One of my goals for the month in between finishing the book and re-writing it was to overhaul the dansolomon.com website. Right now, it’s the same page it’s been for about a year and a half- functional and not hideous, but also static and a little dull. The news section is fifteen months out of date, and isn’t likely to get any better- mostly, it seems, I just can’t be bothered to keep up with that aspect of running a website. But I recognize that it’s useful to have a regularly updated website, especially when one’s goals include building an audience for one’s work. LiveJournal is good, and I intend to continue using it, but it would be nice to have dansolomon.com, which is on everything I’ve published, turn into something of some real value.

To that end, I’m trying to set up a Wordpress blog for the site. The idea being that the main page can be the blog, and all of the current content will be accessible as needed. The main page, then, will be constantly updating, which is less embarrassing for first-time visitors than a news section that was last updated in January 2007 and which is full of lies anyway.

The problem is that Wordpress is an intensively code-based application, and I am illiterate there. Usually I just bang things into a shape I can live with using an intuitive grasp of languages like coding that means I can kinda get them to do what I want, but of which I am in the end utterly ignorant. Which has worked thus far, but this time, it’s not looking so good.

And these things are boring to talk about, but it is nearly two AM and I am full of a sadness that I have dubbed hate because these things are complicated and I am not that smart.

One smart thing I did tonight was go see the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford at the Prince Charles Cinema. I know all y’all American motherfuckers saw it, like, six months ago, but I live in England and the release dates here are many moons behind yours. The film did come out around Christmas, but it lasted exactly three weeks in the cinema before it vanished, only to re-emerge at the Prince Charles last week for a mere £5 ($10) per ticket at the second-run theatre. So we went, and I loved it.

I’ve seen a lot of big movies the past couple weeks, but I don’t really understand how pretend-important pictures like there will be blood get so much hype, while a movie like jesse james managed, at best, to fit somewhere in the middle of a handful of critics’ top-ten lists. I guess it should not be a surprise to me anymore that my tastes are not usually reflected in these things- my other favorite movies last year were black snake moan and into the wild, and neither of those really ignited critical firestorms- but it still seems strange to me that the things I think are brilliant receive only polite applause.

I suspect that, if any movie I’ve seen in the past few years will be relevant and important and powerful decades hence, the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford will be the one. The notion of celebrity is evolving, but its basis is consistent, and if you can recognize Robert Ford and Jesse James in Marilyn Monroe and Jim Morrison and Bobby Kennedy and Britney Spears and on and on, then you’ll probably be able to spot them in whatever comes next, too. Fame is a weird beast, and it makes people do weird things- both the people who possess it and those who do not. It makes heroes out of idiots and monsters out of those who harm those heroes. A hundred and twenty years ago the leave britney alone! kid would have marched into Robert Ford’s bar and pulled the trigger on his shotgun, and he’d have been pardoned for it, too.

If you need further proof of the way the sort of idolization that Jesse James received lingers to this day, check it out- that shit went down a hundred and twenty years ago, same roughly as the murder of Wild Bill Hickock, fifty years after the death of Davy Crockett- and even now, to this day, you can’t make a film or tell a story about the way these men died without making it clear that they knew death was coming, and they chose to let it happen. It’s true of even thoughtful, post-modern deconstructions of the impact of these men’s lives, of the assassination of jesse james and deadwood and the new alamo picture from a few years back. The suggestion that these icons were just men who could be taken by surprise, killed by people who were just more clever or faster remains verbotten. Over a hundred years later.

Hell, when they had Crockett die a prisoner of Santa Ana in the new alamo picture, there were protests in Texas, because he didn’t go out in a blaze of Bon Jovi-by-way-of-John Wayne glory like he did in the cinematic telling of the story from 1960. The suggestion that these mythic creatures could have been real men who failed, rather than just brooded, is unacceptable in serious work. Even now.

Which is interesting, because we don’t lionize gunfighters anymore. Physical courage and battle-cunning are not admirable traits, and they probably ought not be, given the temperments of those who possess them. But we like that sort of hero nonetheless- it’s why there are really only two possible perceptions of Che Guevara, for example, either the courageous revolutionary who traveled among oppressed people and helped them learn how to reclaim power in their lives or the paranoid communist mass-murderer who lined up dissidents and shot them in the head before going to live in a big house that used to belong to someone he killed while peasants still went hungry. Pat Tillman, too- the disappointment was palpable when his death-by-friendly-fire was revealed to have been the truth, rather than the image of him with a knife in his teeth and running around Afghanistan shooting sand gooks like he was still in the backfield at Sun Devil Stadium, and the truth is still glossed over in favor of what had been the official story for a long time.

When they make the biographies of Pat Tillman, you can bet that he’s not going to be portrayed as a scared man who was caught by surprise by scared men who were caught by surprise. We need myths, celebrities and heroes, and we can’t dream of giving up a good one like that.

And it’s true now, as it was true then. We can’t even fathom of celebrity today that is equal to the sort of fame Jesse James had; we haven’t got the vocabulary for it. That sort of fame is beyond our comprehension, so we can only make sense of it by looking at it in a movie like the assassination of jesse james and applying it to the world today.

And these things are worth examining, for obvious reasons. Fame is a force whose power has always been dangerous- celebrity culture didn’t begin with us, it’s important to remember- but it’s easy to forget that, to resent the modern world for focusing on Anna Nicole Smith and ignoring Iraq. But that’s narcissism, borne of the same impulse that leads Christians to determine that we’re living in the end times so they can feel important. It’s reality, it’s not tragedy. It only feels that way because it’s hard to see how long it’s been happening.

the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford is an examination of how long it’s been happening, how long it’ll continue to happen. It’ll be relevant for a long time, I think.