Merry and Happy. Merry and happy what? Well, hopefully you didn’t have to spend the entire season doing what was expected of you. Hopefully, you spent some serious time being selfish and un-Christian. Hopefully you took a moment out to take a rainy drive out to the seashore or into a forest. Maybe you had a moment to flee the mob and its incessant, mordant gift-giving to stand on a bluff somewhere and indulge in despair. Not too long. Just enough to feel the reality of the one thing society fears the most: not giving a damn.

When I look at the Mayan ruins down in the Yucatan where they can’t figure out exactly why these architectural wonders were abandoned and left to the jungles, I imagine people fed up with fake pomposity, cruel certainty, avid Gods (read canny priests feathering their own nests and rulers propped up by superstition) and smug social hierarchies. And I can see the people who did the work slipping out of town for a Xmas session of nihilism… and never returning.

They did it in Haiti. Once yellow fever and the slave armies of Dessalines and Christophe had convinced the French that Paris was a better venue for Christmas than Port au Prince, most of the now ex-slave population headed into the hills, to build isolated farms and small communities, knowing that the generals and politicians they hated would now be black instead of white.

Most savvy people know that political positions are seldom human solutions. The Laws of the Hive have it that once you are given authority, and the requisite pomp and circumstance attaches limpet-like to your person, the juking and jiving begins. You suddenly see no problem in accepting a key to that choice ski-dacha formerly occupied by a Grinch-ish exploiter. You see no reason not to see yourself as a liberator, a cadre of Right Thought since after all your doing helped get rid of the last crew of Bad Think. Don’t you deserve some holiday R & R for exposing Santa as a jejune old codger who spends a few too many long winter nights thinking about little children? Do you get my point?

A large economy dose of Christmas cheer is like too much Marxist ideology, Christian theology, and overdoses of other isms, ogys and ists for that matter. You just can’t hold that Ipana smile long enough. The idea of it can’t propel us past the hypocrisy that colors so many of our public rituals. Liberal dollops of grease and mascara are needed to massage the public ideal. Not to be a complete Philistine, you can see how some public ideas free you up from some other public ideals… for a while. Emphasis on reason and individuality fostered by Enlightenment thinking led to the success of Western science and industry, as well as literature and art. But canny captains of the Industrial Revolution and the governments they bankrolled also knew that in order to secure the raw materials for their Great Society, they still needed jolly elves in black robes to scatter through the land securing the hearts and minds of those they stole from. Eminent Domain, Manifest Destiny and the White Man’s Burden are also ideas and they seem to crop up at the most convenient times.

Today, who would argue that these notions are right, just or acceptable? But we’ve seen virtue swing into action before too. The question is, what happens to what we call good when we trot it out to counter the bad? Is it even within the human genetic code to create workable governments based on values rather than interests? Are we so different from… the Bees?

Does the drone stand at the entrance of the hive handing out pamphlets railing against the superior comb-time of the workers? Maybe we’re different. Maybe skepticism and discrimination allow us to take our Queen Bees with a grain of salt. But is that a trap as well? If we’ve developed the skill to distrust our leaders, and we line up with our RIGHT side against their WRONG side in order to redress ILL and to forget that once the RIGHT side wins it becomes, by definition, the OTHER side, then we’re caught in a closed system which repeats itself ad infinitum. Let’s not forget that two of the three great monsters of the 20th Century got there by virtue of a GOOD purportedly based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Did those millions killed by Mao and Stalin’s Socialist values die any more willingly than those destroyed by the Hitler’s National Socialism? As in football, opposing fouls cancel out. And don’t forget that Hitler’s high-minded ideals championed a RACE/CLASS/GENDER program all its own. Funny how, when you start to make a system out of GOOD, the END is usually near. During Christmas we’ve got the Nativity, giving birth to notions of freedom and transcendence. But the manger is often found in the Catholic Church, an instrument of control, with its triumphant cathedrals sticking up all over the world.

I guess the Liberal maintains sanity with the belief that, in spite of all this, over the years there is an overall increase in Good. Ok, let’s skip the 20th Century then. In spite of the fact that Suburbia Americana sports green, kempt lawns and squadrons of SUVs with loan holders ready to blitzkrieg any government department which wants to peg gasoline to its actual price, I’d check out the graveyards, marked and unmarked. I would say they give a more vivid picture of our times than real estate brochures extolling condos with adjoining golf courses, racially mixed advertising for male enhancement pills or even the published hand wringing of Post Modernists sure that they’ve finally discovered the source of Evil.

So what makes for these contradictions? Is there a convenient scapegoat? It’s good fun to blame aging White Males for history, but if the steam engine had been invented in Africa, it would have been Black Males. Or in the Caribbean, multi-colored Males. And if there was a country of Amazons in power, it would be Females acting like Males. We’ve seen the Jean Kirkpatricks, Indira Ghandis and Margaret Thatchers of the world. It doesn’t matter. History shows that Power struggles to achieve self interest. And most idealism we see is, at root, a struggle for the dominance of the group to which you belong. When the righteous point, slip a mirror in front of them. We’re all in this together, most particularly the finger pointers.

And what of the Conservatives? I guess I share their pessimism about Big Government. They claim more power should devolve to the PEOPLE and to the STATES, which presumably exist closer to the PEOPLE than the NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. But then, when they get voted in, somehow governments don’t get any smaller. National Security requires a lot of guns, ships, planes and boxes to ship them in. Tax incentives are needed to build them, oil them and sell them. And family values and old time religion have to be there to provide righteous justification. My people were hole-in-the-shoe Stevenson liberals and I think you’d have to be a self-satisfied Scrooge to be a Conservative in today’s political climate. But not all Liberals are lining up to help Bob Cratchett feed Tiny Tim either.

And so, during this season of merriment and good cheer, what or who do we look to and how and why? Well, the donnybrook continues, that’s for sure. Societies with monolithic values cry Hosanna to the damnedest Heroes. From Howard Stern to the Ayatollah Bin Laden there are people toying with extreme, dangerous games. And what kind of a person wants a quiet, uneventful life? Security is a myth, but so is Hedonistic license and Fundamentalist insistence that only the afterlife has value. But you pay for the game you play. You pay! There’s a box office at the beginning of every holiday movie line, and a studio at the end to finagle net proceeds.

This is why I say Art should be non-political. I probably wouldn’t say it as loudly if I’d been brought up in Eastern Europe where bastardizations of Communism and Fascism wore down and even annihilated a generation of poets. But in America it’s necessary to insist on a different ground, a more high-minded field, tilled for exceptional talents, and watered by transcendent and deep feeling. I don’t believe in democracy in the field of Art. For all the feinting and fawning going on in current Art circles and all the Kumbaya and Right Thought, talent is still recognizable, and in spite of the varieties of contending tastes, it stands out… triumphant as a Dizzy Gillespie solo, Yo Yo Ma rendering Bach or a Ravi Shankar raga.

I know it’s old fashioned to try to make Art thought of by the 19th Century Romantics as a personal voyage of vision and inspiration, or by Classicists as a look back to Greek and Renaissance models for validation. But both models trump Art as defined by the weird and wacky world of galleries, museums, curators, critics, docents and other philistines we have to endure today. Then there’s American cinema: trendy, good enuff, milquetoast, Mommy and Kiddy’s Night Out No Concept sponsored by Good Thinkers playing cheek by jowl with Tarantino-esque shock and awe, stylish violence in the old cineplex. It’s here where I give the Moslem fanatics the nod. Five will get you ten they never thought to consider their apocalyptic jihad into the World Trade Center an installation piece, or subject matter for a socially motivated doc.

But our Art Savants continue to. Faced with the immense superiority of dramatic cinema as an art form that can, in the right hands, capture the riotous extremes of human hive life, obscurity remains the most potent weapon of the Pop-ites and correctness the mantra of the Mom-ites. The Pop-ites find fun and games one of their only rationales. The Mom-ies, most comical of all, frequently debunk men, and most particularly, the MAN, as their ideological bogeyman of choice. Have you seen that ad on TV where the head of the corporation selects a certain model phone over another in order to “put it to the Man.” When an underling points out that he IS the man, he has to think for a moment.

While thinking it over, let’s admit that it may be fun or it may be idle to talk like this. Words, ultimately, don’t prove much. Art is able to amaze, suggest, transform, and produce catharsis or it’s probably not worth mentioning. In Cine Manifest, our old film collective we used to debate these questions and debate is fun, and cheap, but it’s more expensive to put your name on a piece of work and let it totter out into the world. That’s where rubber meets road. There you have to learn where to hold firm and where to wise up, where to discount good advice and where to get out of your own way. And, realize most of all that it’s not about selling product. If it sells it sells. If not, do you suddenly become someone else? Do you believe differently, act accordingly, go with the flow? I hope not. We can all learn how to get better, but it’s a good deal easier to get worse.

I think developing opinions, having a stance and defending it is what America’s all about: individual opportunity, debate, a chance for the underdog (not all underdogs and not BECAUSE they’re “under”) to muster skill and luck to make an impact. It’s about contest and contrast and being opinionated and wrong headed and getting to duke it out with the higher ups because although this method is chaotic and imperfect, it’s the only way to limit the reign of any particular group of BAD believers short of warfare.

We have it about as good as it gets, as bad as some hold it to be. But the Joe McCarthys and HUAC Committees do grow up on Main Street as well as Alexanderplatz. We have to watch out for them or we’re living in a fool’s paradise. Even today in this season of tall salutations and even higher aspirations we can’t rule out, on a cold winter’s night, noises on the roof, the rough boots of a visitor, a Greek (or is it a Norwegian?) bearing gifts.

There might be other footsteps up there but I wouldn’t give odds that they’re made by eight tiny reindeer. If you’re a pilgrim trying to discover what’s going on in this world I’d rather guess that there are folks up there who have checked their lists and are mad at what you’re saying, intent on having you change your tune. This is the gift you sometimes get for trying to express things as you seem to see them. But what if you haven’t followed your lights or your stars or whatever you follow, and have backed away from your vision, seeking profit, comfort and fame instead? Then you’d be under surveillance from rooftops and vulnerable to chimney spelunkers with nothing to show for it.

Hang those stockings with care and keep on jingling!

Rob

If you’ve read this far you are an elite seeker in our era of fast forward and an eye for the exit. So I’d like to detain you for a moment longer. We worked for the last 14 years in the San Francisco Tenderloin running a player’s (actors) workshop that emphasized being alive, expressive and candid, seeking unpopular truths and avoiding sentimental requiems. We didn’t think humanity was any better than it appears to be nor did we pretend to have answers that could better it.

But we did spend our time developing a unique kind of movie that comes directly out of the experience of fallible human beings. We call this cradle to grave filmmaking method Direct Action, and it is a unique amalgam of traditional and cutting edge practices. We didn’t look to Hollywood or Indiewood for our models. We looked to each other and each individual’s struggle to be truer, deeper, richer in emotion and apt to personal vision and instinct. Although we had professional actors in our group, we didn’t consider them better players than people whose only dramatic experience was attending our weekly workshops and playing in the films that came out of them.

As with all new life forms, film like this is not recognized at first. Sometimes it takes people years to understand the difference between hot house, highly dramatized mainstream cinema, and work which comes from people who are learning who they are and what they’re capable of in moments of cathartic reverie, on the pavement and in the moment.

I think there’s a profound education in understanding what we do. But you can’t experience it unless you have the movies available for viewing and study. I appreciate those of you who have purchased our films, but there are many of who belong to the 15,000 who haven’t.

I’d like to appeal for your support. I’d like you to buy the films we sell on http://www.robnilsson.com. I want you to look at them and think about what they have that impressive big screen epics, glorified cop shows (no one wants to know what cops really do hour by hour), glorified hip hop soap operas, and new breed multi-vitamin documentaries of the Michael Moore variety don’t. I invite you to think about those differences, challenge yourselves to see what NEED has, for example, which MUNICH could never approach or what STROKE tells you, or reminds you of, or inspires in you, which conventional Indiewood films like CAPOTE can never deliver.

I invite you to step up and buy our work. Even though we are holding the 9 @ Night films off the market until they are all finished, we have two of the older Direct Action films, SIGNAL 7 and HEAT AND SUNLIGHT and two of the newer Direct Action World Cinema pieces, SAMT, which uses the Direct Action principles developed in the Tenderloin in Jordan (coming this month) and WINTER ORANGES (Direct Action in Japan) available on the web site now. These will soon be joined later this year by OPENING, shot in Kansas City, FRANK, South Africa, and SECURITY, from the U. of California, Berkeley.

I know that if you start looking at the films and giving yourselves to the very different, but extremely simple experiences they suggest, you will begin seeing what I intend. I want the cinema to come out of the players who are living it, to be part of their personal expression and spontaneous feeling, intensified by the editor’s bright clip. I don’t want it to be physically amazing like the Cirque du Soleil, with it’s bravura tight rope walker’s verve. It could just as well be psychically puzzling, like getting up in the morning and living your life all day until the moment you read this page, so simple you might think you’re missing something. Because simplicity doesn’t equate to understanding. Simplicity is the first step towards empathy and empathy is the door to inquiry, curiosity and wild surmise. And with that step, Art starts to get somewhere. Inner engines trigger outer energies. Eyes open, ears vibrate, minds reverberate across the firmament.

I believe in two things that are unique. The first is DNA, which means that each human being, given the chance, embodies a singular and unpredictable reality. The second is Time, which means that at every second the singular, unknown and miraculous present arrives. These are the two things we court in our films. Forget about story. We aren’t children anymore. Watch characters connect with circumstances to produce a grounded form of organic life. Connect! Connect! Our films can’t do that for you. You are the opposite pole, which much be touched in order that the electricity flow. Only you can produce the final epiphany.

This is what our films are about and I invite you to begin the process of discovering them. Go to http://www.robnilsson.com and help us to continue our mission, by purchasing the work offered there.�