The most masculine voice in town: Deceased Artiste Ben Gazzara

The last of Cassavetes' three “husbands” has now left us. Peter Falk may have been the crowd-pleaser of the trio, and Cassavetes the visionary, but Gazzara was the most intense, without question. His voice exuded machismo without seeming like a pose (John Wayne) or a threat (Eastwood). Put simply, he had the tones of a man who did not fuck around in his conversation. You could believe Ben Gazzara.

It’s interesting to consider that he had the spottiest movie career of the three gentlemen. JC appeared in crappy pictures and TV because he was financing his personal films; Falk made a bunch of meager choices in his later years, but would always “recover” with a better-chosen part (or just another Columbo TV-movie). Gazzara didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into any specific kind of role, and so he moved around from genre to genre. Thus, he was the kind of an actor who never gave a bad performance, but his reputation rests on a small handful of incredibly intense and charismatic roles.

He began as a stage actor, having attended the Actors Studio during the Fifties when that institution produced intense leading men like a well-oiled production line. His voice was the key to his performances — in the 2003 documentary Broadway: the Golden Age, Gena Rowlands reminisces about how Gazzara’s voice could reach the upper balcony clearly, even when he was whispering onstage.

We don’t have many traces of his stage work, except this wonderful clip of the 1955 Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Ben originated the role of Brick. The clip is included in the aforementioned Golden Age documentary:



Prior to that play, he appeared in the play End as a Man, based on the bestselling Calder Willingham novel. The novel was eventually transformed into a film called The Strange One (1957), with a completely indelible finale. Here is the trailer:



Gazzara’s next scene-stealing big-screen role was in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Throughout the Fifties and Sixties he thrived on both the stage (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and TV. Here’s a bit of the latter, Benny fooling around with Whitey Ford and Joe Louis on I’ve Got a Secret:



For a certain generation, Gazzara’s seminal role was on TV as a lawyer who has been told that he has no less than nine and no more than 18 months to live (what an imprecise medic), so he goes on the road searching for new experiences in the completely oddball dramatic series Run for Your Life (1965-68). Each new episode found Gazzara encountering a new group of people and making an impact on their lives (or they made an impact on him). Here is a confrontation with veteran tough-guy character actor Henry Silva:



An “ethnic” scene wherein Gazzara meets opinionated Sicilians Harry Guardino and Sal Mineo:



An encounter with a free-thinker and “pornographic” writer, played by Barbara Hershey:



It has been much discussed by fans and students of Cassavetes how the starring trio in Husbands behaved on-camera as if they had been friends for years. All three actors stated that they barely knew each other, except for having met at public events and parties. Gena Rowlands, though, did guest on Run For Your Life, and thus had some close encounters with Gazzara more than a decade before the two worked together in what I consider the only flawed film of Cassavetes’ personal work, Opening Night (1977). Here is a scene from that RFYL ep:



The stars of Husbands (1970) did seem like they were old friends. Perhaps Cassavetes’ intensive rehearsal period — wherein actors improvised their dialogue and “lived” in their roles — contributed to this, or maybe the three actors were just destined to be pals at some point in their lives. Whatever the case may be, it’s one of Cassavetes’ most emotional and unusual films, in that there are several sequences where the actors are clearly improvising on camera.

Perhaps because the film was funded by a large studio (Columbia), JC felt he could let loosen his rules for a bit, and thus the film has a very informal, and extremely real, aspect to it. An hour-long BBC documentary about the making of the film is available on YT here, and here is the trailer, narrated by the velvet-voiced William B. Williams:



Setting aside Opening Night, we wind up at the picture that has probably contributed the most to Gazzara’s cult status among indie filmgoers, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). The film was a massive failure in its first release (hear Ben talk about that here) and was basically “hidden” by Cassavetes in his lifetime (at least in the U.S.; in the Eighties, I was finally able to see it in Paris, where it was playing at one theater once every weekday).

It has since acquired a great reputation, and its appeal is tied up completely with Gazzara’s charismatic lead performance. His strip-club owner isn’t even on the show-biz map, and yet he’s a man with a moral code and a sense of duty about pleasing his audience.

In that regard, the most interesting anecdote that Gazzara told about the film was that he had to take Cassavetes aside a few days into filming to tell him something was wrong. Cassavetes had no idea what the problem was, and Gazzara mentioned that the girls weren’t undressing on-camera, and that the film was about a strip club. Cassavetes was actually kind of a prude when it came to nudity or sex, but Gazzara, staying true to the code of his character Cosmo Vitelli, knew what the right move was.

The first 15 minutes of the film are here, but here is perhaps the film’s best sequence, with Cosmo talking to his performers in the dressing room:



Another great moment:



Outside of the Cassavetes films and The Strange One, one of the strongest lead roles Gazzara had in a film was Saint Jack (1979), a tough, nasty little character study that was quite a surprise from cineaste/filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. The film has the feel of Chinese Bookie and has the added allure of having been shot in Singapore. It was produced by Roger Corman (as was Bogdanovich’s Targets), and supplies further evidence of Corman’s risk-tasking side. It received great reviews but generally tanked when it came out; now, of course, it’s seen as an absolutely terrific film:



Gazzara worked with Bogdanovich again on the romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981). The film is charming, but it has a sort of sadness hanging over it. The killing of Dorothy Stratten was the first sad incident associated with the film, but then one considers that the NYC it shows is long gone (something mentioned by Bogdanovich in the commentary track he did for the DVD), that happy-go-lucky costar John Ritter died at a younger age of heart trouble, and that Gazzara and costar Audrey Hepburn (who was not unwell during the film, but looks oddly tired throughout) were carrying on an affair that lasted for a short while. The real-life attraction between the two informed their love scenes:



Gazzara was so effortlessly macho that he could take a role that was sort of off-kilter and stabilize it. He does that with the lead role of the poet Charles Serking in the great Marco Ferreri’s Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981). Serking is based on Charles Bukowksi, who wrote the source novel for the film, and there’s no question that, while Mickey Rourke might have been truer to Bukowski’s speaking voice (Snagglepus on booze), Gazzara was the dream version of Charles Bukowski, a macho boozer and brawler who was also acutely sensitive. In short, he had a LOT of fucking style:



But what will the average cable-viewer remember Ben G. for? His villainous turn in the super-schlocky Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House (1989). The movie is fun trash from beginning to end, and Gazzara makes a terrific villain, especially when he is able to tell off Swayze and then “beat him up,” courtesy of a much younger stuntman. Here Benny is, singing my mom’s fave, the whitebread cover of “Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts. Ben could be cool, even in the trashiest of trash flicks:



Gazzara suffered health problems in the last decade, including throat cancer that decimated his strong and clear voice. He was still a superb actor, so he thrived in supporting roles in more Road House-like crap and ambitious films like Lars Von Trier’s impressively abstract Dogville (2003). He also continued to work in live theater, playing in off-Broadway shows and receiving wonderful reviews.

He was not above hyping his work in the media, and perhaps one of the odder things I heard him on was the WOR-AM “Joey Reynolds Show” on the hour of the show that Joey dubbed “the Italian hour.” Il Grande Gazzara, who had once partnered with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, was on that occasion sitting with a character actor (mob specialist) named “Cha-cha” and Joe Piscopo. At first I thought of this as a mighty fall for a guy who dwelt in the top tier of actors, but then I realized that despite whatever health problems he was having, Gazzara remained a working actor, and to plug the gigs he got, he had to do interviews.

The memory of that moment in his career where his opinions on acting were considered (on one radio show, at least) equal to those of Cha-cha and Piscopo makes me yearn for the type of interviews the European press conducted with him. Check him out here being interviewed by a French woman journalist for the show Cinema Cinemas on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue. He holds forth on his favorite kind of part (“men who don’t always win the war”) and his love of reality in acting.



I’ll close this out with two clips related to Husbands. First, the nightmare vision of what the film might’ve turned out to be, if Cassavetes' strong radar for fine acting had ever slipped — here are Cassavetes, Gazzara, and Marty Ingels (!) cast as three poker-playing buddies in the goofy comedy If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).



And there is no better way to feel the real-life vibe that the Husbands trio gave off than to watch this amazing Dick Cavett show from 1970 with the three men as his only guests. It’s been noted that these guys were “the Rat Pack of independent film.” That ain’t half wrong:

Digging the discs: my latest DVD reviews

I present "consumer guide" round-ups (thanks to Christgau for that handy phrase) on the Funhouse TV show on a regular basis. Here are the latest DVD reviews I've done for the DiscDish site.

Jerry Lewis as the Jazz Singer

Beat Takeshi's Outrage: Way of the Yakuza

Isabelle Huppert stars in Special Treatment

The original — and only version worth watching — U.K. seriesThe Office

Godard's masterwork Histoire(s) du Cinema

Darren McGavin stars in Mike Hammer: the Complete Series

Claude Chabrol’s brilliant Les Cousins

Bergman’s Face to Face

The indispensableThe Complete Jean Vigo

David Holzman's Diary, a perfect NYC indie

Hidden in Plain Sight: complete arthouse films for free on YouTube (Russell, Altman, Kaurismaki)

I don’t like watching movies on a computer, and will do so only when the film in question is extremely rare and can’t be found in another format. However, I am in the minority these days, because everyone loves to watch feature-length films on laptops or portable devices that can’t possibly do honor to the visuals of the greatest filmmakers (although the same devices are terrific for TV series, which are predominantly radio shows decked out with stylish-looking visuals that rarely, if ever, have a place in the storytelling).

I used to regularly chronicle on this blog favorite YouTube posters who have made available very rare material or entire films. Since in just about every case, these are fan-generated accounts and the notion of c*pyr*ght comes into play, I figure I should point these accounts out, before the files go down. In this entry I’ll discuss two such accounts, which I discovered while doing research into Ken Russell.

The first poster, lilacwine85, has put up a very nice selection of clips and features representing the “high” end of the artistic spectrum. Mikhail Kaufman (aka the “real Man with a Movie Camera” who shot his brother “Dziga Vertov”’s masterpieces) sumptuously visual In Spring (1931) can be found here:



Agnès Varda’s L’Opera Mouffe (1958) is here:



As for Unkle Ken, two of his early short TV documentaries are up in their entirety. His vibrant 1960 portrait of the Taste of Honey playwright Shelagh Delaney (who died in November of last year) for the series Monitor, “Shelagh Delaney’s Salford”:



And his 1960 telefilm about the inhabitants of a London house where he used to live, “A House in Bayswater”:



Poster lilacwine85 has put up some lovely things (check out the shorter clips too), but the person whose uploads surprised the hell out of me is KingRabbit. The surprise came not only from the fact that this person has great taste in movies and uploaded the films as one long file each, but also because his/her uploads have now been up now for months, meaning the Russell postings were uploaded before “Unkle Ken” departed this mortal coil.

Perhaps they have stayed up because the copies of the films posted have French subtitles. This is no problem, though, as the majority of King Rabbit’s uploaded films are in English, so the subtitles are just a function of where the poster lives (I’m going to take a rather obvious leap here and say either it’s France or Quebec).

I am not one to advocate the blatant disregard of copyright — I’ll allow our hero, ”Uncle Jean” to do that for me — but if you’re interested in saving files from YT, you should already be well aware of savevid.com and keepvid.com.

And so, with that helpful hint in mind, I introduce you to “le stash” of King Rabbit, beginning with Frank Zappa’s extremely trippy experiment in mindfucking a cinema audience with odd lyrics, surreal happenings, and state-of-the-art (circa 1971) video fx. Me, I prefer Baby Snakes because it was my lengthy intro to Zappa-dom, but many fans from the earlier days prefer 200 Motels:



I am a devoted disciple of the work of Robert Altman, and thus would say if you haven’t seen his landmark film Nashville (1975), you’ve missed out on one of his most intricate and entertaining creations. Please see it on a movie screen first, but if you need a refresher course, it’s here:



As for the aforementioned “Unkle Ken” (that being his own spelling of “uncle” for his Facebook account), one of his best-remembered classical composer portraits is Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968):



One of his more flamboyant and engrossing composer biopics is The Music Lovers (1970). In re-watching his work to assemble recent Funhouse episodes, I was interested that, while he is best known for his composer-bios, he only made three of these for theatrical release. Mahler is probably the most intense, but the most kaleidoscopic is this portrait of Tchaikovsky:



The film that followed Music Lovers is indeed his masterpiece, The Devils (1971). King Rabbit has posted the version that has been released in France on DVD, and will soon be out in the UK on disc. It is missing the recently discovered seminal scene (which runs for over five minutes) called “The Rape of the Christ,” but it is still a potent and pointed statement about religious hypocrisy, and one of his finest stylized works:



Russell’s own personal favorite of all of his films was Savage Messiah (1972), because he felt a great kinship with the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and made his biography of the man a paean to the dedicated work (and attendant creative genius) of an artist:



Currently out of print in the U.S., Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988) is a wonderfully weird rendition (read: dream) on Oscar Wilde’s play. It is sexy, it is strange, and it does have something to say about sexual politics. Catch it here:



King Rabbit has also put up films at a different address. Among his postings is Mizoguchi’s 1929 short “Tokyo March”:



Readers of this blog will know of my undying fondness for Vincent Price. KR has also posted a wonderful TV special he did in 1972, wherein he recites the work of Edgar Allan Poe:



Paul Morrissey made the Warhol films watchable, and one of his first films that was independent of Andy (aside from its title) was Andy Warhol’s Flesh (1968):



I reviewed the new Criterion release The Films of Jean Vigo a few months ago on the Funhouse TV show. Vigo’s classic Zero for Conduct (1933) was the inspiration for Lindsay Anderson’s youth revolution classic If…. (1968):



Given the fact that YouTube is now the home of the music video (so much for “music television”…), it makes perfect sense that Yellow Submarine (1968) should be present. It was a Beatles side-project that the band itself gave little attention to (besides the creation of four songs, and a three-minute live-action sequence), but the animators involved, led by Heinz Edelmann, did some exquisite work:



I feel that if a “literary” film can draw you back to reading, it has achieved its goal. Paul Schrader’s brilliant Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) covers a lot of ground, and caused me upon first viewing to get to the library and start reading Yukio Mishima’s gorgeous (and gorgeously tortured) prose. It is a brilliant film:



I like using Andrew Sarris’s phrase “a subject for further research,” and for me one of those subjects is the amazing Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. I have Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and have been meaning to watch it for months. I will do so soon, but in the meantime…. (Note: French, not English subs.)



To show the rapid nature of the sharing that goes on these days, as I was checking this piece to upload it, I found that King Rabbit has struck again, putting up several more movies in their entirety, including the critically-favored Thai film Citizen Dog (2006) (with French subs), the Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), the terrific period piece Cooley High (1975), and the French thriller (note: without English subs) Mortelle Randonée (1983).

The new title that came to my attention instantly, due to my love for the work of Aki Kaurismaki, was La Vie de Bohème (1992). The film is Kaurismaki’s deadpan, non-musical adaptation of the novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème, starring the finest AK actor, the late Matti Pellonpää, and featuring a supporting turn by Jean-Pierre Leaud:

Rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and funk: A trio of musical Deceased Artistes

The old adage about celebrities “dying in threes” means that sometimes actors are jammed in with authors, singers with filmmakers, and TV stars with composers. In the past month, three musical legends died in short succession. Two of them knew each other well (in fact one discovered the other), and the third individual was connected to them in terms of musical stylings, and the fact that he too was a soulful, effortlessly funky musician. (Some might argue that he wasn’t up to the standard of the other two musically, but I’ll offer evidence to the contrary below.)

Etta James was the last chronologically to depart (she died on January 20th, the next two gents left on the 17th). She is remembered primarily for “At Last,” an incredibly romantic song that has indeed been played to death over the past few years. She had a number of big hits, but that was her signature song, and much was made of the fact that when it was sung at Pres. Obama’s inaugural ball, the singer chosen was the pretty but utterly soul-less Beyonce. (Anytime you stack her up against the true r&b singers of the past and present, you find she’s… really, really pretty. And dances well too!)

James had some big battles in her life — against the music business’s treatment of “girl singers,” against drugs, and finally against leukemia and dementia. Those battles informed her absolutely gorgeous ballad singing. But first there was rock ’n’ roll.



The above song was “dirty’ in its day, so dirty that its title had to be changed from “Roll With Me, Henry” to “The Wallflower” (which is some kinda brilliant joke on someone’s part). The song was an “answer song” to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me, Annie,” and was cowritten by Etta and Johnny Otis — but more on him in a minute. First, another sample of Etta rocking it out back when it really mattered, with the terrific “Good Rockin’ Daddy” and “Shortnin’ Bread Rock.” Never has the phrase “you better see that I’m well-fed” had less to do with food.

There is a dearth of live footage of Etta in her prime online. This terrific clip, which appears to be from the mid-Sixties, gives an indication of how electric she was. This woman did not fuck around:



We do have an ample amount of clips from her later career, especially of her dueting with other artists. The weirdest one has to be The Grateful Dead, the most appropriate is Chuck Berry (whose competitive streak comes out throughout this performance — he can’t stop “responding” to Etta’s vocals, and even does the duck-walk to draw attention away from her):



One of her other killer rock/r&b tunes, “Tell Mama,” also eclipses the hell out of the gorgeous but way-too-slick “At Last” for me. Her other indelible signature song was the heartache standard “I’d Rather Go Blind”:



Etta knew true emotion in music — her only cover album was a tribute to Billie Holiday. Here is one of the prettiest of what Sinatra used to call “saloon songs”:


She had impeccable and interesting choices in covers over the years. She did a great version of Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” and in the early Seventies delivered gorgeous versions of three Randy Newman songs — the sexy “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” the emotion-riddled “Sail Away,” and Randy’s incredible ode to an uncaring deity, “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind).” This is perhaps the most perfect version of this atheist’s ode, sung in beautiful gospel tones:


********

Etta’s initial mentor in the biz also died this past month, on the 17th. Johnny Otis was a 100% r&b/rock ’n’ roll legend whose obits made much of his many identities: musician, bandleader, songwriter, mentor, and DJ (for four decades!). Later in his career he left show biz for a while and served as a minister. Throughout his life he remained an activist for political causes and also had a deep interest in organic farming (!).

So there was all that feverish activity in his life, but the most interesting item about Otis was that he considered himself black but was in fact born a Greek-American. Brought up in an African-American section of Berkeley, he felt more at home among blacks, and assumed that identity (from Ioannis Veliotes to Johnny Otis) for good when he became a musician. He started as a jazz drummer and quickly became a bandleader. His biggest hit during this period was the haunting “Harlem Nocturne”:



Take in the raunchy sounding “The Midnight Creeper” and you’ll hear where his head was at in the Fifties. He was part of the wave of r&b acts who created what we know of as rock ’n’ roll — please listen to this scratchy old recording of “Rock Me Baby,” and you’ll know (as with Etta and her “rolling” with Henry) that r’n’r wasn’t intended to be background music for fucking, it was ABOUT fucking.

But that was hard to sell on AM radio, so more polite metaphors were necessary. Hence Otis’ biggest hit, with a riff taken off of Bo Diddley, “Wille and the Hand Jive.” Here a troupe of Broadway dancers show us that rock is safe for white people (while Johnny produces an “earworm” hook like no other):



Johnny’s other identity in the early years of rock was as the man who discovered a raft of major talents, including Etta James, Little Richard, Hank Ballard, Big Mama Thornton, and Jackie Wilson. While he was doing that, he also found time to release killer singles like “the Hash”:



Otis was a versatile musician who picked up on a bunch of genres, including Latin music (which we’ll get back to with our third Deceased Artiste), as in his sequel to “Hand Jive,” “Willie did the Cha-Cha.” He didn’t remain stagnant as the years went by, and the music made by his band, wonderfully called “The Johnny Otis Show,” moved with the times. Check out this awesomely funky number that posits a dance that probably never existed outside of Johnny’s vivid musical imagination:



And drink in this bluesy jazz tune, named, well… just listen…. (Barbara Morrison supplies the terrific vocal):



The singer on the “Watts Breakaway” above, Delmar Evans, joined Johnny and his virtuoso rock guitarist son Shuggie Otis for an album credited to “Snatch and the Poontangs” that contained some wonderfully dirty novelty music, including this old chestnut performed by many other artists including “Dolemite" himself, Rudy Ray Moore:



Although Mr. Otis was a man of God, and by all accounts an extremely moral individual, there is no other word to use to accurately describe his brand of raw rock ‘n’ roll than “raunchy.” In closing, I pass you “Low Down Dirty Dog Blues”:


******

The third member of this troika didn’t ever work with the first two, but his music overlapped with theirs, especially Otis’s, in its emphasis on soul, Latin, and funk. Jimmy Castor was a NYC boy (who grew up, according to which obit you read, in either the Bronx or the Sugar Hill section of Harlem) who first established himself in a doo-wop group called Jimmy and the Juniors. He wrote a song, “I Promise to Remember,” that became a hit for his friend Frankie Lymon.

He continued on a saxophonist and percussionist until his first hit in 1966, the Latin-inflected “Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You” (you don’t get many excellent direct-address titles in music).

Castor’s percussion work drives tracks from that time like “Southern Fried Frijoles” and his cover of Joe Cuba’s fucking awesome “Bang Bang” (go away, Donna Summer witcha “bad girls”).

Castor’s lyrics were always, how shall I put it, silly, but sublimely silly. Here he is in 1973 performing a medley of “Hey Leroy” (watch him kick ass on the timbales!) and the sequel-tune — yes, this is the full title — “Say Leroy (the Creature from the Black Lagoon is your father).”

Castor’s music was terrific and his lyrics were, yeah, pretty bizarre. Being a fan of novelty records, I love them to pieces, though, particularly because of their mix of funky music and nonsense lyrics. In 1972, he had his biggest hit with “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” which introduced the immortal refrain, “Gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman…”



And the equally immortal sequel, the “Bertha Butt Boogie”



As the Seventies continued, disco eclipsed funk and Castor was right in line with the dance beats of the time, as in the trippy and relentless instrumental “Psych Out.” His music was heavily sampled in later years by rap artists, and he set a precedent for other recording artists by suing the Beastie Boys for using a sample out of his “Return of Leroy” without credit or remuneration (he made a settlement, and later claimed he had pursued it not for the dough, but for the principle of the thing). One of his most “utilized” tunes, funky as all hell (minus the novelty lyrics), was “It’s Just Begun”:



My favorite piece of odd trivia about Castor is that he filled his albums with renditions of songs you wouldn't figure he'd cover. During his Latin period he covered "Winchester Cathedral," later on (during the funky era) it was Elton John's "Daniel" (lounge-y!), on another LP it was "Stairway to Heaven," and on one of his later disco-funk recordings he for some damned reason had a cover of "You Light Up My Life."

Since I do really love novelty records, let me close out with two of Jimmy’s silliest, his ode to the one and only Dracula:



And my favorite of all his songs, a tune that burned itself into my brain a quarter of a century or so ago. All bow down before “King Kong!” Here Jimmy performs the song’s opening verse live:



But here is the full version of the song with my favorite verse: “He didn’t dance or party/he spoke at times but hardly/One woman heard his love call/but he was too big and too tall.” Jimmy, we’re gonna miss you, Kamasami!

Ken Russell on “the Richard Lester style” and Spike Milligan

I’m editing the last half of my 2008 interview with the late Ken Russell for upcoming Deceased Artiste episodes of the Funhouse TV show, and thought I’d share the clip embedded below. By way of explanation, a program of Russell’s early homemade shorts and some of his later oddities (including a screen test he shot for Twiggy) played at the Thalia Soho in the late Eighties. (The theater, now known as the Soho Playhouse, was indeed where I was interviewing Russell, whose only theatrical production, Mindgame, was mounted there.)

Among the offerings was “Portrait of a Goon,” a short that Russell made in 1959 for the TV show Monitor. The film is currently locked away from public view on the academics-only BFI site.

Chronicling a day in the life of the mighty Spike Milligan, the short surprised me because it included quick cuts, odd camera angles, and other aspects of what we now call “the Richard Lester style.” Lester famously directed Milligan and Peter Sellers in “The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film” (1960). The story goes that, when Lester was hired to direct A Hard Day’s Night, Goon-fan John Lennon was very impressed with this prior credit of Lester’s.

Watching the Russell short I began to think that, while Russell was certainly using that style a year before Lester, that perhaps its true source was neither “Unkle Ken” nor Richard L., but Spike himself. Although he never directed a film, Milligan’s work on The Goon Show on radio and in plays like The Bed Sitting Room (later, of course, adapted for film by Lester) indicated his love of momentum and jumping from situation to situation.

Whatever the case may be, two things remain inarguable:
—Richard Lester is an incredibly talented filmmaker (as was Russell, who at his best was a visionary)
—he was basing his style in part on the rhythms of silent comedy and the jump cuts introduced by Godard in A Bout de Souffle.

But, when one sees Russell’s “Goon” short, one realizes that Spike was indeed the *other* auteur behind the style that, after A Hard Day’s Night, became the standard way to edit rock music on film — and in commercials, and music videos, and…..



NOTE: To see the style pass down to a bunch of folks who would *never* credit the Spike, check out the first season of Laugh-In, which included blatant visual rips from "The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film." (Hey, if they could rob from Ernie Kovacs, why not Lester/Milligan also?)

New York, “Nu Yawk”: Deceased Artiste Lynn Samuels

The best radio personalities hold a very special place in our hearts, despite the fact that we have never met them in person and are very unlikely to do so (unless you’re plotting a Play Misty for Me stalking campaign). Lynn Samuels, who died this past Xmas Eve at 69, had an ultimate “Nu Yawk” voice and was one of the most unconventional presences ever in the world of talk radio.

Lynn had an incredibly unique trajectory as a radio call-in host. In a few short years, she moved from a no-pay position at the legendary local Pacifica station in NYC, WBAI-FM, to being on the central talk-radio station in the Tri-State area, WABC-AM. And she did so with a voice that was, to put it kindly, “untrained” — you either enjoyed its nasal, often shrill, tonality, or you had to turn the dial.

When I first heard Lynn on WBAI in the early Eighties, I thought she sounded like Julie Kavner in her Rhoda incarnation. I very quickly got used to her voice because I enjoyed the content of her show which, more often than not, consisted of interviews with local folkies and comedians, calls from people who were further-out neurosis-wise than she, and a copious amount of Lynn complaining about something or other for minutes on end.

Lynn was from my home borough of Queens (no obit stated which part), and she fucking LOVED to complain. These complaints could range from the political (bellicose foreign policy) to local (reporting the dismal state of MTA service in NYC) to extremely personal (petty accounts of being pissed off by someone she passed on the street).

The degree and depth of her complaining was nothing short of miraculous, and that is why I kept on listening. The true appeal of media curmudgeons is that they make listeners feel content about their own life — Lynn often seemed to be mad at the world and everyone in it.

She started out on radio as an ardent Leftist and developed into a Right-wing contrarian. Thus, she developed a hearty loathing for Obama during the 2008 elections, claiming he was an “empty suit” and wasn’t a true progressive. I’ll go with her on the latter, but how did Lynn choose to attack him once he became president? By contesting the status of his birth certificate, thus placing her firmly in the crackpot category and obscuring what might have been genuine objections to his policies and time-wasting quest for “bipartisanship.”

So how could I and many, many other listeners be so addicted to a radio show hosted by a person with an abrasive voice whose political opinions got more and more jaded as time went on? Well, as was the case with George Carlin, Lynn was a disappointed idealist who sounded incredibly bitter when discussing politics, but could still revel in the simple pleasures that delighted her no end. As much time as she spent complaining that “we’re all fucked!” (and I will give her that one), was as much time as she took to discuss things she really loved.

In her WBAI days, I remember her keeping us apprised of the activities of various local folk-rockers, including Mark Johnson and the Wild Alligators, who supplied the theme song for her show “Part of the Act” (“everything is the same old thing/it’s all part of the act/it’s analogous to the fact/that it all comes back/to the same thing…”).

In later years, she would spend entire segments (on NYC’s biggest talk-radio station!) discussing things she’d found on sale, or a trash TV show that she was addicted to (man, did she love crap TV), or just flashing back to one of her earlier obsessions. I remember fondly a fangirl-ish interview she conducted with Julius La Rosa, whom she had idealized as a teen.

She truly loved and hated in equal measures, and what you heard on the radio was the real Lynn, for better or worse. Her friends confirmed this on the radio tributes to her that aired after her death. They also talked about another aspect of her career that made her one of the most unique talk-radio hosts ever: the fact that she had “day jobs” not before but *during* her mainstream radio career.

I remember her announcing on WBAI that she hawked newspapers on the corner of 57th St. and Fifth Ave. At least twice I made sure, when going to the Doubleday’s on Fifth between 56th and 57th, to walk up a block and hear her very distinct “Nu Yawk” voice hollering out a headline about Reagan (the paper was The New York Post).

Walter Sabo (right) has posted a wonderful article about how he recruited Lynn for her first paying gig in radio on Saturday afternoons on WOR. Going from no-pay WBAI to a mainstream station in one of the biggest markets in the country was a quantum leap, and an incredibly rare one. (To illustrate: the latest “new talent” announced for local talk-radio is Geraldo Rivera, whose career in TV news and “shock” daytime TV-talk is now apparently over.)

The WOR slot on Saturdays didn’t vault Lynn into the spotlight, but it did help her score her next, seminal job at WABC-AM five mornings a week doing lead-in for “the new guy,” Rush Limbaugh. Lynn was an incredibly odd presence on mainstream radio, and especially at ABC, because the station was slanted to the right.

At that time, she held to her Lefty beliefs, which were always colored by her own odd take on the issues. Here is a great fan-made compilation of moments from Lynn’s first months on WABC. The clip stats out with a rare TV interview with Lynn and her then-colleagues Grant and Barry Farber:



Lynn rarely argued issues on hard facts or logic. She responded viscerally, and her voice rose to a wild shriek at times when she was outraged. This reached a crescendo in 1990 when she was memorably paired with Farber (pictured) for two days. I remember those shows fondly as the most fucking abrasive radio I’ve ever heard. My memory was that Lynn was incredibly shrill during that pair of shows, but the sole fragment that has surfaced indicates that Farber was equally obnoxious — this was a team made in Radio Hell. Lynn’s behavior got her fired from WABC for the first time (she was dismissed on three separate occasions).

After the Farber debacle, Lynn ended up making ends meet by taking a job at a laundromat, where she made change and assigned the dryers to the customers. The fact that she went from a five-day-a-week mainstream talk-radio job to an hourly-wage position, and then came back to mainstream radio (she was rehired at WABC by John Mainelli, the guy who had hired her in the first place, but had left in the interim), makes her very unusual indeed in the world of entertainment.

Lynn’s career got more unusual: after her third firing from WABC in 2002, her WOR patron, Walter Sabo, got her a five-day-a-week gig at the Sirirus satellite “Left channel” in 2003. In 2011, after her politics had taken a sharp turn to the Right, or Libertarianism (or whatever the hell it was), she lost her slot on the Left channel and was reduced to two weekend morning slots.

At that point, according to one of the tributes, she once again took up a job at a laundry (this time in the West Village); this is disputed by her webmaster, who said it was never mentioned by her on-air (and, again, it's not the kind of thing she would've hidden from her listeners), and she never mentioned it to him. From what I could discern from her final shows, she deferred taking Social Security until she was 70, so she could receive the maximum amount — that’s a bet the government always wins, because in many cases (as happened to Lynn), you kick off before you’re eligible.
*******

During her stints at WABC, she developed the habit of cultivating friendships with Right-wing hosts and alienating the Left-wing ones. She got along famously with the uber-right-wing and genuinely nasty talk-radio NYC legend Bob Grant, and also befriended Limbaugh — who, according to Lynn, did offer her some job leads when ABC fired her, so that was indeed a good enough reason for her to like him, even though he remains a foully pompous broadcaster.

I lost track of Lynn after she was booted from ABC in 2002 because, despite my love of radio, I can’t justify paying over 100 dollars a year for satellite (read: the stuff you used to hear for free, now “niched,” a la cable television). I did look at her website several times a week, because she created a valuable news round-up, providing click-throughs to a shitload of interesting articles from both mainstream and partisan (Left and Right) websites.

Upon her death, thanks to one very generous blogger, who posted a number of her last Sirirus shows, and her webmaster Billy Masters, who posted not just one but two terrific podcasts (the first-linked offers the best cross-section of Sirius clips), I was able to “catch up” with Lynn.

What I heard was by turns jaw-dropping and touching. Her voice had that same “Qweenz” combination of nasality and shrillness that I remembered from my youth. Her petty complaint segments now took up a quarter of the show, and were as delightful as ever. (Like every died-in-the-wool New Yorker, I like hearing someone who makes me seem like a contented optimist.)

Her political shift was depressing, though. She always enjoyed a good argument, but in her incarnation on Sirius, she had moved into the Right-wing, Libertarian (read: conservatism with a “cool” edge), anti-government mindset. This was best illustrated when she advocated in a straightforward manner that the solution to the illegal immigrant problem was that “illegals” should be shot and killed at the border as they try to enter America. (She took great pride in telling listeners that Sean Hannity had told her that was too extreme, “they are human beings…”).

However, as she discussed this ridiculous position with a viewer two weeks before her death, the caller then brought up capital punishment. Lynn made clear that she opposed executing death-row prisoners on principal, citing facts she had clearly learned in her Left days (“it actually costs more to execute an inmate than it does to keep him in prison for life”).

When the Right-wing caller noted that these two positions didn’t jibe, Lynn simply noted that, “I know it makes no sense — I’m very inconsistent.” This kind of illogic was one of many reasons it struck me as sad that Lynn wanted to be accepted by her Right-wing radio colleagues — her opinions were too emotional even for them, and she remained a weird mascot figure, a former member of “the loony Left” who was now more extreme than they were.

Her friend (and one of the few Left-wing hosts she hadn’t alienated entirely) Mike Feder noted on one of the two very touching tribute shows he dedicated to her that, in the early 2000s, she carried on a “Platonic” love affair with Matt Drudge, the Winchell-wannabe conservative web-hack for whom she worked as a call screener (and constantly, on WABC, defended as “not conservative”). Drudge, according to Feder, broke Lynn’s heart.

As she praised the Right-wing hosts (she looked forward eagerly to every broadcast by hate-speech specialist and thickly-accented ex-NYCer Michael Savage), Lynn seemingly went out of her way to openly insult Left-wing hosts. I remember hearing Randi Rhodes (pictured), another host who has kept her deep Brooklyn accent, saying that Lynn had been rude to her. WEVD/WWRL host Sam Greenfield (now of WVNJ) has noted on-air that Lynn made a disparaging remark about his daughter that he couldn’t forgive. In addition to these personal slights, she often expressed on Sirius her absolute loathing for Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, Ed Schultz, and her "nemesis," Alex Bennett.

Thus, when she died, Feder, Mike Malloy, Richard Bey, and Alan Colmes had nice things to say about Lynn, but several Lefties avoided making any personal comments, positive or negative, in their death notices (as with Amy Goodman, whom one Samuels diehard fan said had been called “a cunt” by Lynn) or were brief and praiseworthy, but also totally honest (as with Lionel, who praised her unique on-air style but did note she was a “big pain in the ass”).

Setting Lynn’s simplistic (and often downright ridiculous) political opinions aside, I do think that she was a very good broadcaster and a top-notch entertainer. This became apparent to me again — and erased all the bile she had been unleashing — when I listened to a number of her final shows and heard segments where she just chatted calmly and amiably with her callers.

At its best, her program was a hipper sort of coffee klatch (listen to Lynn describing her experiences taking ketamine for an explanation of the “hipper” label), a 21st-century update of the friendly “personality” radio that existed in the Forties and Fifties, and continued on mostly with “women’s shows.” (In NYC, WOR has had the lock on this type of program for decades, from the heyday of Arlene Francis and Pegeen and Edward Fitzgerald, to the only program of that kind still on in this area, Joan Hamburg’s show.) When she was calm, Lynn was an engaging host who could transform her pop culture tastes, her preference in food and shopping, and show-biz gossip, into very engaging “appointment radio.”

The few full-length radio tributes indicated that she was a person whose heart had been broken both romantically and professionally several times, and who had virtually turned into an agoraphobic (she did her show from her Woodside apartment, and bragged at the end that she only left her home to shop).

She will be remembered for a long while by her listeners. I’m glad Billy Masters is uploading more “everyday” moments from her WABC and Sirius shows. I’d of course love to re-hear the “prehistory” WBAI hours and those stunning, shrieking pair of days with Barry Farber. There are a scant few clips of her on YouTube (just as there are very few photos of her online). Here is Lynn in her what was surely her only movie role (!), and here she banters with an ABC newscaster, exhibiting her sometimes sick sense of humor:



In the final analysis, Lynn was a one-of-a-kind personality who was never “professional” in the standard sense of that word. She was, again, an entertainer who possessed what was definitely the most "un-radio” voice ever heard on the radio….

"Hugo": a love letter to cinema (and respite from Leo!)

I’ve already noted on this blog my great disappointment in the beautifully crafted but soulless work produced by Martin Scorsese in the years since Kundun. His latest film, Hugo, contains several elements that would seem to make it yet another venture into multiplex-land: a massive budget, a kid protagonist, a “heartwarming” promotional campaign, and 3D. Instead, the film is the best thing Scorsese has made in a decade and a half, and the first time his holy cinephilia has been “smuggled” (his phrase from Personal Journey) into a fictional narrative.

The film is a few minutes too long — Scorsese can't really answer his own question to young filmmakers, “is it as tough as Bresson?” (read: lean) — and is also incredibly sentimental. In this instance, though, the sticky-sweet sequences are evenly spaced out, and in the latter half they are hooked securely to the love of cinema in a way that makes them quite touching.

In the end, there are two key elements that make Hugo vastly different from the last decade of Scorsese “pictures”:

— it was made in England with a predominantly British cast, thus ensuring that no wildly miscast American star (Cameron Diaz, Gangs of New York), comatose lead (Nicolas Cage, Bringing Out the Dead), or preening wonder boy (Marky Mark, The Departed) shows up to utterly disrupt the narrative.
— no Leonardo DiCaprio (hosanna)!

The greatest joy of Hugo is that it seems to exist for an actual reason (was/is there any reason for The Departed to exist — and be 151 minutes long?), and that reason is for Scorsese to use state-of-the-art technology to conjure up the most primitive cinema there was, and the most magical: the works of Georges Méliès. It’s a perverse decision to be sure, but one that succeeds beautifully.

3D is a gimmick, one that was created in the Fifties to combat television and has been reintroduced into the marketplace to combat movie downloads. It has held no interest for me, as it has been used to gussy up the kid-centric fodder that occupies every multiplex everywhere. However, if this resurrected and improved technology is used with an experimental purpose in mind — as in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Wenders’ Pina — the effects can be remarkable.

In Hugo Scorsese first creates a clockwork universe that seems derived in equal parts from Tati and Jeunet, and then takes us into the less intricate but more riveting world of magician-turned-filmmaker Méliès (right). Though chronologically “primitive,” Méliès’ films remain far more impressive than the computer-crafted flicks that currently flood into the multiplex.



So, as Herzog used the third dimension to convey the nuances of prehistoric cave paintings and Wenders spotlighted the spaces between dancers, Scorsese uses the current technology to underscore the hard work and surplus of imagination that went into Méliès’ handcrafted films. Hugo may have a young protagonist (two in fact), but it aims quite higher than the usual raft of anthropomorphic animal (or doll, or car) movies that are being presented in 3D (oh, and that nightmare of tedium that is “motion capture” — just make a fucking cartoon, guys, or a live-action feature!).

Here Scorsese draws on the tradition of French films about children leading independent lives (Forbidden Games, Truffaut’s work, and a healthy dash of Zazie dans le Metro). The constant succession of chases in Hugo does parallel what goes in most kid-centric H’wood pap, but here it evokes the races-against-time that distinguished silent cliffhangers from the likes of Feuillade and Griffith.

As noted, I detected the influence of Jean-Pierre Jeunet throughtout Hugo, and this is just as it should be, since, as I’ve noted on the Funhouse TV show, the most interesting uses of CGI effects in the past decade has occurred in French films (Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, Vidocq, every film in French by Jeunet), creating distinctive period pieces, but also fashioning interdependent universes in the Metro, a bar, an apartment building, and so forth (take a glance at Amelie, or Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, and you’ll see the blueprint for Hugo).





Scorsese demonstrated his debt to the French New Wave in his sublimely rough-edged Seventies masterworks (think of the Alka Seltzer scene in Taxi Driver, evoking Godard’s Two or Three Things…). Here he openly pays tribute to Godard and Truffaut by having an “expert” (Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, above) supply an entertaining lecture on the beginnings of cinema, looking straight at us. Kingsley’s Méliès is every expert Uncle Jean introduced to explain something in detail to a character, as well as every Truffaut character who spoke directly to us rather than another character, to tell a story from the past.

A few quibbles aside, Hugo is the film that older Scorsese acolytes of old have been waiting for — giving us a respite from the deadening central presence of Leo. It’s a film that reminds us exactly how expert a filmmaker Scorsese is, putting his technical proficiency at the service of a storyline that evokes genuine emotion and wonder.

I can only hope that Scorsese continues to make British or European-themed films, as it can reinvigorate him as it has reinvigorated Woody Allen. Never forget that European and British funding allowed Funhouse deity Robert Altman to survive when he was out of favor in Hollywood (which was quite often).

I’d love to see “le grand Marty” produce another picture that is “as tough as Bresson”; I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen again, now that he’s infatuated with big, large, massive, colossal budgets. I’ll settle in the meantime, though, for something he really cares about, that isn’t a star vehicle and is worth rewatching. Merci, MS.

*****
Méliès' work is available in profusion all over the Internet because (unless the film in question has been wildly tinkered with), it has fallen into public domain. Thus, you can see numerous copies of his most mind-warping films, but I would recommend these as a “starter kit.” First, the “greatest hit,” featured heavily in Hugo, “Voyage to the Moon”:



“The Man with the Rubber Head,” from 1901:



“The Merry Frolics of Satan,” from 1906:



“Fantastic Butterfly,” from 1909

Three Jewish comedians on the topic of Christmas presents

So these three Jews walk into a department store… no, no, that’s very politically incorrect. However, since I want to salute the holiday without trotting out the same tunes you hear ALL the time, and I certainly don't want to go anywhere near the religious content of the occasion, which (let’s face it) has nothing at all to do with what goes on around this money-centric country anyway. The Yuletide is all about the gifts, and so there is no better subject to be tackled by comedians in search of an Xmas single. (When people did release singles, that is. I am old.)

In this spirit I offer three Jewish comics from different comedic backgrounds supplying their takes on Xmas. First, the rarest track of the three, one I personally uploaded to YT, Marty Feldman’s “A Joyous Time of the Year.”

This is included in a CD release called “I Feel a Song Going Off” that is made up of the contents of a 1971 Marty LP called The Strange World of Marty Feldman, plus extra tracks which may or may not have been singles. Marty was a true original who did Keaton-precise physical comedy (see his “Loneliness of the Long Distance Golfer”), but he was also extremely funny as a manic character comic (watch this sketch). Here is his Xmas ditty:



A few years later, Albert Brooks released this single written by him and Harry Shearer. Interestingly, Albert was not a dad when this came out, but had children later in life. It’s a nice and nasty piece of business that comes from the period when Albert was a wonderfully abrasive comic presence (see my article on his transformations as a comedian and filmmaker). From 1974, “A Daddy's Christmas”:



And finally, since we never heard from him this past Labor Day (or since), I’ll close out with the “unkillable Jerry” (French variant title of one of his comedies). Here he laments the crappiness of his gifts with a song that is a lot more listenable than “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” or “I Ain’t Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas (’Cause I Ain’t Been Nuttin’ But Bad).” Herewith Jerry’s “I Had a Very Merry Christmas” — whatever you think of it, it’s worth it just to hear his pronunciation of the name “Minnie the Mermaid” (and, yes, I uploaded this one too -- these things need to be heard!):



Thanks as always to Jim G. for his diligent work unearthing the rarest comedy LPs found on the Net. His hard work is invaluable.

Arrogance, Eloquence & Intelligence: Deceased Artiste Christopher Hitchens

In terms of having read Hitchens’ writing, I am severely undernourished [UPDATE: not any more, but more on that in a future blog post], so I will speak about his importance as a media personality and a public intellectual, which is a very rare and valuable commodity in the culture of idiocy (oh, sorry… oversimplification) that has ruled in America since the B-movie actor was Pres. Hitchens could be, and quite often was, a major pain in the ass to listen to or read, if you disagreed with him. As a Lefty who enjoyed his columns in The Nation, I found his later discussions of how the Iraq War was a just one (against “Islamofascism”) endlessly annoying — more than likely because I wanted one of the best media intellectuals on my “side” and not putting his impressive intelligence in the service of something that was so clearly wrong.

But Hitchens, like any good intellectual, argued on a higher plane than most individuals whom you encounter on a daily basis, so even his most stridently wrongheaded arguments had a grounding in facts and were presented with a force that is rarely encountered outside of academic settings.

Hitchens had personality, dammit, whether he was right or wrong, and his lectures, print interviews, and TV appearances exuded the kind of contentious brilliance that was de rigeur in the days of Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, and Gore Vidal (thankfully we still have Vidal among us, an American national treasure and a rapier-sharp speaker), but has sadly disappeared from sight.

Hitchens was defined for many Americans by his English accent, incredible erudition, his linearity of thought, the reputation as a massive smoker and drinker, and yes, his obnoxiousness in interview and debate settings. Watch this wonderful clip from the fucking awful MSNBC show Scarborough Country and you’ll see him in fine form, telling off a representative of Jerry Falwell whom he’s supposed to be debating about the “war on Christmas.”

The fact that Hitchens didn’t suffer fools gladly made him a joy to watch, and this impatience made him invaluable when confronted with ridiculous belief systems like the “selfishness is good” Objectivism cult of Ayn Rand. His comments here decimate the whole Randian philosophy (plus her crappiness as a writer) in a scant few minutes:



He began as a socialist, a Trotskyite in fact, and was a heralded writer for Leftist publications until his “Islamofascist” period, which was followed by what seemed to be a move back to the Left (perception… and American politics!) with his decision to devote his attention to the dangers of organized religion and to explore his atheism.

Throughout his life, however, he remained a man of ideas who wrote books about authors and politicians he idolized (Orwell, Paine, Jefferson), while taking on people whose mythologies he felt concealed their hypocrisy (Kissinger, Clinton, Mother Theresa).

At times it seemed like he pursued conflict for its own sake. At one point he made a strident, Jerry Lewis-like, incorrect pronouncement in Vanity Fair about women comedians not being as funny as men — a topic that can be debated endlessly, but I think has much more to do with the audience reception (that audience including Hitchens), and the cult of personality that surrounds humorists and comedians. The question is, will straight men ever be cult followers for a woman comic as they would for a male? Will other women?

That debate truly felt like it was “Hitch” just honing his contrarian pain-in-the-ass image, although I have to fully agree with his savage attack on the inherent unfunniness of Bob Hope. Sure, Hitchens was ignoring the extremely entertaining movies Hope made in the Forties and early Fifties, but by the Sixties the Old Ski Nose was truly agonizing to watch (his specials from the Sixties through the Nineties remaining interesting more as cultural curios than classic comedy). Hitchens was one of the few to write about this after Hope died.

Hitchens was thus an invaluable voice even when he was being petty and bitchy about something that just popped into his head — his positions required that the listener/reader think in order to respond. He addressed the issue of whether his ire was fabricated in this very good C-SPAN interview:



I believe his decision to deconstruct “the Mother Theresa myth” was extremely important — so many people blindly worship the lady that Hitchens’ contention that her beliefs (among them, that suffering is “holy”) were wildly illogical and in fact detrimental to the people she “gave her life to” was something that needed to be said. He backed this up with facts about the way her missions operated, and how she moved among world leaders while espousing her message about the “biggest crime” (abortion).

A short-form version of his argument against her can be seen in this segment from Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, but a full thirty-minute documentary he made, Mother Theresa: Hell’s Angel, is available on YT:



Without question, what wound up being Hitchens’ legacy is his devotion to advocating and explaining atheism to those who are still tethered to the reassurances of religion. He lacked the scientific background and logical precision of Dawkins, but his lectures and interviews on the topic were never less than brilliant.

One YT poster put together an expert little montage of some of the best moments from his public debates and TV appearances. Herein you find him making some absolutely superb intellectual points, as well as a few moments where Hitch seems, like good old Norman Mailer, to be playing a “heel” wrestler to an antagonized audience:



What he shared with Dawkins was the ability to point out to the “faithful” that atheists could enjoy life with as much fervor as those who felt they had a safety net in the afterlife. Here both men speak at one of Hitchens’ last public appearances, at the Texas Freethought Convention two months ago. Dawkins gives a nicely sentimental tribute to his prickly debate partner and colleague in rationalism. It's a very moving clip, especially during the visibly weakened (physically, not mentally) Hitch's turn at the mic:



There are literally hundreds of Hitchens clips on YT and even a Hitchens channel. The best way to end this piece, though, is to spotlight his statements on death, first in an interview with Anderson Cooper talking about how the faithful were hoping for him to experience a “deathbed conversion”. Here are his comments about the key use of the afterlife as a come-on in religion:



Most of Hitchens’ fans were taking swigs of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black on the day of his death. I am not fond of the taste of whiskey, so I salute his memory as I can, with a clear thought and a rationalist’s admiration. Yes, he could be massively annoying, but we need many more people who can annoy the way that Hitch did.