One Sentence Movie Reviews: “Valentino: The Last Emperor”
Valentino: The Last Emperor (2009): "A life's worth must be looked at with both pride in the accomplishment and the sad awareness of knowing when that tenure of work has ended."
Notes: This documentary about Valentino, the last great fashion designer still running the company that bears his name, has me thinking hard about one's lifetime body of work, legacy and how one would like to be remembered. Lined up next to the death of Michael Jackson, my new job and future book projects, these questions have been crowding my mind for the better part of the summer.
It's probably some kind of arrogance zenith to be thinking about legacy a month before your 36th birthday with one book and a modest pile of good ideas to your credit. But few things are more important to me, more fundamental to what I will consider the soil and sunlight of a well lived life. Can I look back on my work and be satisfied that I give them my best effort? That, on balance, I let creativity bloom instead of languish and that I did not give up because I lied to myself by believing I had nothing to say?
It comes down to work, steady, organic, doing until somthing real is born. Fuss with it as much as you like afterword. First you must bring it into being. And that takes a kind of time and space I feel like I must invent from nothing.
Writing is not as important to me as being a good person, as being the kind of friend, son, partner, brother I was put here to be. But it is a very close second. I could do without it. But I would be walking around with half myself, a butterfly with a rip in this wing.
Everyday I do. Or I try to. Otherwise it is a day, yes, a glorious celebration of being alive but one in muted colors and allegros missing measures. A day spent practicing one's art may end in pain, exhaustion, sorrow. It will always feel louder, brighter, grander than a day when we left our tools languishing on the work bench, waiting for someone else with something to say.