RIP Robin Williams

"Life isn’t anything but what you make it." - rollins

pull yourself up by your bootstraps you saddos *kisses biceps*

ugh i just realized that jack frost movie is more than 15 years old

Henry is celebrating the 20th anniversary of being a wacky bit player in hollywood movies this year - Charlie Sheen's The Chase came out March '94

"robin couldn't hack it? fine, more potential bits in family comedies for me. i got this goofy priest role by the throat. residuals forever."

Patch Rollins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3S-IuxseAI

family, maaan

I rescreened Popeye this evening. One thing that doesn't get brought up much (if at all) is how well Williams handles the, er, Nilsson-ness of the musical material. He really captures the quirky touches/maker's marks.

Rollins posted a pretty earnest apology on his website

very unusual for a celebrity whose toxic opinion goes viral

heartless opinions about suicide victims are pretty common. glad rollins is getting dragged through the dirt for this.

that said, i think people sometimes adopt the attitudes rollings put forth in that essay as a way to talk themselves out of killing themselves. sort of like right wing rhetoric on "personal responsibility": as a personal mantra, it works great, but it's cruel to hold other people to that standard.

also it's probably cruel and toxic to your own psyche to try to whiteknuckle yourself out of suicide ideation. a more compassionate course is better. but anyone who has experienced that or knows people who have knows how scary it is, so it would make sense, in that case, to develop an ethos in which the act doesn't seem like an option...

Rollins' apology is really good, and no rote non-apology. It's worth a read, if only to get a sense that he genuinely seems to realise what he wrote was wrong, or to at least have genuinely been affected by the reaction to it.

Indeed, http://henryrollins.com/news/detail/an_apology/

Maybe I'm being too cynical about this (and still shaking with rage over his initial screed), but what the fuck did he think the reaction was going to be? How is he surprised by this?

He thinks people still take this at face value: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jCLizTg9nWo

the original essay doesn't really get THAT bad until the last few paragraphs - he's expressing emotions that may grate to the more informed beforehand, but not yet making self-contradictory edicts. as treeship suggests, there may have been a degree of him blurring the language that gets him through and language that would help others. throw in 30ish years of people hanging on his every thought, 30ish years of sharing his every thought, and a newspaper that would PREFER your thinkpiece be as provocative as possible, and i can see how he could be a little clueless.

not that i think it speaks well of him that he can to claim he respects someone's decision in the same paragraph he says he thinks less of the person for their decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U71P5FKFqfg

Great homage by Greg Proops on his The Smartest Man In The World.

otm

really lovely.

and with a good bit of fire too

I rewatched Garp for the first time in eons, and it has some fine sketches and episodes (p much all involving some combo of Close, Lithgow, Williams and Swoosie Kurtz) but Kael gen otm:

Hill's pastel, detached, and generally meaningless comedy may, in some ways, be preferable to the baroque apparatus that Irving constructed--but in recounting the book's key incidents Hill and Tesich lay bare the pattern of mutilations in the plot. Tongues, ears, penises, eyes, lives--everybody on the screen is losing something. If you listen to what Garp says, the movie is about love of family; if you look at what happens, though, it's a castration fantasy. The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's "vision."

Mike Powell wrote something partly about it:

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/robin-williamss-terminal-condition-on-the-world-accord-1621606617

yeah, we watched it again a week or so ago, probs my first time since my teens (was a constant in our VHS as a kid), and her line elsewhere in the review about straw-women is absolutely key: it's a movie that's impressively ahead of its time in presenting a likeable and sensitively handled transgender character, but OOF the villainous female characters (the Ellen Jamesians, the women-only funeral, Pooh) abound.

Watching The World According to Garp for the first time, I kept waking up to an odd noise: my teeth grinding. This combination of whimsy and social realism repelled me.

have you read any John Irving? an inexplicable late '70s/early '80s phenomenon.

I don't hate the movie tho.

OTM. Remember the paperback publishing blitz in which it came out with six different covers, I think? Had a snobby but likeable high school English teacher- aren't they all- who bought into the hype and said there was "something more" or words to the effect.

He was also of the John Gardner school that believed that Nabokov and Poe were shallow aesthetes.

I was infatuated with A Prayer for Owen Meany in tenth grade for about three weeks.

Did you like it as much as A Visit From The Goon Squad?

As a sophomore I thought it was generally not a good idea for novelists to write a protagonist's dialogue in capital letters.

but I can see how the film was hip to the zeitgeist: dadless savant would rather sit in car watching his precious children than go to the movies with his wife; meanwhile, tongueless feminists plot his death.

No mention of multiple covers but http://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/15/world/paperback-talk.html

it is hard to think of another slice of celluloid whimsy where the protag and his mom are both gunned down in the last reels.

yet how many times have we wished for it

I was in 6th grade with the kid from that movie at the time it came out. All I remember now is the gal telling Robin Williams "No glove, no love."

Also got in trouble in 8th grade for bringing The Hotel New Hampshire to English class, since my teacher had read about the incest in the reviews of the movie version.

i read "Roger's Version" for the dirty bits

up to you what tense you choose for the verb in that sentence

THNH is the worst novel i've ever finished.

I was infatuated with A Prayer for Owen Meany in tenth grade for about three weeks.

meeeeeee toooooooo

I have never gone back to it because I feel rather affectionate towards my younger self's love for that book and I don't want to ruin it. Also, I think books like that, where the structure is so plainly visible, do help kids learn something about how novels are made and how they might start working on their own.

shrewd point

Looooved Owen meany when I was 19. My mom and I both read it that year and that hasn't happened before or since. Will probably never reread for xpost reasons. In general, Irving was like a Tom Robbins I didn't hate.

Gotta agree with the sentiment that Owen Meany is a great book for that age; it was for me, but I never want to revisit it

Lost all interest in Irving when I realized he really was willing to milk that semester in Vienna for dumb coloration in EVERY goddam novel he wrote.

According a poster on the Criterion forum, Terry Gilliam has revealed he's in the middle of preparing materials for a CC release of The Fisher King.

just registering myself as another guy who read all the john irving books in high school.
plus dean r koontz and robert r mccammon and stephen king and vonnegut and a lotta other pulpy stuff

I remember Stuart Dybek talking about taking a class taught by John Irving while he was writing Garp. Irving would basically just bring in the new pages he'd written that week and read them to the class. A part that didn't make it into the book was a long (like 70 pages) Faulknerian tangent about the Rath brothers who ran around Appalachia committing petty crimes and raping women. One of the students said he should cut it from the book, publish it separately and call it The Rapes of Rath.

Watched World's Greatest Dad over the weekend. Unsettling viewing now and even if things go off the rails in typical Bobcat fashion, Williams is tremendous.

otm

the scene where he finds his son & breaks down on the bedroom floor is moving & beautiful in a v haunting way

This guy really, Really, REALLY likes Garp: http://m.hitfix.com/motion-captured/is-the-most-timely-movie-of-2015-a-blu-ray-release-of-a-movie-from-1982

Not the first Caitlyn Jenner/Roberta Muldoon contrast I've had pointed out during the last few months, but I'm pretty sure the first time I've seen it in print.