A busy week for tragedy
I spent a summer in Ferguson, Missouri 20 years ago. I was back for a visit three years ago and it looked exactly the same. In 1994, I lived on W. Florissant Ave., a street that, this week, has seen two people shot-- one dead, both by police, righteous and angry protestors in action, and riot gear-clad police with military-grade weaponry. Despite what you might have heard, it's a story not about property rights, but about human rights. It's a battle not between white and black, but between the citizenry and a police culture that treats young black men like animals.
A suburban police department acting thus far with absolutely no transparency has refused to release the name of the officer that shot dead 18-year-old, unarmed college freshman-to-be Michael Brown from a distance of 35 feet while Brown had his hands in the air. The ACLU and the National Bar Association have filed open records requests for the still-secret police reports, and if the name of the officer is not soon released, we might wind up hearing it from Anonymous.
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It may not be possible to fully comprehend how bad the state of community policing is in this country. In an era when so much knowledge has come to us about the sociology and psychology of crime, it seems we use virtually none of it.
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A couple years ago I Netflixed my way through about 15 Bogart films chronologically. In about half the cases, I was re-watching. I couldn’t leave any of the Betty Bacall collaborations out of the exercise-- To Have or Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo. Bacall was so sultry and sophisticated that it betrayed the truth of how young she was in those earliest of her pictures. That she could die seven decades later and not yet be 90 years old is difficult to comprehend. Most of that generation’s stars are long gone, and I have had Bacall on my mental list as about the last one. They never really leave us though, you know? Not only will Bacall live on, she’ll always look damn sexy. The silver screen gifts a curious immortality—and Bertie Higgins songs grant one that’s even more curious.
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Robin Williams’ public stock went up and down during his career, as each performer’s does. He took his lumps for certain movies, and at times, from fellow stand-up comics. His brilliant comedy style was impossible to duplicate but relatively easy to mimic, as it often was with malice. His free-form riffs were mostly rehearsed, but that fact was expertly concealed. They could be caricatured by tallying the popular Williams characters in rapid succession—the old man hard of hearing, the televangelist, the telethon host, the fag, Jack Nicholson.
For every performer out there, I believe there is an individual moment in which we each, once and for all, make up our minds about that performer, an impermeable thumbs up or thumbs down. For me, the Robin Williams moment came in 2002. I grew up watching him on Mork & Mindy, and always loved him more as a guest on Carson and Letterman than for any particular film. On May 21, 1992, he was the last “first” guest of Carson’s long late-night run, an honor as great as Williams' Academy Award, to my mind.
By 2002, Williams was still an enormous star in movies. “Serious” Robin had been Oscar-nominated for Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, and The Fisher King, a winner for Good Will Hunting. “Funny” Robin had been made legend partly by a public anointment by Jonathan Winters, and also by Mrs. Doubtfire and Aladdin, a pair of family films that were absolute box office explosions, although a pair I mostly glossed over at the time because of a generational incongruity. In ’98, he had been pilloried by critics for Patch Adams, a film that critics scared me away from that was reported to have been an especially pandering attempt at combining “Funny” and “Serious” Robin. By ’02, I was mostly on to other entertainment interests.
I tuned in to his HBO stand-up special Live from Broadway on this particular Saturday night in 2002—and I didn’t go into it with a lot of anticipation. Ho hum. But Jonny Winters so help me, that was about the funniest stand up special I had ever seen, the eternal thumbs up from me. Robin Williams had entered my imagination, left it, and now was back to show me his ultimate worth. He moved to icon status for this fan and it’s hard for a man or woman to get knocked out of that box once they’re in.
Enjoy that 2002 HBO special tonight on YouTube. After doing so, you might be able to tell me you have ones that you like better, but you won’t be able to claim that they belong on a higher plain. This is Robin’s genius on full display.
posted by CM @ 8:32 PM
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