I've been watching a video I made yesterday, a compilation of film footage and still photos, highlights of my career as a showman. I should say sadistic lunatic. A truly incredible list of crimes. I threw pies in people's faces, dumped buckets of paint on their heads, made them slip and fall, set them on fire, had a dwarf use a slingshot to shoot a marble at a showgirl's butt on stage. I forced a perfectly respectable, capable cinematographer to use a single bare lightbulb in a ceiling fixture. I bellowed at a dignified senior producer in a swish West End restaurant and demanded a four man crew, two cameras instead of one, and when I got to the concert, I bullied and berated the group's manager to let my people walk on stage with the headliner. I've told people to their faces that they had no talent, give it up, don't even try. The number and depth of my egregious financial sins were too many to count or weigh. Some of my stunts were preposterously vain, challenging top executives who had the power to crush me. Worse, much worse -- I think that some hundreds of people, maybe thousands were moved by ideas that I promulgated. I put my hand on the lever of history. No sense of humility. I took a million liberties in the name of art, the highest form of pleasure known to man. Why? -- because we live but once. I lived.
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