Worth five minutes of your time

What I have to offer ...

"So you are here, and I am here, spending our time

as we must, it must be spent. I am trying not to

spend this time, as I spend most of my time, trying to

get you to like me; trying to control your thoughts, to

use my voodoo at the speed of light, the speed of

sound, the speed of thought, trying to convince you

that your two hours with me are not going to be

resented afterwards.

It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and

I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This

pattern of time usage paints over an ancient

wound, and paints it with bright colours. It’s a sleight

of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the

pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into

this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I

do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my

being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is

unknowable, or at least unable to be articulable.

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is

both specific to you and common to everyone. I do

believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden

and protected, it is the thing that must be tap

danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that

won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is

the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is

the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you

impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it

is the thing that wants to live.

It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your

dance, your composition, your philosophical

treatise, your screenplay is born ...

The world is very scary now. It always has been. But

something grotesque and specific to our time is

blanketing us. We need to see that it is not reality; it

is a choice we are making or allowing other people

to make for us."

Read the full speech:

Charlie Kaufman

30 September 2011 at BFI Southbank

Angry all the time

"Sometimes I don't know why this old world can't leave well-enough alone," Bruce Robison.

Whatever the words, they come true

CRESSIDA TO TROILUS: A GIFT
By Margaret Atwood

You forced me to give you poisonous gifts.

I can put this no other way.
Everything I gave was to get rid of you
as one gives to a beggar: There. Go away.
The first time, the first sentence even
was in answer to your silent clamour
and not for love, and therefore not
a gift, but to get you out of my hair
or whatever part of me you had slid into
by stealth, by creeping up the stairs,

so that whenever I turned, watering
the narcissus, brushing my teeth,
there you were, just barely, in the corner
of my eye. Peripheral. A floater. No one
ever told you greed and hunger
are not the same.

How did all of this start?
With Pity, that flimsy angel,
with her wet pink eyes and slippery wings
of mucous membrane.
She causes so much trouble.

But nothing I ever gave was good for you;
it was like white bread to goldfish.
They cram and cram, and it kills them,
and they drift in the pool, belly-up,
making stunned faces
and playing on our guilt
as if their own toxic gluttony
was not their fault.

There you are still, outside the window,
still with your hands out, still
pallid and fishy-eyed, still acting
stupidly innocent and starved.

Well, take this then. Have some more body.
Drink and eat.
You’ll just make yourself sick. Sicker.
You won’t be cured.