Month: February 2014

RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman

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RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1967-2014

I suppose our capacity to feel shock and sadness and even anger over the death of an actor—someone who we don’t really know, didn’t know, couldn’t know—comes through an emotional identification. I was shocked at how shocked (and saddened, and angered) I felt when I read that Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead today in his apartment in New York City penthouse.

I first saw Hoffman in 1997, in Boogie Nights, a film I watched so many times in college that it is imprinted in my mind. Hoffman played Scotty, a boom operator whose not-quite-repressed homosexuality erupts in strange emotional moments. Hoffman brought pathos and humor and understanding to the character, and we could look at it like a template for all the work he would do in the decade and a half after. Hoffman shaded even his smallest roles with depth and spirit. His Scotty could have been a leering freak, a grotesque caricature—but Hoffman knew Scotty was more than that—he made Scotty real, a person, a human whom the audience could feel.

Hoffman continued to work with Boogie Nights writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson. In Magnolia, where he again brought pathos and intensity to a minor role: “See, this is the scene in the movie where you help me out”:

Hoffman showed the extension of his range in PTA’s sharpest film, Punch Drunk Love:

But his best work with Paul Thomas Anderson in The Master, where he showcased his deep, penetrating intelligence as Lancaster Dodd:

The Master was one of the few leading film roles that Hoffman got, which perhaps makes sense if you consider the type of character he was often cast into: The creep, the weirdo, the failure, the fat friend, the obsessive. But he brought so much to those roles too, whether it was Phil Parma sneaking Penthouse into his bread order (Magnolia), yes-man Brandt’s repetitive nervous tic (The Big Lebowski), Scotty lunging for a sloppy kiss (Boogie Nights), or Sandy Lyle shooting hoops in the forgettable romcom Along Came Polly. Actually, Along Came Polly is an instructive example of just how great Hoffman could be—he raised the film, was easily the best thing about it, bringing depth to his character (a failed former child actor) and adding the term sharting to the lexicon.

Hoffman was also the best thing about his first major lead role in a film, Capote, where he played the titular writer.

Hoffman played another writer in Charlie Kaufman’s messy postmodernist riddle Synecdoche, New York. Hoffman played Caden Cotard, a theater director whose ambition is to produce a play  so utterly real that it transcends fiction. In his commitment to this project, Cotard essentially misses his own life.

Despite these lead roles, Hoffman will likely be remembered as a character actor, but one who surpasses the, “Hey, it’s that guy” label. He’s a cult actor, and with good reason. His death is so sad in part because  Hoffman felt like one of us: One of the freaks and the weirdos, one of the guys on the margins, awkward, maybe, but also deeply real, with a soul, with an intellect, with talents that might not announce themselves in the form of rippling muscles or perfect hair. He was often the only thing worth watching in bad or mediocre movies (Charlie Wilson’s War and Cold Mountain come to mind), and he elevated good movies to great movies—I don’t think Spike Lee’s 25th Hour could have been nearly as compelling without Hoffman’s sensitive, flawed friend there as an anchor to Norton’s overcharged performance; he also provided a cynical ballast as Lester Bangs to Cameron Crowe’s airy memoir, Almost Famous. Hoffman was electric when playing against type, as in Sidney Lumet’s too-overlooked thriller, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, in which he played the alpha male with savage aplomb (he’d refine the characterization in some ways for his portrayal of  Lancaster Dodd in The Master).

But as always with these things—and by these things I mean the deaths of the famous, of actors, of musicians, of etc.—always the sadness we might feel is perhaps born of a selfishness—yes, the reminder of my own mortality, your own mortality implicit within the actor’s death, sure, but in Hoffman’s case something more I think, here too—that we know that this guy was great, was Capital G Great, was almost always the best thing in any film he was in, was smarter and deeper than the script often had a right to lay claim to, that he improved anything he was in, that he compelled the viewer’s attention, that he was so young, that he was so, so young, that he still had so many films ahead of him, so many great works ahead of him, so many years ahead of him…

Gertrude Stein on Football

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In a 1934 radio interview, Gertrude Stein talks American football:

INTERVIEWER: You saw the Yale-Dartmouth game a week ago Saturday didn’t you? Did you understand that in the American way or the football way or how?

STEIN: IN the American way. The thing that interested me was that the Modern American in his movements and his actions in a football game so resembled the red Indian dance and it proves that the physical country that made the one made the other and that the red Indian is still with us. They just put their heads down solemnly together and then double over, while on the sidelines the substitutes move in a jiggly way just like Indians. Then they all get down on all fours just like Indians.

INTERVIEWER: But those jiggles are just warming-up exercises.

STEIN: It doesn’t make any difference what they are doing it for, they are just doing it, like the way the Indian jiggles in the Indian dance and then there is that little brown ball they all bend down and worship.

INTERVIEWER: But the ideas in that is to get the ball across the goal line.

STEIN: But don’t you suppose I know that, and don’t you suppose the Indians had just as much reason and enjoyed their dancing just as much?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Peter Goodfellow

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Groundhog Day — Andrew Wyeth

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“In Football Season” — John Updike

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“In Football Season”

by John Updike

            Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to you words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear; by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a j sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of I a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fra­grance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousand-fold on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

“We”—we the school. A suburban school, we rented for some of our home games the stadium of a college in the city of Alton three miles away. My father, a teacher, was active in the Olinger High athletic department, and I, waiting for him beside half-open doors of varnished wood and frosted glass, overheard arguments and felt the wind of the worries that accompanied this bold and at that time unprecedented deci­sion. Later, many of the other county high schools followed our lead; for the decision was vindicated. The stadium each Friday night when we played was filled. Not only students and parents came but spectators unconnected with either school, and the money left over when the sta­dium rent was paid supported our entire athletic program. I remember the smell of the grass crushed by footsteps behind the end zones. The smell was more vivid than that of a meadow, and in the blue electric glare the green vibrated as if excited, like a child, by being allowed up late. I remember my father taking tickets at the far corner of the wall, wedged into a tiny wooden booth that made him seem somewhat magical, like a troll.

And of course I remember the way we, the students, with all of our jealousies and antipathies and deformities, would be—beauty and boob, sexpot and grind—crushed together like flowers pressed to yield to the black sky a concentrated homage, an incense, of cosmetics, cigarette smoke, warmed wool, hot dogs, and the tang, both animal and metallic, of clean hair. In a hoarse olfactory shout, these odors ascended. A dense haze gathered along the ceiling of brightness at the upper limit of the arc lights, whose glare blotted out the stars and made the sky seem romanti­cally void and intimately near, like the death that now and then stooped and plucked one of us out of a crumpled automobile. If we went to the back row and stood on the bench there, we could look over the stone lip of the stadium down into the houses of the city, and feel the cold Novem­ber air like the black presence of the ocean beyond the rail of a ship; and when we left after the game and from the hushed residential streets of this part of the city saw behind us a great vessel steaming with light, the arches of the colonnades blazing like portholes, the stadium seemed a great ship sinking and we the survivors of a celebrated disaster. Continue reading ““In Football Season” — John Updike” →

Kenton Nelson Painting (Woman Reading)

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Don’t despair (Kafka)

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Surreal Albin Brunovsky Engraving

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(More).

February — Grant Wood

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Harlem Renaissance Map — Tony Millionaire

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Watch Gerald Murnane Type In His Writing Room

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I call this my literary archive, there are ten drawers, and each of them contains all of the material that went into the making of one or other of my books. But at the back you will find untidy hand written pages, at the front you will find a file copy of the finished book and even all the reviews and comments. … This is part of what I call my chronological archive, um, we just have happened to have opened one of nineteen drawers that we could have opened. And then, I have been a great writer of letters to people, and people write letters to me. In there must be… I couldn’t count them; there must be many thousands of letters in those cabinets. The equivalent for me of emails is the little box of envelopes up there.

Illustration (Reader) — Flannery O’Connor

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Illustration