Is Acoustic James Bond Better...?

Truman Capote, who is one of my favourite writers of all time, could not finish a novel to save his life.

In fact, not only was he completely useless at it, you could 'see' how much of a mess of things he was making - getting himself further and further into a ditch he would never be able to get out of. You could see where his nerves were getting the better of him, not so much the self-doubt, but the sheer anxiety of himself knowing he was so much better and that people would inevitably get the wrong idea.

In this respect, Capote was a symmetrical writer - well, as in, symmetrically 100% opposite.

This is what the eyes of pure genius look like

His first um, perhaps fifty to a hundred pages were astonishingly good - you know at some point that you're in the hands not only of a master of the modern English language, but someone whose brain was worth listening to, if it was prepared to disclose anything to you. Truman Capote, in my view, understood human beings in ways that not too many even understand themselves about. He was nuanced. And he was far deeper of a personality than - at least in my estimation - the times in which he lived were capable of reaching even if they tried, and they generally didn't try.

Today, we have radically gone off the rails though - we could have reached depths, we could have hit heights; we were on the way there with Orson Welles, Arturo Perez Reverte, maybe even Ken Russell in some a strange sense. Kubrick was personally always too closed off from the public to give the mass public itself a feeling of its own true potential: he pointed to something, but then he also pointed over - with Kubrick there is always a bridge across vast spaces, metaphorical and spatial, between contemporary Man and society, and that 'other' place where there is a deep Man. That is to say, a profound Man.

Man is no longer even close to being profound.

There are good men but they are not profound. Capote was profound in ways that Vidal never ever was.

Where we've gone off the rails is in this mistaken belief that technology equates with 'the profound.' But it doesn't you see; design equates with the profound - it's about why intelligent beings select one thing over another thing. 

It's not about that you do, or that you can do, or how you do (something) - it's always about why.

'Why?'

Financial markets have energy (or lack of it), politicians have energy (so we can see), athletes have energy - life appears to have energy.

I don't believe it does have energy however. It has a dialogue going on: and there is a strict order with a fateful terminal sentence velocity...

Static things exist, and then the question is asked first: 'Why.' 

And then you get an answer from what ought to be a void.

Sure, listen to the voice - but watch the eyes