When I had measles as a child, my grandmother and her sisters took turns reading to me. I don’t remember a single book. And the only books I remember reading in high school, outside of the books we read aloud in class and comic books of all kinds, are Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane detective stories, a few Reader’s Digest books and Peyton Place. (I vividly remember the Peyton Place scene of a man giving his pregnant wife head.) Somehow, though, young Phaethon, plummeting to earth from the Sun God’s chariot, slipped in and nudged the Yellow Dwarf and his Spanish Cat off of the beaten path.

The summer before I left for college, I set out to read “everything.” But I don’t think I got very far. I enrolled in an American Literature seminar and was laughed at when I named James Michener as an important American writer. I was mortified. But in another seminar I heard Chaucer read in Middle English and snapped to what college and college professors were about. I cut classes to read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Teilhard de Chardin, Mailer, Algren, Jones, Shaw and Ginsberg. I saw films by Vadim, Truffaut, Godard and Bergman. I moved into a boarding house full of vets going to school on the GI Bill. I made drunken road trips to Mexican border towns. 

I witnessed the advent of color, wide screens, surround sound and Dolby, 3D, theater complexes with tiny theaters, naked women and almost naked men on the big screen in living color and in black-and-white. By the time I had graduated from high school, dropped out of college a couple of times, been drafted into the Army, lived in Germany where I wrote for an American tabloid, and got back to the states, I had been watching movies for over 20 years, but I don’t remember commenting on a single one of them to anyone until, watching Scorpio Rising (1963) sometime late in the summer of 1967, I turned to a friend and whispered: “Did he just say that Jesus was a queer?” And my friend, turning his leering, acid-distorted face my way, replied: “I don’t know. But I like the way he said it.”

That was my first brush with metonymy, a concept that, like mise-en-scène, I experienced long before I had a name for it. Years later, over dinner one night, I tried to sell the importance of metonymy in film to the Greek wife of a museum director. She cut me off. “Man lives by metaphor,” she said.

In was in 1967 that I discovered Antonioni and Fellini. I saw Blow-Up (1966), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Persona (1966), The Loved One (1965), and Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1965). I watched Godzilla (1954) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) on late night TV. I read a Wonder Wart-Hog comic book. I saw a drunk sleeping on the stoop of Carnegie Hall.

It was the summer an Army buddy and I took over the second floor of an old duplex in Galveston and put in some time arguing politics versus culture. He was a Swiss Marcusian and argued that politics shapes culture. I argued the opposite.

It was the summer of the Six-Day War and our favorite cartoon showed the aftermath of a collision between an Arab and an Israeli tank, the Arabs holding their hands in the air, the Jews holding their necks.

I read the Koran that summer and I was impressed by the idea of houris.

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Sitting by the pool at The Galvez, a grand, beach hotel one afternoon, I suddenly understood what a function was and lost my fear of mathematics forever.

I programmed computers at an insurance company downtown. After work every day, I'd drop a deck of punch cards off at the computer room and the operators would run my latest Keynesian model on the company’s IBM 7080 mainframe. The models always blew up. I never got the accelerator and the multiplier right.

My friend totaled my red '65 Barracuda Fastback on the Boulevard one afternoon. He had just come back from the Monterey Jazz festival. The richest man in town sent him out there with somebody's wife, probably as a joke. My friend ended up inheriting a department store in Basel. Somebody’s wife ended up finding Jesus in the bathroom of a cheap motel in Laredo one night. She was crouched in the corner, desperate for help, and it was Jesus or the big cockroach that had just crawled out from under the sink.

I still think it's about culture. About education in all its forms. If I don't know what a credit default swap is, never saw a play or an opera, never read a serious book or saw a serious film, don't know what a function is, never read any history, how can I believe I know anything worth knowing at all? What does “serious” mean? I think it’s about the intention to do more than pass time. 

Politicians, like everyone else, swim in the sea of mass culture. Political movements emerge and ride the wave of mass culture for a while, then sink back into the sea. It is impossible to imagine the New Deal outside a culture that valued people and the idea of society, just as it is impossible to imagine the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protests that followed outside the Counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. The problem with the American political system now is that not only the leaders, but all of the possible pretenders to positions of leadership, to political office, you see, have been vetted by an establishment process that has eliminated the possibility that any anti-establishment, read anti-Wall Street and anti-Corporate, idea will work its way into the political process. The culture of dissent just isn't there to sustain it.

It’s not my intention to create a culture of dissent. I wouldn’t know where to start. My intention is less ambitious and less serious than some. Norman Mailer felt “imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." I just want to raise sensibilities a notch. I freely admit that my intention is highbrow, though I fear I am too lowbrow myself to produce anything of real highbrow value. I will settle for building a little raft by lashing together, in homage to a brilliant scene in the HBO series Rome (2005 - 2007), the bloated bodies of a few old thoughts.

I read John Simon and Pauline Kael before I went to film school. In film school I read Andrew Sarris, Robert Warshow, Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt. After film school I read Bazin, Wollen and Tarkovsky. I believe it was Simon who said the difference between critics and reviewers is that critics assume you’ve seen the film.

I could find out if it was John Simon who said that, but I’m determined to resist the urge to “google it." I’ve had too many dinners and friendships ruined by people reaching for their cell phones to resolve a doubt, nail and ambiguity, or dispute a fact. No one vaguely recalls, imagines or speculates in the face of a cell phone and Google. No one makes up a more pleasing reality at dinner anymore.

When I got out of film school in the late sixties I was able to make the films I wanted to make for a while. If they are inaccessible and too allegorical it’s because I was inaccessible and too allegorical myself. I was never interested in the world as it was. Things of this world were only manifestations of a ghost world or of a long-gone past I tried to evoke without much success. That kind of filmmaking requires a patron. If I ever had a chance to acquire one, and in retrospect I think I might have had a chance, I didn’t snap to that at the time. I guess the lesson there is to keep your eye on the main chance. There was only one film I wanted to make that I couldn’t. I saw Jerry Jeff Walker perform at Liberty Hall in Houston and left the hall thinking that anyone who had ever had a friend or hoped to have one would want to know Jerry Jeff Walker. But the timing was bad. Before I could put the film together, Walker’s career was in a tailspin. If I had been Albert Maysles, Walker would have been a perfect subject, but I was still thinking like D. A. Pennebaker and trying to get in on the beginning of something good, not to document its end. What I remember best about my career as an independent filmmaker is the generosity of friends who gave me jobs, loaned me equipment and helped me make my films.

In the introduction to I Lost It At The Movies, her 1960 collection of film reviews, Pauline Kael asks: ‘Isn’t it precisely the artist’s task to give form to his experience and the critic’s task to verbalize on how this has been accomplished?” Yes. But to what end? Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight." What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."

Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover one world that underlies all of the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not? Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering, air and space travel possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter? Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg, Red Mountain and Green Mountain, le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the fifties and sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't seeing the same things at all.

Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.

What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, or filmmaker that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelets. All I can make accessible to anyone is what I see, hear and think when I watch a film. But again, to what end? To stay afloat as the wave of pap rises to fill the bandwidth streamers are creating.

For the maker of films there are thoughts, jottings, comments and notes here about how to make film from the world. Quentin Tarantino is right. A good review can be studied like a class assignment. And for the viewer of films there are thoughts about how to make film from film. These essays may be more useful to the student than to the accomplished filmmaker or to the viewer who wants only to be informed, entertained or emotionally moved. But there may be something useful here for viewers who can entertain the notion that the film we experience as memory is the real film.

If I have any single reader in mind it is the independent filmmaker on the brink of becoming the next big thing. The good news for that filmmaker is that there is a lot of bandwidth to fill. The bad news is there will be a lot of crap competing to fill it. When bandwidth was scarce, the value of information was that it added something novel to our picture of things. Now bandwidth is unlimited and we have to create a new standard of value. The problem for the filmmaker now is how to stand out and the problem for the viewer is how to make good use of his or her time.

It’s a truism that literature, film and photography, are synthesized experiences. They don’t exist until a maker creates them. But the experiences of the world, of emotions and of memories the maker uses as the building blocks of their creations is important. The maker’s own experience and direct knowledge has special standing. Write what you know. Film what you know. That’s good advice. Or maybe we should say write and film what you remember. Of what you remember, choose those things that are first-hand, intimate and full of emotion for you. Bring those emotions to every situation. Write and film what you know with abandon. Write and film what you feel. Imbue every situation, past and present, historical or speculative, with your own experience and authentic emotions. The story is just an occasion for synthesis and the quality of the film depends on the quality of the emotionally moving experience the maker is able to create.