So, Rilke’s understanding might boil down to “watch the assumptions you make.”

Makes me wonder how many of the celebrity “tirades” are just frustrated requests for everyone else to catch up.

Second, I respect Billy Bob more now. You know what it’s like when someone isn’t really talking to you? When one of your friends or acquaintances assumes you instead of communicates with you–that maybe you’re a liberal or a socialite or that you’re not that smart because one time a hundred years ago you were one of those things? That’s what it seems like to me–like that interviewer had a “trajectory” he was trying to push through. He isn’t actually questioning and interacting with Billy Bob in an immediate way, or even a respectful one, though of course immediacy is the highest respect we can pay. But that’s why he gets so rattled when it doesn’t follow that expected path. He was asking from the beginning with his whole body to just let it go as planned–to have a canned non-interaction–that’s where he gets his surface confidence from. His surety in giving the pat questions and receiving pat answers that aren’t real answers but are ones he assumes his audience wants. And Billy Bob says “Fuck no buddy, this is really happening. *Now* it’s happening. See how that works?”

It’s like an enactment of Rilke, or the kind of consciousness Rilke recommends. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke talks about courage, the only kind that may be required of us, he says–to accept, welcome and embrace the strange and singular: “For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope…. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security.”

Billy Bob takes us into a much larger room where we and that interviewer don’t know what’s going to happen next. No wonder Angelina liked him. And the interviewer needs him to stay within the limited confines, tries to bully him into them. “C’mon man, let’s just say Music is your first love, because it’s nice and pat and sells things.” And it’s a lie, it’s a fabrication, and Billy Bob won’t do it; it’s not worth it. It’s amazing to me to see people who are that big. Big enough to so completely fill their own shoes, they stay in them no matter what else comes along.