Even Better Than The Real Thing Dept.

Some artists have a way of riveting your vision with the certitude of what they do. This has nothing to do with subject or style. It's inexplicable. Andy Warhol and Grandma Moses. The spareness of Bergman or the Fellini circus.

Yes, yes! I murmured to myself while reading those words. (Written for a review of a movie I've been eager to see since its trailer popped onto Apple's site, no less.)

You know the real ones right from the beginning. The minute you start a song by Led Zeppelin or X or John Mayer, you know it's them and no one else. When Takeshi Kitano nails down his camera and fills the soundtrack with music that's as soothing as the action is not, he's unmistakable. When Roberto Bolaño fills two whole pages with a labyrinthine paragraph that somehow spits you back out right where you came in, and you realize this without having to flip back and look, you know you're dealing with an original.

You're an original when you can't be anything else but. Werner Herzog embodied this sort of thing from the inside out. Nothing was worth putting on film unless it was worth risking everything for. Small wonder he put Klaus Kinski on that raft with all those monkeys, or left that steamboat halfway up the mountain, and boiled and ate his shoe in real life when Errol Morris dared to finish and release Gates of Heaven.

You're an original when the categories just run like hell to get away from you. What possible classification could hold Jandek, or Takashi Miike's Izo, or a band like Pablo's Eye?

You're an original when people think of you as something to take to a desert island. If greater flattery exists, I have yet to find it.