Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

I picture her naked but with the clown makeup on, and instantly I realize a new fetish has been born.

I have no idea how she means that. The clown makeup makes it difficult to read subtlety of expression. She is forever smiling like a monster from hell.

I am poured a glass of wine. It is white, which is, of course, wine for people who don’t like wine, but I don’t tell Laurie that.

I shake my head, sit, and bury my face in an old copy of Hyp-Notice, a kind of Pennysaver for hypnotists. Some guy is selling a pair of swirling hypno-eyeglasses, never worn. It’s the saddest ad I’ve ever seen.

Something is funny because it’s wrong. Wrongness can only be appreciated if there is a developed sense of rightness. So expectations may be dashed. A dog does not think a man slipping on a banana peel is funny because a dog does not have any expectation that this man was not supposed to slip on the banana peel.

Are you the president of the United States? I ask every person who challenges me. They have to say no.

They say to me, “Mr. President, make me great again.”

I don’t even really know what I want here. I’m not gay. But he’s not a guy, right? He’s a robot. And second, he’s a me robot, so…there’s nothing homo about touching yourself. Everybody knows that.

I think of King Lear, which is by William Shakespeare, and though I haven’t read the play, I have seen the Lin-Manuel Miranda rap version Give Me an Egg, Nuncle at the Bedminster Playhouse.

German law at this time allows inmates to “keep anything that falls to the floor of their cells and remains there for at least five seconds,” the so-called fünf-sekunden regel.

“As someone who suffered a severe head trauma, I’ve discovered a new empathy for those who have suffered severe head trauma—”

Quite frankly, I don’t even remember Clown Laurie’s ass. I think I only ever looked at her face, so obsessed was I with the clown element of her personality.

“I don’t know, Chick. He’s a nice kid. And kidnapping a kid is kidnapping.”

I am, when all is said and done, an old man who sleeps in a hypnotist’s sock drawer.

I can, of course, see the towering Oleara Debord as well. She is visible from everywhere, to everyone in the Seen, Unseen, and Unseen Unseen.

But I don’t do that very often. That would make me creepy.

It is the four thousandth iteration of Walter Mitty, which was already moth-eaten when Jimmy Thurber penned it.

It is essential to realize that there is not a single joke in this film, a single frame of levity, a single laugh. This movie is three months of unrelenting torture. But we need that, don’t we?”

We hear tell, in the film, of the privileged, the healthy, the white, but we see them only as weather, as the whirlwind of violent oppression that they are….”

This is one of the reasons I love Ingo’s work. He had no interest in jamming it into anyone’s head. His motives were pure. He was creating for himself. And because of this, I feel justified in jamming his work into people’s heads.

Would that I could be a gay man. I would like myself better. But I am the most heterosexual of all my many acquaintances.

“But you understand my point and we are in agreement, so why harp on this one aspect of how I articulated it?”

I’ve read the book forty times. Forty-one, if you count next time, which I’m almost about to do.”

I cannot say I entirely understand this play. It appears Barassini is playing Vladimir Nabokov, but for what I assume are legal reasons, he is here called Adam “Nickels” Jacoby, and, in addition to being an amateur lepidopterist, he is a gay rodeo bronco buster/Broadway actor in love with a blind civil rights lawyer/former space baby played by Castor Collins.

My wailing reaches some kind of Tuvan throat-singing level, which is not cultural appropriation because I am in flames and one does what one must.

There are helmets of all varieties, of all periods, from the world of fiction and from the world of not.

Watching the other photojournalists running around shooting guns, I have to question their neutrality.

Did the past I created create me?

If I am a series of discrete images, then am I even alive in the conventional sense? Am I an illusion to myself? Are we all just a series of photos?”