3:20:22
“We were in Dublin together, on the lash. That means having a drop of something cheerful.”
What a gem. What a story, what cadence, what elan. If I were still teaching, this would have been a video I would have played for my students alongside an interview by the world's greatest idiot hack Jimmy Fallon, so they could see how low we'veA sunk from being interesting and magical and alive. As one YouTuber put it in the comments: "Can you imagine Fallon doing this interview? Peter would have probably gotten interrupted several times until he throttled him."
I came across this video via Celia Farber, who noted that the interview is an example of why the robots will miss us when we're gone.
Farber: "I’m thinking more and more about how much extraordinary range there was to human beings, and how sad it would be if we were all replaced by robots. I’m sure they would miss us."
We’ll never have people like this again. FULL OF LIFE, even when they’re being destructive.
We're still here, but we're already gone. People like O'Toole no longer exist. No one talks like this, sounds like this, jokes like this, lives like this. Believe me, I am looking for it, I am listening for it. My ears are pricked and my eyes are open. I have never closed them. Just a several years ago, I was still having this kind of fun with people: magical long winding unfolding unexpected wild nights. If we don't know what human means, how can we fight for it? This interview has inspired me to rewatch The Ruling Class tonight (1972) and Lawrence of Arabia tomorrow. I just want to look at O'Toole's face again. I will never understand why he had all those disfiguring nose jobs. Speaking of noses, I've just started watching the Sopranos (first time ever, save for one or two episodes when it first came out. I never had cable back then), and I'm in love with Michael Imperioli's nose. I've always found him to be so beautiful. I used to see him in my neighborhood deli all the time. In fact, many of the cast members lived in my neighborhood in the early 2000s. More on The Sopranos over the coming weeks. I don't think I could have appreciated the show when I was younger. I guess that's why I didn't watch it. Not ready.
It may sound fucked up--and I am being somewhat broad and general and cavalier--but I'm starting to think that in a culture of authoritarian safetyism and the current cultural obsession with microaggressions (Jonathan Haidt's 2018 The Coddling of the American Mind comes to mind here. In other words, we know how these people got here and why they have latched onto the COVID narrative so intensely to the point of inflicting trauma on everyone else. American safetyism is really just another obsession with control), that trauma and knowing how to "make interest" (not in the financial sense), as Henry James argued, is the key to not only great art, but interesting resilient people. The Peter O'Toole interview is a great reminder of this.
In a letter to H.G. Wells, James wrote:
"My value, whatever that may be, is my own kind of expression....Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance."
In a wonderful essay called "The Interested Party" that I used to teach in a class on childhood, Adam Phillips writes:
"For James, life was not sacrificed to art, nor was art an alternative to life; they were integral to each other...What he is describing is both the gift of the artist and the necessity of the so-called ordinary person. We cannot help but transform our experience--Freud's emblem for this is dreamwork--and we cannot help but express ourselves. Whether we like it or not, we are making something of what we are given, even when we are merely making do. People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling undernourished, and this is because--depending on one's psychoanalytic preferences--either what they have been given wasn't good enough, so they couldn't do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation. In James's terms, they are failed artists of their own lives...They cannot make interest; the kind of interest James intimates that might make one love life."
Deleuze's hugely important thought comes to mind yet again.
In today's war news, Coffee & COVID writes:
"Once again, I am baffled — why don’t we just give Putin what he wants? Guarantee no NATO for Ukraine. Destroy or hand over all those biolabs that should have never been there to begin with. Arrest the nazis. Use the military aid package to help rebuild Ukraine’s damaged infrastructure. Stop the arms race. Russia gets out of Ukraine’s hair.
I bet the long-suffering Ukrainians would agree. The smart thing would be to concede on all these easy terms, let Putin “win” and save face, and stop the suffering of the Ukrainians. But I’m guessing we’re not going to do the smart thing. We haven’t done the smart thing at any point over the last two years. Why start now?"
Like Catherine Austin Fitts said: ""Americans are not agreement capable."