Below are a series of correspondences between Ray Carney and Rob Nilsson. The first letter is about the writer strike, and it involves Rob’s friend Bobby. The second letter Rob speaks of ENERGY and touches on a project in the works about de Kooning.

Hello Ray,

Your whole Modest Proposal makes so much sense it kind of … hurts. The rage bubbles up when I think of these people questioning your right to speak a kind of truth that is so obvious it hardly seems like heresy. But heresy is the only direction an active pilgrim can take. No one gets anywhere without questioning authority. Authority is the creation of sinecures. Authority exhibits the fear of the mediocrities who have nothing to go by except rules, regulations, regular recourse to “no” without even a hint of the fervent wings of the high flying ‘yesses.’ I’m writing an essay called ENERGY. I’ll send it to you soon. In the meantime here is what I wrote about the writer’s strike to my friend Bobby.

Hi Bobby,

I found your words about the strike absolutely to the point! All I would have done is dittoed, and re-dittoed your words about the absurdity of these TV and studio writer/hacks claiming that they’re creating American culture. American culture is being created far from the hills, valleys and flatlands of Hollywood. I would even say that we hardly know who is creating it today, because of all the dreadful posturing going on in an apparently dying society unable to speak the truth to money. I find this true in the plastic arts and in the cinema, and probably in music as well. There seem to be some important writers still at work (Phillip Roth, William T. Vollman, maybe, Eggers, maybe), a couple of important critics such as Ray Carney, and some poets, but since hardly anyone reads poetry or prose, they seem tragically unimportant in the total scheme of things.

For cinema, go to Mexico, Inniaritu, del Toro, Cuaron (although they seem to have moved up here) and I would imagine there are young filmmakers down there better than these three who walk the thin line between mainstream and the real thing. But go to Iran, Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf (the father), go to Taiwan, Tsai Ming Liang, Hou Shou Hsien, go to Thomas Vinterberg, Denys Arcand, go to Gaspar Noe, go to England for Sally Potter, Mike Leigh, Mike Figgis. The talent in America has made accommodation to a system which promises to pay, but not for the film you want to make. You make the film with the requisite name actors (who as you say, lord it over you and despise the practice of true collaboration). And then you’re forced to listen to the outrageous notes and “reasonable” changes suggested by amateurs who once wanted to be artists, but who settled for money. And they dole it out providing you understand the meaning of the word compromise. I know what this is because I’ve done it myself and have steeled myself never to do it again. I’d rather fail on my own hook, than succeed with the acclaim of a debased audience, made so by the soporifics of TV and the Hollywood feature.

Anyway, Bobby, here I am fulminating when I intended to praise you for pointing all this out in such a simple, concise and emotional way. You are right to doubt any so- called writer who is not thinking for him/herself, working from the inner furnaces, trying to plumb the depths of “the way things seem to be.” This is what we need from our artists. Courage, candor, a shot at diving deep and coming up with something wet and dripping, unfamiliar, and completely, uniquely cathartic. Instead we have sycophants masking themselves as workers who have always kow towed to the studios like little brothers and sisters but are now suddenly getting all greased and proletarian. “Motherfuckers, increase our percentages of Internet revenue or we will storm the… “. Storm what? Anyone with any sense at all knows that these people are anything but revolutionaries. So who cares? They’ll storm their way into Starbucks. Their Bloody Thursday is a Lakers game. and a late dinner at Spago. They are paid scriveners of big business who want the Robber Barons to cut them in on their swag. It’s comical because their work is trivial, second rate and clearly done for only one reason.

Anyway, you said it better than I did because you’re speaking from the front lines. As your friend, I’d like you to make the money you make from the system because you put it back into your own personal movies. How many others can say that? No one should live in an ivory tower but if you choose to, have the decency to provide your true address. And I think I know where the towers are concentrated these days.

I also admire you for speaking out and making a distinction between real and fake unionism. And how may of these self appointed Wobblies have given a thought to all the pain they’ve caused to the real workers, the restaurant workers, the yard workers, the nannies and security guards, the secretaries, the clerks, the food truck guys and the “olvidadoes” who hang around the ad hoc labor pools on LA street corners, who risked their lives to come here to work in jobs the writers would consider beneath them. How many of them have been fired or their working opportunities reduced because of elitist writers prattling on about their “rights.” I admire you for saying these things in the belly of the beast. Thank you for educating me.

Rob

Here is the second letter between Rob and Ray.

So Ray, good to to hear from you. This battle is an impossible one which is why it must be pursued. The sham of today’s Art and Cinema world points out the failure of social life everywhere. There are few places where real Artists can perform their cathartic work free from those who would turn it into either a political, an academic or an economic exercise. You are right to point people to the artists themselves, but the language of Art is co-opted and its practices so vanilla- fied that people are right to reject most of it. This is the legacy of political correctness and the lunatic Left’s disappointment in revolution as a strategy. So much easier to take over the studios, the museums, the art institutes, the galleries and infect the soft tissue of those who hate real Art because of their failure in it. Hitler was one of these, (by a cute trick of rhetoric a National “SOCIALIST”) but most of them are cowering, small people who work best in little mobs of right-thought and identity politics.

But then there are the middle of the roaders who are mad at you because you identify problems which, if they were solved, would put them out of business. I just think the old distinctions of Right and Left are becoming meaningless. I can’t find colleagues in either direction. And so I guess I’m a monk in the service of ENERGY, human and cosmic, and its greatest expression by the visionaries who continue to inspire me.

By the way I have been recently impressed by Donald Kuspit’s, THEN END OF ART. Do you know it?

Glad that people talk about 9 @ Night. You are certainly right about discerning audiences. They are small but I have been having a great correspondence with Nina Avedon which is one of the perks of a performance for just such a group. And I have you to thank for it.

The Harvard Magazine article is supposed to be coming out soon, as well as something from Film Comment. I hope they’re good.

I wish I could help you with the fools who are plaguing your existence, but their only Waterloo, I’m afraid, will be History. In that regard I think about a project I am preparing about de Kooning painting Woman 1. As it became clear that he was going to be “chosen” to represent an art movement, replete with fame, fortune and world approbation, those who had struggled with him began to see the cost. Some were envious, others sympathetic, others quietly philosophical about the long struggle they had waged for a highly personal, but universally applicable Art from the inner furnaces, which was now going to become popularized. And of course, de Kooning, who never really drank in excess before that, ended up a hopeless alcoholic. A millionaire with every material dream realized. But lost. So material success is no answer. Only an additional problem to deal with in the search for “the way things seem to be.”

Rob