According to Dean Young, anyway, may he rest in peace. It comes from The Art of Recklessness, which is a treatise on surrealism and creativity gone mad, guised up as a notes-on-craft poetry book. Like a lot of his work, it reveals a zigzag alchemy of high and lowbrow. Ariosto yin, fart joke yang. My cup runneth over, praise be.
As such are basically all the things I can remember ever being drawn to. Always either mischeviously-clever lowbrow stuff, or lofty canonical things which apparently can't help themselves but to say pull my finger. I find it in skateboarding, Björk, The Three Stooges, ska, Fleischer Studios, and of course in jackass.1
And I might be digressing here, maybe not, but lately I've also found this orbiting-between-poles in Fellini too. I'm usually kinda hands-off toward movies2, but I've always felt drawn to Fellini, but didn't have much exposure to him aside from falling asleep every! single! stupid! time I've attempted to watch 8½.
Until I found La Strada, and was immediately won over by Guilietta Masina. Her eyes alone command total tragicomedy. She draws the sympathies right up out of you, and I realized that I never knew Fellini was making such completely brutal movies. I thought his characters were illusioned rich people. And then I watched Nights of Cabiria. Uffda. Both movies are totally cruel, but Massina has a peculiar and indomitable humanity which seems to shine right out of her. In La Strada, right when she's making new circus friends after being literally sold to Zampanò, one turns and says to her: What a funny face. More like an artichoke than a woman. Eek, burn. One second she's glowing with a sense of possible and better worlds, and then the next second she's deflated and sauntering off like Eeyore.
Certainly, I'm still only scratching the surface of Fellini. I was plainly dumbfounded at how both these movies pummel Massina and yet how she somehow triumphs in each of them. Maybe her nonverbal communication is just that convincing, and maybe the physicality is the connective tissue that likens these works to the more, ahem, humble media forms in my mind.
It does remind me of what Chuck Jones said about facial expressions--they're the one part of us that's always alive, conveying everything. But then he went and stretched that logic like a fresh pulled noodle, running the gamuts all across emotion, expression, history, humanities, genre, you name it, to giddy extremes.
Is this what the carnivalesque is?3 Wagnerian opera à la Bugs Bunny in drag? Koko the Clown as Cab Calloway delivering the eulogy of Betty Boop? I sure hope so. Because it hits me like the monkey's crashing my head between his cymbals. Like a big, brassy, bawdy richness. The sun is right there, waiting to be stared into.
Camarón de la Isla and John Coltrain pursue the same thing4, and I think similarly do these goofy cartoons cross swords with classic Italian Neorealism, nyuk nyuk nyuk. I think it's the same harebrained vigor that pulses through Dean Young's books, through Ulysses, and through otherwise-blindingly-moronic skateboarders rigging up spots like Rube Goldberg. The art of recklessness indeed.
I could go on, but I'm not here to write lists. I'm still building this website's foundation, so the pulpit can come later.
1 I actually tried to do some of my graduate work on how, in my view, jackass weds traditions from classic Hollywood, slapstick, and camp all together and how different design modalities inform it. The crew was made up of skaters, editors, and at least one big-shot filmmaker by the name of Spike Jonze. However, my university at the time went on strike and my classes all suddenly ceased, and unfortuately that material was never finished. Maybe I'll still get to it eventually. I completed that degree, but suffice it to say, I don't trust universities anymore.
2 Big fat waste of time. Annoying many friends and family, I first went on a movie "hiatus" in 2019, which was kind of nuts since suddenly we all went into lockdown, never to be screen-free again. And then last summer I finally read Amusing Ourselves To Death, and that was that, final nail in the coffin. Movies suck, there I said it, lock me up. (shakes fist)
3 I have wondered since I was a 19-year-old English major. Yada yada Bakhtin, but let's be honest, I'd never understand. Years later now, you'd have a tough sell on your hands to get me to read one more page of theory.
4 Antonio Lizana said this when I saw him in Jackson Heights. I believe it!