Great movie about mental disease and megalomania, and the true nature of art and the aesthetic experience, if we only look closer. Daniel Johnston's music is truly unique, although it is really really bad¹. But it falls under that category that it is so bad, so bad, it is good. It has this adolescent-campy-weirdo attraction to it (not unlike Kevin Smith, blargh). But that's not all, it has a complete media-self-referential self-created life-story to it. I'm not saying I would buy or waste my time listening to it, but the movie sure got me to think a lot about me and my friends.

We are just leaving the era of the superstar, the idols made by the last century's eletronic communication mediuns, which were corporate-made but mass-consumed. We are following the path to single-made, few-consumed. Daniel Johnston desires to be a genius — a great musician — and his religious fumblings, together with a bunch of weirdos that believed him, helped him become a small phenomenon which deserved him an impartial yet still morbid driven documentary. They also, it looks, made him waste much of his life, and if not directly led him to great suffering, for sure aggravated it.

In Porto Alegre it seems to me everybody strives so hard to be unique, even those who dwell in the lowest naivetes, and for sure are as common as they don't want to be, still have this underlying principle — ill formed or grotesque as may it be, but which is not different in quality from the true masters of making-themselves-a-myth, be it in quantity. This cannot be a restricted to Porto Alegre phenomenon, I must concede, and this sort of narcisistic orgy has its redeeming features, I presume. For one, conformity may be even worse.

But really, Daniel Johnston's had me watching his movie, and had me connecting everyone reading this to him. He sure doesn't mind the reasons; and in fact, I believe he would relish in understanding the workings of "selling your soul to the devil" as I'm sort of explaining here. He was willing to do anything to raise his head a little bit from the crowd; as was John Lennon's killer, by the way. He sacrificed his sanity and most of his life to be loved by crowds, and he got a movie. May we follow his saintlihood with a grain of salt. May we be less focused on bulshit, and strive for true love and fearlessness — not the eight wordly dharmas². Amen.