Tortured Louis Black Paragraph of the Week

Black's column this week, "Wild and Delirious," was fairly coherent compared to his usual overstuffed style, but he did manage to slip in a few of his ridiculous tendencies. The unnecessary celebrity name-drop: "Years back, I was lucky enough to spend time hanging out with the king of softcore filmmaking, Russ Meyer... Film Comment ran an interview with him by Ed Lowry and me; I talked to him for the Chronicle; there were also times when we just hung out." The poor-sport attack on Chronicle readers who happen to disagree with him: "The gaggle of geese that regularly write in assaulting me and the paper are quite mistakenly convinced that their honking sounds pass for some kind of snide wit rather than just annoying noise." And, of course, the precious poet of the soul, who gives us the tortured Louis Black paragraph, or honking sound, of the week:
"Eyes closed. Involuntarily, I felt the flushing of all breath being pushed out of my body; like the characters in the cartoon 'Balloon Land,' I deflated. This occurred not physically but in almost every other way: My spirit gushed out like rushing, raging water from a 10-day storm slicing through a dam. It wasn't the writing but the thinking. I had nothing to say and no desire to say it. You, the readers, disappeared, while the flames of my passion went out and even the embers grew cold."

You're not writing the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Black. You're just farting out some ramblings in a local alternative weekly. Try to relax. Your "buddy" Russ Meyer didn't worry about embers growing cold. He liked big breasts and made a lot of movies about them. And they were good.