It's too purple, earnest and overdone, very American in its innocence, but it's a defense of art as craft and honesty, as intimate description, intimate empiricism. And it makes all my arguments about the changes in our culture over the past decades. It's the reason for my comedians tag, the tag for lawyers as opposed to law, for performance and participation in democracy, for Joe Jamail and John Mortimer and Rumpole, for honest, champagne or not, bourgeois decency.

In light of all that is going on in the world today, it is difficult to celebrate the already-celebrated Stranger Things. But this award from you, who take your craft seriously and earnestly believe — like me — that great acting can change the world, is a call to arms from our fellow craftsmen and -women to go deeper and through our art, to battle against fear, self-centeredness, and the exclusivity of a predominantly narcissistic culture and through our craft to cultivate a more empathetic and understanding society by revealing intimate truths that serve as a forceful reminder to folks that when they feel broken and afraid and tired, they are not alone. We are united in that we are all human beings and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that is being alive.

Technocratic reason is the truth of generalities, or the aggregate, of the fungible. Mimetic art is the description of one moment in time, one event, one day in one life, the death of one person. Non-mimetic art is gesture of such specificity that it forces us to focus, and we become powerfully aware that each of us is present for that moment in time, that event, that day.

More personal, so less abstract, less about ideas than -and because- about experience, a black man, not a white man in America.


See the previous post, and this one, and this one.