote Being John Malkovich, which I didn't much like, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I did kind of like.) This is an unusual film in form and content, which covers in dreamlike fashion some forty years in the life of Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady with a messy life, who wins a MacArthur Grant and goes to New York City to create a massive theatre work as his ultimate expression.

There are layers, time jumps, reality and fantasy intermixed, visual and word puns (like the title), probable references to various mental disorders and possible elements of Jungian psychology, in this movie about life, purpose, love and especially death. The story begins with Cotard at about 40, in more or less the present, and leaves him at about 90 in an apocalyptic future. Throughout the often brutal, tragic and absurd events, Cotard (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) keeps getting new and often ridiculous ideas about his increasingly sprawling play, which involves hundreds of actors in residence for decades, but never a finished play for an audience. His dying words are something like, "I think I know how to do this play. I have an idea."

The DVD includes a discussion among a group of young film bloggers, all of whom have astute comments. They talked about the personal impact of this film, how it required something from them, and how they feel this is missing from movies. It reminded me of movies and their impact on me in the 1970s (though some of the movies I saw then and was affected by so strongly were made years before.) They also all found the movie initially depressing.

I can see why, but even though I am older than Kaufman, his view of the point of view of someone my age or older seems right. Though the presence of death, the brevity of life, the telescoping of time, the ongoing stubborn and probably futile search for a summary expression, are not just implied but hammered on, I felt the ending was fairly positive. Cotard finds an illusory but fulfilling final moment of love, and his last thought is a further idea on his never-ended project. I can see why younger people find this depressing. But I don't exactly, and it turns out that Kaufman (in an interview on the DVD) agrees with me: the all-encompassing work is never finished. Trying to create it is just life.

Perhaps it also is a product of age that I found so much of the movie, while painful, was also funny. Maybe this movie for the young is a tragedy. For the old, a comedy.

The K Scale

Instead of thumbs up or down, a five star system or a ten point scale, or even the SF Chronicle's "little man" whose posture indicates levels of approval, I am introducing a new system, the K Scale, for the evaluation of new movies.

This new scale is needed I believe because of the sheer awfulness of the vast majority of new movies that ruin the taste of perfectly good cardboard popcorn in 987-screen cineplexes throughout the land.

But more than that it's a highly personal scale. It reflects in part my maturation from a young curmudgeon, mortally offended by degradations upon the cultural potential, to my present state of practicality, and acceptance that demographics have passed me by, additionally leavened by mortality awareness.

So now I make no apologies for my personal taste, and my general priorities of don't waste my time, let alone my money.

I introduce the K Scale in time for the summer movie season. This is actually the time of year I am likely to see new films in the theatre. I know I should be more moved to see the wintry serious films but I find myself spectacularly uninterested in the emotional upheavals of younger Hungarians or the spiritual, sexual and shopping traumas of younger denizens of Manhattan, London or Beverly Hills. The operative words here are "younger" and "trauma." I figure I've paid my dues over the years in having my own emotions wrenched and wrung out for art, through two hours or more of seduction---getting to identify with or care about the characters-and abandonment, as awful things happen to them, with perhaps a couple of glib minutes of hopefulness at the end. Life is taxing enough, thanks.

Which doesn't send me to films of mindless violence either. Possibly due to some mental defect, I find violence disturbing rather than entertaining, even if only as it pushes the fight or flight button. I'd rather not go through that unnecessarily.

Not all action films are just violent. Some are just dull. For instance, the currently popular Kung Fu style fighting bores me to distraction. The fight sequence in the second Matrix film (which I saw only because the first was intriguing; I wasn't dope enough to see the third) only had me yearning for Fred Astaire. He could have done that sequence with so much more style, and with better music.

So the dramas are too draining, the comedies are mostly not funny (and whatever is funny I've seen in the TV promo) and the action pictures are largely without redeeming value. Add to these feelings my new preference for DVDs. In terms of pure viewing---the picture, the sound---they easily beat theatres for me. Plus I can pause, rewind, fast forward, repeat, and indulge in the textural extras and commentaries. All for prices much lower than I would pay for the privilege of sitting in badly proportioned seats behind an excessively tall person who talks throughout the film, my feet sticking to the floor, the picture so dim I can see through the letters in the titles, and the sound pitched to ear-splitting explosions and incomprehensible buzzes of dialogue.

Still, most of my viewing life came before videos, and I have strong affinities for the experience of the movie theatre. I've seen hundreds of films in theatres, including scores I've seen repeatedly. (Glancing through the lists of the ten best film comedies, thrillers, westerns, musicals, fantasies, histories, and dramas in The Book of Film Biographies, edited by Robin Morgan and George Perry, I note that while of course I don't agree with all the choices, I've seen them all except one-"Goodfellas", which I don't miss in the least.)

I also have a partner who likes to go out once in awhile. So once in awhile, and a bit more often in the summer, I'll see a first-run film when it opens. I've always liked science fiction, my favorite as a kid and still appealing if for additional reasons. Science fiction, comic book mythology, fantasy of a certain kind---that's where the new magic is. (Though the Tolkien films were often striking, they were more effect than substance, and the effect was less enchantment than special effects battlefield exhaustion. And I am definitely not interested in the strongest-survive, "fight evil with evil" war movies disguised as science fiction or fantasy.)

So there are a few films I want to see this summer. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban first and foremost-I think this is going to be a good one. I'll see "The Day After Tomorrow" somewhat for professional reasons, but I enjoyed "Independence Day" and found a lot to see and think about, even if I can't say I totally admire it. I was a big Spider-Man comic book fan, so I'll see that one. There are a couple more of that ilk. And of course we all await "Farenheit 911." All this is made easier by a Christmas gift of a movie pass card. Because now that I don't get in free as a reviewer or important art person, money is an object.

So fittingly enough, money is the basis of my K Scale. (What? You think I forgot?) In everyday terms, in our house we tend to rank upcoming films as "see at theatre," "never see until trapped on an airplane with it" or mostly "something to rent when it hits the $1 rack." My K Scale is an outgrowth of this method of thinking.

Instead of rating films based on how much I liked them, which is a sucker's game anyway because you have to see them first, I've decided to rate films I haven't seen by how much money I will require to be paid in order to go to a theatre opening weekend and see it. (I suppose this is also based on habits of mind derived from being a film reviewer, when I saw lots of films only because I was paid to write about them.)

Though the exact K Scale is still in development, here's the basic idea. I start with the smallest amount, say $20. Say there is a film I wouldn't mind seeing and sort of would like to see, like Shrek 2. (I enjoyed Shrek. I loved the Billy Crystal character, and the Harry Hausen in-jokes.) A total stranger could convince me to see it by handing me $20. Then again, I might see it anyway, if I simply wanted to go to a movie and it was playing, or my partner did, or some friends. (Though they are more likely to want to see some serious wintry film, and so I'll go... if it doesn't happen too often. )

After that, we get into serious application of the K Scale. Now we're talking about movies I wouldn't see unless I got paid to see them. (This amount, by the way, is in addition to a free ticket and a pre-paid tub of popcorn.)

So for current movies, the K Scale would be:

VON HELSING.........$30

This is a film I'll probably rent someday, since I'm mildly curious, and I can watch it on fast-forward. But for $30, I'll go to the theatre.

TROY......$60

A film I am unlikely to see even on video unless I'm doing research on the Zena Era of Anachronistic History.

DOGSVILLE... $75

A worthy if not brilliant film I'm sure, but I just don't want to go through all that, thank you very much. But for $75, I'll see it.

And so on, up the scale until we get to the likes of:

KILL BILL (any number).... $10,000
That's what it will take to get me to see these films. The idea of going to see the decadent corruption of filmmaking talent wasted on hip shock and unrelenting cynical violence has no appeal, but $10,000 will soothe the pain, especially since I can contemplate it during the film, plus it will pay for some extra Dots and maybe one of those big Snickerdoodles.

I also apply the K Scale to individuals. For instance, I will go to a film with a cast that includes Ben Stiller or David Spade only for the price of $15,000. (For each film. If both are in it, I'll give you a break and take $25,000.)

Though I reserve the right to adjust the scale according to the continuing deterioration of film quality and the level, sanity and agenda of the general culture, I do have a top, or bottom, point of the scale so far. It is:

PASSION OF THE CHRIST....$50,000 (in advance, cash or cashier's check only.)

Oscars

I had a little oped piece published in the L.A. Times recently, on the politics of gender-specific acting categories for the Academy Awards. I'd only seen it on-line until the Times sent me a tear sheet last week. It turns out that my Oscar piece was published right below another Oscar piece, by Kirk Douglas.

That's as close as I've come to the Oscars. Well, I did have a friend who was nominated once, in the Best Documentary category. It was years ago, when the audience and nominees still sat at tables, like they were just there for dinner. He told me that just before his award category winner was to be announced, his girlfriend at the time leaned over and told him not to kiss her if he wins, because she hadn't told her old boyfriend she was leaving him yet. It turned out not to be a problem, for that was as close as he got to an Oscar.

I have to confess to being a fool for awards shows in the arts, especially the Oscars, which is the only one I've watched in recent years (except the Kennedy Center and AFI Awards which are each a bit different.) I watched a good bit of this year's, even though I saw only a few of the movies nominated. I've watched in the past partly because I had a rooting interest, but except for Bill Murray I didn't much care this year. The last year I can remember being invested in outcomes was quite a good year, when "Shakespeare in Love" and some other good films split the awards.

But I always had two other reasons, and they remain. The one that remains strongest is the one that seems to be getting stronger in the awards' programs themselves: the celebration of the movies, and of the wonder of making them. I've been around moviemakers and moviemaking enough to know that, sure, it is a crazy business full of ego and envy, lies and betrayal, and dominated by arbitrary forces and money, but within that and through that is a wild, joyful and magical process, which also expresses bravery, honesty, integrity and intelligence.

There may be plenty of people to hate, and something in nearly everyone to stay away from, but there is also a lot to like. Technical people are often very smart and they have a lot of fun. Actors can be the greatest people to be around, as long as you can go home by yourself afterwards.

I don't like most movies these days but the ones I do like I really admire, and some I am in awe of. And that's how a lot of those people in the Oscar audience feel---you can see it. They may be self-absorbed stars but they are also in awe of the movies, and they are just as awestruck---maybe more awestruck---as the rest of us, watching Katherine Hepburn and Gregory Peck, two stars who died this past year and who were given tributes. I like to watch them look at each other, and celebrate the work they do.

Which relates to the longest-lasting reason, the vicarious experience. A lot of people put down the vicarious, but I don't. I know only too well that in many areas of life, if I didn't have vicarious experience I'd have no experience at all.

Part of the attraction of movies themselves is the vicarious experience, putting ourselves in the place of those people in those situations on the screen. I feel the same way about the people who make the movies. I vividly remember, so many years ago that it's embarrassing, watching Kirk's boy Michael Douglas, producer of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," with Jack and the cast and director, the first film to win the top 5 awards, saying how long a struggle it had been, how everybody had told them they were crazy, etc. etc. But they did it.

And there I was, looking up at a TV set in a small town bar, wanting desperately for my future to include such a moment. But I got to share the moment anyway, I felt really happy for them. I imagined what it would be like to have that moment---to feel fulfilled, lucky, vindicated and blessed.

I've felt that vicariously many times since, as the years have gone by, as that young upstart producer and his young upstart lead actor have become active elders of the Hollywood elite---as the upstart Francis Ford sweeps the Oscars, becomes vilified and obscured, but makes a life on the big stage, and his daughter becomes the first American woman nominated for Best Director--- while my life spirals in slow inconsequence, from improvisation and reinvention to denial and delusion and back again, and I remain a vicarious participant.

We used to talk about life being a movie. My life has been a movie, that only I have seen.

So when I watched this year, what I saw (for example) was a group of people who shared their lives and work for five or six or seven years on "The Lord of the Rings" project, together probably for the last time, at the end of an incredible adventure that probably has defined their lives. A fantastic gift, and a kind of curse they'll have to deal with for the rest of their lives. One of the producers I think it was who remarked that he had been working on this film for nearly all of his two children's lives. How amazing that is to even contemplate.

I can remember when I was younger actually trying to figure out how long it would take me to get my as-yet unfinished screenplay to the screen, and being in a panic because I couldn't figure out how I could possibly survive that long. So today, as far from Oscar as I've ever been, it's just as amazing to me that I somehow accidentally lived without one than it is to contemplate having one.

Maybe I'll read something different tomorrow, but to me, Bill Murray looked devastated when he didn't win. His first try at a serious part was in a movie I liked a lot, "The Razor's Edge," but which generally bombed. He played comedies forever after, and developed as a comic actor; from within his own personality he developed his unique colors and depths, so that by "Groundhog Day" he was a master---there will be a tribute to him someday as awestruck as the one for Gregory Peck. Then he seemed to fade away. But "Lost in Translation" was a unique part, in which he created a character from his own persona but not identical to it. I'll bet he was convinced he'd never get a better chance at the Oscar than this.

And what was with Diane Keaton, dressed as Annie Hall, the part she won for? Was it to acknowledge that she knew she wouldn't win this year, or was it for luck? Oscar is a strange thing, for everybody, I guess.

I can also remember when I first heard of Oscar parties. I went to one in New York, at somebody's apartment full of hip Village Voice media people, and hated it. People talked all through the show, they dished, they complained. I wanted to bask in it, feel it, do that vicarious thing, be happy for the winners I admired, feel bad for the deserving who lost.

This year I saw an ad for people who design Oscar parties, that's their job. No thank you. Margaret makes the best popcorn in the world. That's all I need.

Bring on the Night

Over the past couple of days I've watched (in pieces) one of my favorite movies, "Bring on the Night," directed by Michael Apted. It follows the construction of the band and first album of Sting when he first went solo in the late 80s. It's a great band, made up of mostly jazz musicians, all of them non-white:Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland (who has since passed on) on keyboards, Omar Hakim on drums, the definitive backup singers of Dolette MacDonald and Janet Pendaris.

It's a skillingfully done movie, made especially enjoyable by the locations (all in and around Paris), the musicianship and personalities of the band members, and how articulate they are, which of course also extends to Sting, the star of the show. (There's also the post-Don't Look Back required scenes of the semi-slimy manager, in this case castigating the designers for the bland clothes the band is wearing, while he is wearing exactly the same colors and style.)

It also means a lot that this album constitute Sting's best in merging political/historical content with great songwriting. So two scenes near the end of the movie, the only ones in which Sting is near tears, occur one after the other. The second is the on-camera birth of his son, with him in the delivery room with his wife, Judie Styler (very brave to appear pregnant in the whole film; what she looks like normally can be seen in one of Sting's best song videos, and perhaps one of the best anyone made in the early, most creative days of such videos, for "We'll Be Together" from his next album, "Nothing Like the Sun," which is pretty much an extension of this one, "Song of the Blue Turtles.") It's done with great potency to Sting's song on this album and in this show, "Russians." It is so simple that at times it is simplistic, but at times it is the poetic essence of the reality. "We share the same biology/regardless of ideology..."

(There's probably not a more complex yet powerful political song than "We Work the Black Seam," also on this album and in this film.)

The first is his sit-down interview answer to the question, was there a moment when you knew your dreams were going to come true? Yes, it was when he was waking up after a gig (with the Police presumably) in a hotel room in northern England and he heard the man washing the windows singing his song, "Roxanne." (This moment is referenced in his video for "Every Breath You Take.") He said he nearly wept, and nearly did as he said it. To have someone sing a song you wrote is, as he says quite precisely, "a great privilege."

It is a dream that I share. It sort of happened to me at least once, though I still dream of hearing children I don't know sing a song I made up. I guess the meaning of it is hard to explain to someone who doesn't share it so intensely. But I agree, it is akin to something holy and can't be really sought after. It is a great privilege.

On those days, in those moments I am conscious of living on the far edge of my life, I do things realizing they may be my last opportunity. In these very close to desperate times, what I thought I was doing was completion. Finishing and getting it out there. But there were also things I was starting, things I am in the middle of; there were and are things I've held onto.

I suppose there still are things I will hold onto for awhile, a few ideas, for instance, like the concept I have for a new image for the arts. But I now realize that what I am doing is giving away. Holding on or holding back is itself a kind of death. Give it the chance of life, even if that means giving it away.

So I will give away more. I will send my ideas out there, freely, but also without fear or favor.

I will give what I have to give. Partly this is because I believe you make your best contribution by doing what you do best, especially if it is markedly different from what else is available. Partly it is like that conversation between the Woody Allen character and the space aliens in "Stardust Memories." Woody (playing a comedian who makes arty movies) asks them if he should devote his life to doing charitable works with the poor, or something like that. They tell him something like: You're not the type, you'd never last. If you want to help humanity, tell funnier jokes.

Maybe it's just that we give what we have to give, because we cannot give what we do not have.