With Honors
There was a time America produced hope for the world, churning out of every commercial orifice in this country. One of those holes was Hollywood. In the 1990s, there were movies made to make us better people. One of those movies was called With Honors and it starred Joe Pesci, Brendan Frazer, Moira Kelly, Patrick Dempsey and god damned Gore Vidal (if you can believe that). It was a simple premise - an entitled prick named Monty (Frazer) who thinks he knows everything about the future is hell bent on impressing his prick mentor (Vidal) in Government studies at Hahhhhvaaard loses ten chapters of his senior thesis because his ancient computer crashes and the floppy disk (yep, the movie is that old) gets corrupted along with his hard drive. That kind of shit used to happen to us before “The Cloud” came along and snatched our lives away.
So the prick takes the one paper copy of his thesis to Kinko’s on a windy, snowy night. He trips over something and drops his thesis down a grate by the library, and he can see it through the basement window, sitting on the floor in its manila folder. By the time he makes it down to the basement, the folder is gone, and he tracks its movement to a boiler room where a bum named Simon (Pesci) has already fed five pages into the furnace to keep himself warm. There is an altercation, and Monty gets Simon arrested, but has to bail him out to get his thesis back. The deal they made is that Monty gets a page every time he does something or gives something to Simon, including a place to stay, meals, and because when he tripped, Monty busted up his foot, Simon started carrying his books to classes.
In one of those classes, Gore Vidal is holding court and asks the class if the President of the United States is a King because he can destroy the world without checks or balances. Watch this scene, because it hits differently 30 years later than when it was made.
The narrative arc of this film is towards social justice and human kindness. It’s a great movie, one of Joe Pesci’s best performances (and that’s saying something because he’s never had a bad one I’ve seen). It also indicates a time when America set the moral standard for how humans should behave towards one another.
There is a reason the current government is going to war against art, and it’s because art is memetic and far more culturally influential than any threat of force. Governments can only kill you once, but art can make people want to be better humans every day, which is what it means to live with honor.
I Never Got To Say Goodbye
Four years and two days ago, my best friend died in the pandemic at 47 years old. It happened so fast that most of us didn’t get to say goodbye, though I feel his presence in my memory and my gratitude. Yesterday, we gathered with his parents, wife, ex-wife, amazing daughter, and a house full of friends. We celebrated life and briefly shared our pain at his loss. But mostly, we shared gratitude for the blessing of connecting and keeping his memory out loud together. What a legacy and an honor to have had such a powerful presence in my life.
What I’m Working On
The Twin Peaks book is about half done. I recorded a sweet video breakdown for those interested in the current state. Check it out:
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