Black Lamb

A global embarrassment

September 1st, 2003

BY GREG ROBERTS

The film industry has been a global embarrassment for such a long time, it leaves me with one wish: I hope it gets even worse, until it reaches the final degree of worthlessness, at which stage I can forget about it completely, the way I’ve dismissed popular music.

What thrill of freedom will be mine, and soon, too, judging from the quality of recent films. Bin Ladin is right — this stuff is real crap. Watching modern movies makes one a dirty little peasant child digging through the vast garbage dump of Guatemala City, occasionally, rarely, finding a piece of string or a bone with some tissue left on it, just enough to keep him slogging on.

The cardboard characters, the lousy scripts, the moralizing that is so heavy-handed you feel like a stockyard calf getting hit straight between the eyes with a sledge hammer, and the perpetrators — people such as Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte — not only get rich, they get respect for their shameless dreck.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Movie Issue, Movies, Roberts | Link to this Entry

The man who couldn’t think straight

June 1st, 2003

BY GREG ROBERTS

Thoreau messed me up pretty bad. I read Walden at seventeen, and it turned me into a non-materialist for most of my life. As a result, I endangered my family by driving them around in a hundred-dollar Peugeot 504 with bald tires that were ready to blow any second. I thought I was saving the planet. I’m better now. We have a thousand-dollar Toyota van with new tires.

I’ve lost some respect for Thoreau. He’s a wonderfully clever writer, but he couldn’t think straight. The imprisonment at the pond, in a hell-hole of a cabin, slaving over a goddamn bean patch, would have driven anyone to suicide, except for one thing — he was writing the book. With the inspiration of his art, it didn’t matter where he was. Same for Beethoven. His drive to compose music made him oblivious to his filthy room with the many unemptied piss pots.

Anyone without a major artistic project had better stay away from a Walden situation. Better to exist in a studio apartment with a part-time job at Burger King and a basic cable package.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Book Issue, Books and Authors, Roberts | Link to this Entry

Author profile

December 1st, 2002

Greg Roberts grew up in Hiles, Wisc. (pop. 132) and has held dozens of jobs, been fired from most of them, and is left with fond reminiscenses of being a restaurant violinist, stand-up comic, and consultant to a Guatemalan fly-tying factory. He has worked as a magazine editor and, over the last forty-five years, has contributed to dozens of publications, many of which have disappeared from the face of the earth. Roberts owns and helps operate Equator Coffee Company in Eugene, Ore. He has had a three-toed sloth as a pet, caught billfish on fly tackle, and still subscribes to three philatelic journals. His Black Lamb column is called Blunderbuss Dilettante.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Roberts | Link to this Entry