sielwolf's Journal: Honest Fictions

So it's the third day of the National Convention in... wherever (I guess a few years from now since I'll be at least 35 then) and it's the point of the Convention where the candidate accepts their party's nomination for President of the United States. Now before there were the usual speeches (young party figures, respected old-hands, the token nod from the rival party, wives of candidates) and it was the usual old tired roll of political drumbeats. There are the twenty-four hour cable news networks now, the Internet, blogs and opinions outside the regular network and primary newspapermen to care and feed. The Convention, in spite of excessive cheerleading, draws no attention and is a ratings blackhole. Most of the media present are exhausted from boredom, anxious to close tents and speed away in their news trucks before 8 pm. As the convention center fills with Party faithful and tasteful music echos in the rafters, all eyes are on Blackberries or fingers casually dipping through chicken wings sticky with cold congealed fat. The Party Chairmen looks like his head's about to come off. The veins stick out of his neck yet his face is sheet white. You know that Japanese businessman smiling disease? That seems to be killing him right now: in every interview, every forced handshake and blurry conversation his voice quivering on the break to hysterics. Journalists are penning articles in the back of their heads, the ones of the chairman's worst dreams: "Convention ratings disaster. What the Party had hoped would ignite America's electorate died last night with a creeky death rattle. The benefit might be, that one paid attention do their embarrassment" That is except for the reporters and the pundits, all half-convinced to just shit on the nominee for suffering them through this entire enterprise. Talking heads are smoothed with touches of makeup.

Then the lights go off. And it's pitch black in the convention center. Then all the satellite feeds are cut, except for one: the Party's. And then the music starts. It's just a guitar. It's a high hard piercing note. And others. It is feedback. And then a crash.

And cymbals. *tick tick tick ti-tishk* And the guitar crashes again.

Loud, very loud. Later the media would detail the wall of speakers, kept from sight, they were stacked from floor to ceiling in an array of over 120 that killed Kilowatt Weeks of power for the next 5 minutes. More guitar. Everyone is stunned, the stale air of the convention center explodes, knocking them back with concussive force on every note.

The guitar and cymbal cycles on a big fat fucking dirge. A billboard of neon lights up. Big and trashy, like over 1000 feet square: the shiny blue and white starfield of the American flag. The stars pulse with the percussion, not quite on time with the cymbal crash or each other. Some look away, most look up dumbly as it's color in the absence of everything else.

At the 1:37 measure, the BPM kicks up and the guitar plays loosely over a single chord. The stars beat a little faster together now. The guitar squeals. A woman yells, "MY EARS!" No one can hear her. Idle channel surfers at home pause for a moment.

"Seriously... what the fuck?"

Bass and snare drum kick in. Fury. The whole building shakes. Television producers are frantic. Cellphones are ringing, no one can make any sense over the din.

Explosions. And thirteen lines of orange fire roll out from the blue and the stars, each over eight feet tall. They complete the spectacle: a giant flaming American Flag suspended in space and vacuum overhead and in every television in the country. Some cameras flash unsure what comes next.

The song continues. Singing now. Loud, growling, incoherent. The stripes of the flag fuel and sputter. And now the banners are on fire! And the ring of crimson reaches around the roof, lighting everything it touches. There is panic, and the delegates begin to seize and consider the door-

and the banners all fall, revealing giant projected images. Human faces, distorted and mangled through computer algorithms from one to another. The burning flag signals- something. Rage? It flushes with some unknowable soul. Giant and angry.

A spotlight. From up high. Down to the podium. It is empty. A hallway of lights descends back under the flag. It is empty. The projected faces rotate quickly, seemingly mouthing the words to the song.

How. does. It. Feel?

The song returns to the verse. Everyone is deeply moved. The Nazis where right: people are suckers for huge fucking fires and spectacle. They LOVE that shit. And this is the coolest fucking thing anyone's ever seen.

And I walk out: your candidate for President of the United States.

"I don't truck much with a man who says he's honest. No honest man would call himself that. And so you can assume this self-called honest man a liar. We like honesty. We say it all the time. We imagine it from all of our friends and our politicians and our movie stars. We like people because we think they're honest. But why?

"Because their honesty gives us something. It gives us an edge on them. That we go without the concern of double play or pulls from the bottom of the deck. And we like that. 'cause we can use their honesty against them. An honest man is one you don't need to trust because you can dance around him with his shoes tied together. We might not be the biggest lion in the savannah. But we sure know how to eat on zebras.

"Honest men make good eating. And you can let your guard down. Nothing to fear from an honest man. But there are no honest men. Only those who know they aren't and those who put the swindle on others saying they are. All we lions do. Snack on each other. And if you know somebody will drop their gloves when you 'aww shucks' and fancy yourself honest, well that makes a fine swindle. Go ahead, shake that man's hand. And when he reaches out with the right, know well he's going to stab you with the left.

"Among ourselves, in our good hearts, we all wish ourselves to be honest. We hope we can live up to that. And if we can't do that at least us do right by them and let them know that we tried. And if I may do sin let us at least call each other brothers.

"I don't read autobiographies much because only 'honest men' seem to write them. Celebrities and important persons. All very successful. And all really interesting only how they try to present themselves to you. You get luck of the draw, take a spin, right place at the right time and that somehow confirms everything else. The man who says 'I'm just as dumbfounded by the whole damn thing as you are' doesn't get the book deal-

"but that's the better book. The truer book. And that's what we all really wanted in the first place. If I'm not honest at least let me be true. We all know the truth is something that we can either present or hide but we can never capture. You can't unmake the truth. Truth is the best sort of lesson. All else might crumble yet it's surface goes unscuffed. A thousand years from now archeologists will dig us up for the truth of how we where, not to validate our honesty.

"Something like an Autobiography is an excellent book. A great book even. Akira Kurosawa, the director, wrote it about himself and he took deliberate care in the beginning to set out the rules: this isn't an autobiography and you shouldn't take it as such. You both know he's going to talk some about him as a boy, as a young man and as a director but the first chapter strikes you as funny. Like a grandfather wearily preambling a lesson with 'now don't you get any stupid ideas'.

"He knew- he felt he had something to say. He seems to choke on it a bit and want to spit it out. But he knows it's not all good and he'll keep some of it down. And so he goes on a bit about his life and... well, before he gets to that, at least know he's not being completely square with you and- well, he tried.

"I guess he did that because he knew that it was fickle memory. And they come to him so vivid that they might have just happened. But, no, he's an old man now and that was many many years ago.

"He shares his stories with us. And they're of all sorts: sweet, painful, sad, joyous. The flavors of his childhood. The sounds. The long wall of red bricks that guarded the armory he would walk along to school every day, running his fingers over the uneven surface. The wall that came down the 1923 earthquake and is gone. Some of the chapters are incredibly short. Only as long as Kurosawa feels they need to be. Maybe he adds why the memory came to him. Or the sadness he feels when one in particular is a long forgotten face to time. Like all good stories they're a pleasure and we don't care much how real they are or not. But Something like an Autobiography isn't much on that. What it has is truth in it's pages. And that's a much greater thing.

"Kurosawa is upfront about his childhood. About how he cried and how weak of a child he was. His brother Hiego berating him. 'Baka,' he sneered. And how that slowly hardened Kurosawa, drawing him up from childhood. Hiego who was so huge and imposing in Kurosawa's life. There is a story about how when he was still a crybaby, Hiego would walk with him to school spitting a non-stop tirade of insults. Later a semi-circle of children formed around him on the playground, taunting and taunting him. Hiego walked over and called out to his brother. The children broke rank and Kurosawa scampered over to him. After a hard look, Heigo said 'Nothing' and went back to his own friends.

"Pride might have brought him to intervene. Possibly out of blood fraternity. Or out of just the embarassing pitifulness of it. But Heigo rescued Kurosawa regardless. Kurosawa doesn't try to justify his brother's actions. But he tells you what it meant to him.

"Kurosawa follows his brother's footsteps. He grows and becomes a bit unwieldy. After the Great 1923 Earthquake and fire, Heigo and Kurosawa go down into the city and see all sorts of horrors. Families of burned bodies, solitary charred human forms throughout the rubble. Heigo forces his brother to not look away. When they return home, Heigo confides that he too was afraid but you can't look away. If you look away the image will haunt you forever.

"Heigo becomes a narrator for silent movies and becomes politically active. Later Kurosawa gets involved in movies and politics in his own way. Of all the people in the story, Heigo is the most vivid.

"Kurosawa later recounts Heigo's suicide though he admits it is painful. He discusses the last time they met and how his mother wailed and Kurosawa had to help his father cover his bother's bloody body with a sheet. He doesn't spend much on the specifics, only to make them a proper coda.

"Kurosawa would later try to kill himself, cutting his arms while lying in a bath. Something Like an Autobiography never talks about this. It's written in chronological-order and it ends when Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Vienna in 1950. Kurosawa tried to kill himself in the 70's and the book was written in 1983. In those missing decades were some of the most golden and bleak moments of his life. But Something Like an Autobiography ends with Kurosawa, in 1983, while writing the book watching Rashomon being shown on television and seeing a studio head giving an interview and gushing rosey praise on the movie. This sickened Kurosawa because this was the same suit who battled him every last moment in making the movie. The man's venomous words still sticking fresh in the back of his mind as he watched his smiling face on the screen.

"The products of his life, his movies, Kurosawa decided, were really the best way to remember him. They existed and spoke for themselves without him necessary to interpret them. His movies were a truth that would sustain when he was gone from the world.

"So much talk is autobiography and self-proclaimed truth. So much of it is either affirmation or harsh denial with out any effort to realizing what is there. The stories we tell, so many great fictions, that we carry as unalloyed truth. We declare because we like to make a lot of heady declarations. We spin so many secondary sentences that our faces go red. We lose ourselves to the words themselves. Parrying and dancing about, some sort of thing that evaporates if for a moment we stop.

"I dislike those sort of declarations. Talk like that makes me uneasy. Arguments can be won without any progress gained. It always assures tomorrow more arguments. That's why I like stories. They're rootless metaphors. There is no way to cloud the intent. A story must be unwrapped, cradled and nursed. It activates the mind's digestion. The story's veracity is moot. It doesn't quite matter if a frog does or does not have wings. If it did, it wouldn't bump it's ass a' hoppin'.

"With stories you define yourself in an inverse way. You tap the world of all of these things around you; drawing a circumference closer and closer to where you are. Orienting yourself by looking for three landmarks, putting them on the map and centering it. The universe expands and as I stand here we are all in motion. Through space. We are aging. Through time. And yet you see me, here, in space among all of you. Navigating by the stars as all horizons are moonless ocean."

[For those looking for musical accompaniment]