the inessential

Two films, both entertaining , but both lacking something.  McCabe and The Long Goodbye. As with the fiction, which you don't think you can read any more unless it really gets down to the bone, there's a limit to your enthusiasm for films. Larry's Party, for example. Enough writerly material to keep you going but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself: so what? 

You want a book or a film to illuminate some part of your life, bring half-understood things out of the shadows or make you see something in a new light. What you don't want to see is acting, or writing, or "ideas" or any attempt to seem profound. This is, of course, very much an age thing since with time it is harder to tolerate bullshit. Eventually, reality will catch up with you, no matter how many evasions. 

Is there a way in modern life to reach truth or goodness without suffering?

If you cannot see beauty or truth in one's life do you inevitably have to fall back on the mind, the imagination? An imagined beauty? Is art, then, just a high-brow mirror image of popular culture's familiar escape routes? 

McCabe: the west as it really was: muddy, cold, a shambles, full of stupidity, pettiness, made up of village bumpkins, whores, gamblers, goofs, tricksters, dealers and hustlers; a veritable Russian drama without the aristocrats.

Talking of Russia...Ivan's XTC sounded like a great story but the acting is so hammy, so awful that you're tempted to give up on it. If you don't want to see acting you equally don't want to see the lack of any acting! And yet, there was something that drew you in. 

Which leaves you with Bergman's Smiles and Frances Ha.

Much is being made of the renaissance of television with series like Breaking Bad, the Wire, the Sopranos, Sherlock, the Killing...all of which are very popular amongst a certain class here. With life and work catching up on you it's simply impossible to indulge in such luxuries. Are you becoming a Benthamite? Do you want to calculate the precise scale of pleasures from a book, the opportunity costs? No, it's not that, but at a certain age you have to work out-but not too tightly- what's essential and what's secondary. At this stage in your life you don't want to just read about goodness.