inspiration

The Last Trickster Poet of Hollywood

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A remembrance of an evening with Val Kilmer—where he conjured a provocation: the creative life begins when you stop asking for permission, find art in the everyday, and dare to make your own reality.

It wasn’t a conversation, not in the traditional sense. Val Kilmer didn’t stand behind a podium. He didn’t read from notes. He shuffled onstage, found an armchair that looked like it belonged in a sunken living room from 1978, and just—sat.

This was at my college, a small liberal arts school with an ambitious lecture series that had recently hosted former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and an up-and-coming senator named Barack Obama. These were people of consequence. Leaders who made policy, waged war, held power.

But none of them had been Batman, Iceman, Doc Holliday and Jim Morrison all rolled into one. None of them had that strange electricity of myth and menace, all bottled in a single person.

The moment Kilmer appeared on stage, the air in the room changed.

This was post-Heat, post-Batman, the tail-end of a decade when he’d shape-shifted through a rogue’s gallery of icons. He was famous in a way that felt dangerous. You didn’t know what he’d say—and that was the point.

He opened the floor to questions immediately. No script. Just Val, free-associating through Twain and Shakespeare, quoting his own films, rhapsodizing about his kids, about cameras, about the stubborn, irrational act of making art. The whole night orbited one message:

Create your own reality.

Nobody’s going to hand it to you. And even when they do, you’ll have to fight to keep it. Surprise people. Be undeniable.

He told the story of landing The Doors. He hadn’t waited for a studio call. He recorded himself singing Morrison songs. Slipped one of his own into the demo, unlabeled. Even Oliver Stone couldn’t tell which was which. Neither could the remaining members of the band. He became Morrison, and by the time casting decisions were made, there was no decision. Val was the Lizard King.

He talked about being the first person he knew to own a video camera. He filmed constantly. It was the same footage that would, decades later, form the spine of Val, his devastating, luminous 2020 documentary.

And somewhere in those rambling minutes, something clicked in me.

That night, Kilmer didn’t just perform. He modeled something. A way of living as an artist—scrappy, obsessive, defiant, enchanted. Shortly after Kilmer’s talk, I started carrying around my own video camera. I shot everything. DIY remakes of Psycho. Art films about levitating scissors. Late-night antics at Denny’s . I wasn’t trying to make something perfect. I was trying to live creatively. To treat reality as pliable. To find everlasting moments in every day. Val would understand.

It’s easy to remember the fun stuff. He did say “I’m your Huckleberry,” and yes, he told a story about Marlon Brando so strange it felt like a hallucination—involving face paint and a kimono. But what stayed with me were the deeper threads—about fate, failure, and the fragile, self-styled scaffolding that holds up an artistic life.

When someone asked about his reputation for being “difficult,” he didn’t flinch. He spoke about being a guardian of truth—for the characters he played. If he found something essential, he fought for it. The work didn’t have to be easy. It had to be real.

He talked about his son thinking he was actually Batman, not Val. Even after showing his son the movie, the boy was not convinced, and assured that he was Batman, and not his father onscreen, despite the blockbuster proof. What is reality anyway?

Maybe we are all Batman.

Kilmer painted, drew, made collages. None of that showed up in the tabloids, but it pulsed through him that night. A creative energy too unruly for one medium. You realized that the onscreen personas were just fragments and borrowed masks—glimpses of someone constantly inventing, constantly seeking.

I watched Val recently. Listened to the audiobook of his memoir I’m Your Huckleberry. Rewatched Tombstone, then Heat. And suddenly, I was back in that auditorium. In the dark. Watching a man peel away the myth and try on masks, only to reveal something stranger: a deeply sincere, wildly imperfect, defiantly poetic romantic. It was impossible not to feel inspired by that.

He made rebellion feel sacred. Mischief felt like method. He refused to play the Hollywood game, even as he conquered it. His career was a masterclass in turning dust into gold and getting bored the moment it gleamed.

Yes, he made baffling choices. Burned bridges. Took detours no manager would have greenlit. And yet he carved out something rare: a career that was his. A life of ecstatic contradictions.

He turned down the easy version of success. Maybe he regretted it. Maybe he didn’t. What’s certain is that he kept surprising us, right up until his voice gave out, and then—somehow—kept talking.

That night affirmed something in me.

I stopped waiting for permission. I stopped bowing down to so-called gatekeepers and forces I can’t control. I started making things. Well, I started making more things. Different things. Experiments. And I’ve kept on, trusting that if you throw enough wonder into the world, something unexpected will come back. It worked for Val, and over time, I’ve seen it play out in my domain as well.

Val Kilmer was, and is, our Huckleberry.

A trickster-poet in a cape. A dreamer who saw art everywhere. The crew-cut scene-stealer who once stole Top Gun from Tom Cruise with a single, arrogant chomp of chewing gum.

The Lizard King who refused to let The End define him—but instead transform him.

And when we look back, when we really trace the strange flickering light he left behind, what do we see?

We see the ghost of Jim Morrison swaggering through firelight, singing prophecy through a veil of leather and smoke—somehow about something more soulful than an expected chronicle of sex, drugs, rock n’ roll.

We see Doc Holliday, pale and facing the void, still faster on the draw than anyone alive. A Southern specter, one foot in the grave, the other in poetry.

We see Batman, not the brooding demigod of later years, but something more tormented—more Shakespearean. A Batman who looked like he’d read Hamlet and meant it.

We see Chris Shiherlis in Heat, silent and wounded, a thief with the face of a fallen angel and the soul of someone already halfway gone.

And we see Val himself, in Val, the final act, stripped of voice but not spirit. Archiving his own myth with love, regret, and more vulnerability than Hollywood ever knew what to do with.

Each of these characters was a mask. And each mask revealed something truer.

Because Val Kilmer didn’t just play icons. He inhabited them. Bent their voices to his cadence. Let their ghosts borrow his skin. He moved through genre, through persona, through time, as if this life was just one long improv scene and he was dead set on finding its truth before the lights went down.

And maybe that’s the real secret:

He was never just acting.
He was becoming.

Becoming the outlaw.
Becoming the poet.
Becoming the myth.

Becoming a cosmic jester with paint on his hands and a camera in his palm, chasing beauty across deserts and backlots and dreams.

Some actors fade.
Val burned.
With brilliance. With mess. With risk. With refusal.

He created a reality larger than the screen. A creative life so alive it bled off the edges. A rock opera of detours and digressions that joyfully haunt us all.

So here’s to Val.

Our Huckleberry.
Our Saint.
Our fading gunfighter, laughing into the abyss.
Our shapeshifter in the spotlight.
Our silent poet in the wings.

Val, if you're listening—
as you're out there still filming, still dreaming, still editing the reel of your cosmic cut—know this:

You didn’t just live a life.
You performed a constellation.
And we, lucky as hell, got to look up.

Grass, Leather, and the Geometry of Failure

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How baseball reveals the beauty and brutality of being human.

Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki throws his first pitch on the mound at Camelback Ranch during spring training. Glendale, Arizona. Photo by Andrew Miller.

Baseball begins with a whisper.

Not a roar, not a frenzy of synchronized chanting or the gut-punching bass of stadium speakers rattling ribcages.

No, baseball begins out of sight, behind chain-link fences on dew-soaked backfields where the grass is still wet enough to stain your cleats and the air carries the faint scent of distant concessions. It’s less an arrival and more a reemergence—the slow, deliberate stretching of limbs, the muscle memory of leather against palm, of fingers searching for that perfect grip along uniform red stitches. Something deep and primal stirs, an echo of summers past and seasons unfinished.

Baseball is a contradiction in cleats. It is both timeless and fleeting. Timeless in the sense that the game itself has barely changed in over a century—the diamond remains ninety feet to first, the pitcher’s mound still sixty feet, six inches from home plate, and the rituals of sunflower seeds, pine tar, and rally caps persist like sacred rites. And yet, for those who step onto the field, the opportunity is heartbreakingly finite—a narrow window to weave yourself into the tapestry of a game far greater than the sum of its individual strands.

And make no mistake, baseball is a game of strands—light and shadow, myth and mathematics. There’s the version you see on glossy posters and highlight reels, all towering home runs and gravity-defying catches. Then there’s the version obscured by shadows—the grinding repetition of early-morning fielding drills, the bone-deep ache of a season’s wear and tear, and the whispered superstitions that players follow as if appeasing the baseball gods themselves. Step over the chalk lines. Never mention a no-hitter in progress. Wear the same socks—unwashed, if necessary—until the streak ends.

Baseball’s unwritten rules are less suggestions and more commandments etched into the collective consciousness of players and fans alike. Violate them at your peril. Flip your bat a little too enthusiastically? Expect a fastball in the ribs next time up. Linger too long admiring a home run? Watch your teammates duck the consequences. It’s a sport where humility and hubris exist in constant tension, where respect for the game is paramount—even as the game itself shows little mercy in return.

Consider the cruel calculus of baseball. In no other sport is failure so visible, so frequent, and so defining. Hit safely three times out of ten and you’re a legend. Anything less, and you’re just another name etched into the ever-expanding database of statistical mediocrity. And the numbers are always there, whispering in the background—batting averages, on-base percentages, exit velocities—each data point a tiny chisel scraping away at the illusion of permanence. Swagger might get you through the tunnel, but baseball’s relentless machinery grinds down even the most confident players, reducing ego to dust scattered across the infield.

Yet, for all its cruelty, baseball remains a democracy of opportunity. The lineup is a great equalizer—one through nine, every player gets their turn. There are no shortcuts, no strategic dodges that let a team avoid its weakest link. When the game is on the line, fate might call upon a superstar, but just as often it taps the shoulder of a journeyman utility player whose name barely registers outside the clubhouse. And should that unheralded player deliver in that singular moment—should they lace a line drive into the gap or drop a perfectly placed bunt—the weight of their past failures momentarily lifts, replaced by the intoxicating clarity of success.

Of course, the opposite is also true. A stellar career can unravel in an instant—the wrong hop, a momentary lapse in concentration, or the cruel physics of a baseball rolling through the legs at the worst possible moment. Think of Bill Buckner. One error, one instant of misfortune, and decades of excellence reduced to a single highlight looped endlessly across sports networks. Baseball remembers both your triumphs and your failures, but it has a longer memory for the latter.

And yet, year after year, players return. They gather in sun-drenched ballparks and windswept dugouts, chasing that fleeting sensation of contact perfectly made—the sharp crack of bat against ball, the clean thwack of leather as a fastball hits the catcher’s mitt. They return because, despite everything, baseball offers a portal to something beyond the drudgery of daily life. It demands total immersion—an obsessive focus on the minute details of weight transfer, swing mechanics, and release points. Hours spent perfecting the spin of a slider or the precise timing of a swing become their own form of meditation. See ball. Hit ball. The mantra is deceptively simple, but in its simplicity lies the freedom to disappear into the moment, untethered from the world outside the foul lines.

Baseball is both therapy and torture—a game that reveals character with unflinching clarity. Step into the batter’s box after a strikeout and the game will immediately test your ability to forget the past. The pitcher on the mound doesn’t care about your self-doubt. The scoreboard doesn’t offer sympathy. The only question that matters is whether you can reset, whether you can convince yourself—against all evidence to the contrary—that this time, this swing, will be different.

And perhaps this is why baseball players are, more often than not, a peculiar breed. To survive a season’s worth of failures requires a contradictory blend of obsessive focus and short-term amnesia. You must care deeply about every detail of their craft while maintaining the ability to shrug off each setback as if it never happened. The moment you start carrying yesterday’s failures into today’s game, the weight becomes too much to bear. So you forget. You rebuild your confidence from scratch, one at-bat at a time, until the next slump arrives to tear it all down again.

This cycle—of hope and heartbreak, of success measured in fractions of inches—is what makes baseball both maddening and irresistible. It’s why, every February, players gather once more on those dew-covered backfields, their breath visible in the crisp morning air as they stretch and sprint and reacquaint themselves with the feel of bat and glove. They come not because they’ve forgotten the failures of seasons past, but because they’ve chosen to believe that this year might be different. That this year, the baseball gods might smile a little more kindly. Empirical evidence and a Wikipedia page full of strikeouts be damned.

Baseball is coming.

This is both promise and threat.

And somewhere out there, on a sun-warmed field where shadows fall long and thin, a ballplayer picks up a scuffed baseball and grips it tight. The seams press into his fingers, familiar and strange all at once. He winds up, lets it fly, and listens for the sound—the slap of leather against leather, the first echo of a thousand possibilities yet unwritten. The whisper that started it all, now rising, growing, swelling into something more.

Because baseball, in the end, is not merely a sport like the others, but rather a cosmic question posed to the universe: What if this time, just this once, it all goes right?

Play ball.

Andrew “Oyl” Miller is an advertising Creative Director and Copywriter. He spent 15 years working at Wieden+Kennedy on brands like Nike, PlayStation, MLB and IKEA. You can check out his work on his website.

Little Routines and Deep Breaths

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Without places to go and people to see—time has a way of flattening out. It’s important to create little spikes of nowness in your day. Little moments just because. To have some control over something. To fight a vague sense of dread with a specific burst of passion. Even if it’s just for five minutes. It’s important that we reclaim what we can. Reclaim what is ours. To be present and take back now.

Me, I reclaim my creativity with short writing and drawing breaks. I enter these with no goals in mind—no pressure. I just come to a blank page with a desire and willingness to create. That's what gets me going. I lay down some brushstrokes or colored pencil or start flowing sentences from my pen. Sometimes it leads somewhere else. Sometimes it completes itself. The victory lies in actually carving out the time. Reconnecting with your intentions. Taking back what matters to you. The things that make you breathe.



What are you doing to take back your now?