(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. A new chapter every so often.)
You are a swashbuckler. You live beyond your means, both financially and psychologically. You live dangerously, which is to say naked and unashamed. Play and danger are what you need. There is no security anyway and heaven loves those who dare.
Fear is a bore (see BOREDOM).
And what is guilt but fear of punishment? Also boring. Surrender to the air and ride on it. If there is a cosmic bureaucrat monitoring your behavior (see GOD), give him a good show. Sell it, baby! Be selfish. Be a monster. Sin, as Martin Luther said, bravely. You have an obligation to indulge yourself. Once you start going for safety it never stops, it's like money. Never enough. Go without assurance. Safety is vulgar.
Taking this attitude towards fear--an attitude of disdain--gives the right relation. Fear is ignoble. You are noble.
You are more than noble. You are divine. Fear is forgetting that one is divine. What can possibly happen to you?
But here is the paradox: anything can happen to you, because divinity is vulnerability. Insofar as you are divine, that far are you vulnerable.
Which leads to a seduction: if you make yourself tall enough you'll fly, fine, but do you want to fly? To get high, to experience joy always can only be desirable (see JOY), and yet you find yourself yearning for a vision with a little blood in it, even if it's your own.
The analogy is to religion. On each of the several continents the vast majority of sentient adults are apparently bores committed to some form of religious practice or metaphysical speculation; whereas if they really believed in their eternal natures as you do it might occur to them that eternity is adequate for the contemplation of the eternal. We have made a privileged intrusion into time. It is the moment for things of the earth. If they're not to your taste you'll just have to wait for the bus back.
So it is with your fear. You cling to it not perhaps because you are afraid but because you find it cozy, like gray weather (see WEATHER). You suspect that it may be the price of sensitivity (see MANNERS). Uncertainty and ambiguity are the stuff of life. How can they be relished without fear? Your very sensuality requires that you feel fear. There can be no shiver of anticipation without it.
Make yourself tall enough and you'll fly, yes, but make yourself small enough and you'll get by. Humility is comelier than pride. If you are of a higher race it is the condition of your moment here that you forget that.
Fear, that is, is luxury. An indulgence. If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
(See also MORALITY).
Pretentious Pictures Presents:
You
Need Money to Be Rich
stealing with style
Reg’d © Library of Congress
Nobody ever met cuter:
She's tough; he's refined.
She's practical; he's cultured.
She's brilliant; he's elegant.
She's serious; he's frivolous.
She's a lawyer; he's a crook.
She never loses; neither does he.
Romeo Balue is a handsome light-hearted charming thief, and he has his sights set on a wide selection
of paintings originally stolen by the Nazis from his friend Ada’s family during the
war, now in the hands of the Kremlin. But Ada, weary of the constant anxiety associated with high-profile theft,
forbids him to steal them. Then again, she can’t afford £10 million to buy them
back. The only option, then, for Romeo, is to steal the money to buy them.
Right?
Daring British barrister Francesca Smithson, the darling of the press for her courtroom tactics, is appointed to defend American CFO Hugo Danch at hearings to extradite him to New York for absconding with a fortune from his crashing company Engone.
Due to a mix-up—well, is it a mix-up?—Francesca, when she comes to meet her new client for the first time,
goes to Romeo’s room and the call-girl Romeo had asked for is sent to Hugo’s.
And, what is it, her spirit of fun? She is in a rut—she plays along!
Soon she's leading a double life—by night Romeo's bird of paradise, by day the defender of a man with a briefcase full of bearer bonds.
Hugo Danch, an American embezzler,
has fled to London with $100 million worth of bonds—and has
the hotel room next to Romeo’s. Watching Hugo on TV, Romeo spots a pin number
written on Hugo’s hand, which piques Romeo’s interest.
To avoid arrest Hugo turns the bonds over to her—and then Romeo disappears with them, and with a
truckload of paintings. Who's been conning who?
At Ada’s house in Como he relaxes—until Francesca shows up with a pair of thugs after her, and the game heats up.
Set in London and Como
Pretentious
pictures presents
You
Need Money to Be Rich
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
Pretentious Pictures Presents:
The trial of don Juan
A comedy of passions
The modern Don Juan is a woman in disguise—both a womanizer and a manizer, and active in both fields.
Famous, indeed legendary, she wears high boots, a flowing white shirt and a stylish little mustache, as if she’d just stepped out of the 17th century—everything but the sword.
She climbs balconies, changes lovers as fast as if she were dancing, and displays her sharp and wounding wit—in a way she does carry a sword— whenever it can win her a conquest.
Trouble is, she likes to gamble, and isn’t nearly as lucky at cards as she is at love. She loses fortunes, and is obliged to marry—in her role as a man.
But her wives—look, it’s not her fault!—die. And those who had stood to inherit believe she murdered them.
She’s been indicted, she’s a fugitive from justice, and now she’s making a video about what really happened—her testimony to the judge whom she dare not face in person.
Her adventures take her from Seville to Switzerland to Turkey to a Greek island to Rio de Janeiro—
—a Don Juan out of Molière, Byron and Mozart, always in command, always victorious—well, at least until she meets Celeste—
—and encounters in her an aristocracy of feeling that compels in Don Juan the love she usually commands from others. And Celeste loves her—as a man. What happens when she takes off the mustache?
Leporello, Don Juan's servant and foil, misses no chance to contradict or belittle "him," though they have an affectionate bond. "She won't look that good in the daylight, sir." "Who wants to see her in the daylight?"
Rich widow Pucci Winkleman and the Don fall in love and marry. When she finds out he's a woman she conspires with him to keep it a secret—
—even from her sister-in-law Philistia. And when Pucci accidentally falls from a high place, and Philistia doesn't inherit, she begins an obsessive quest for revenge.
Livingston Bartlet rescues the Don from a gambling fiasco, and the Don rescues her from a husband she can't bear.
When she is hit by a train, he joins Philistia in her campaign to prevent Don Juan from enjoying their money. While gambling with it—
—the Don is drugged and kidnapped by an Emirate sultan, and taken to a house on the Turkish coast—
—where she is caught in the bath with the Sultan's seventh wife.
Don Juan escapes, abandons herself to the sea, and swims from wherever she is (she doesn’t know it’s Turkey) to a nearby island—
—where she emerges nude before the unbearably proper Roger Humphrey, who falls in love.
Relieved by Don Juan's facility with disguise, he takes "her" home, where his wife Thomasina falls in love with "him."
Don Juan is on the point of escaping this tense situation when in walks Celeste, whom he had loved at first sight in Seville years earlier—
—and has never stopped dreaming about, chasing her nude up eternal staircases, through labyrinths of pillars, in the sea.
With Celeste is her domineering husband, Bloke Bletherington, a dangerous man, and a jealous one—a Blackwater type with worldwide connections.
But now that Celeste is here, Don Juan is helpless to leave. They are in love, and Bloke sees it.
When Don Juan reveals herself to Bloke as a woman, he takes “her” to Rio—and drowns. By accident! Really, that’s how it happened!
And how did the bitchy sister-in-law die? Well, Don Juan did try a little voodoo while she was there—but she’s not on trial for that!
Tell it to the judge. And Don Juan is on the run.
Pretentious pictures presents
The trial of don Juan
A comedy of passions
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