In today’s tiny moviefilm, I talk about minutiae of a day. Such as: In this context, the power being out means no Starlink. The power being out means no heat. Then I came back in to the almost-cold house to get that murmur ready to upload, but first I made coffee.

I measured out the water, put it on to boil, scooped in the three scoops of Equal Exchange Guatemalan, and went back to work. In a few minutes the kettle sang. And I said to myself with sudden realization: how come the electric kettle boiled that water so quick when there’s no electricity?

That was how I found out it had come back on.

The moral of this story is that, in this context, the power being out means no coffee either. I would do well to remember that. Will I do well? It will always be unlikely, an improbability.

I also learned that the minimum crew for a ship of fools is exactly one human animal. That much at least I am certain to retain.

The process of my art has always drifted hard toward being a solo sail. That’s why writing was my first love, and why the great love was talking over the radio in the middle of night from a small studio to a potential audience of millions, and an actual audience of dozens.

I acted in plays and I liked it, but I always knew that the big collaborative effort of theater was not my game. Counting on that many people to get my art out is just not how my soul is built. So my projects have always been very small in scale and light on ambition; at least ambition in the sense that leads to success.

Without a radio tower to call my own, my art is necessarily small too. Mostly that’s fine with me. But sometimes I think: god damn, what would life be like if I could make movies with epic sweep like Stanley Kramer did?

I told you about On The Beach. The second Kramer piece I want you to know about is called Ship of Fools.

Ship of Fools | Vivien Leigh | Lee Marvin | Full Restored Classic Movie in HD | Retro TV

Even more than OTB, this is a movie that makes me want to weep, at the genius of the vision motivating it.

Unlike OTB, there is no clear moral, except perhaps a silent urging to truly live and embrace this miracle called life before it is too late. Because someday it will be, and that day is probably a lot closer than you think.

At the center of it is a doomed love story and in orbit around that center are other stories of doom, love and otherwise. It looks into the limits of tolerance, the pros and cons of storytelling being used for the greater social good … so many fine-grained and important things that an average film or work of art never comes close to even acknowledging, much less addressing.

This is no When Harry Met Sally drivel made to sell popcorn. This is cinematic art and I want to understand how to be like the guy who made it, even if I never quite am.

I want to learn how to be the kind of man who would never let Simone Signoret go like the doctor does. Might that be too much to ask?