Okay, listen up, because this is one of the single best things that I have ever posted here on Dangerous Minds. I’ve waited for a good version of this to get uploaded to YouTube since we very first started the blog and now that’s finally happened. There have been over 17,000 items posted here and THIS, as I see it at least, is one of the very, very top best of all those various things…

What am I talking about? It’s called Way USA, a pilot for a punk/comedy travelogue that was done for MTV in 1988 and hosted by the silver-tongued—and absolutely fucking hilarious—Tesco Vee of The Meatmen. It was directed by Peter Lauer (although it’s missing from his IMDB page), then a staffer with MTV’s graphics department who has since gone on to direct dozens upon dozens of major television shows that you have seen, including Strangers with Candy and Arrested Development.

The copy I had was acquired working at the post production house where it was edited. I’m not 100% sure that it even aired on TV. Although Way USA was produced at a time before MTV aimed its content squarely at teenagers, it still seems a little racier than I recall them ever getting back then. (It says at the end that there was one done in Niagara Falls as well, but I have not seen that.)

So, yes, Way USA is a punk/comedy travelogue that begins when Tesco sells his soul to the Devil (in the form of East Village lounge crooner Craig Vandenberg, here billed as “Tony LaVentura, the Adonis from Paramus”) for a good time traveling across America in opulently sleazy style.
 

 
First stop, it’s “Charm City—that ‘s Baltimore—and what trip to Baltimore would be complete without making a pilgrimage to the Pope of Trash, John Waters? Naturally Tesco checks that one off his list as well as visiting the notorious red light “Block” district, eating two dozen eggs at a diner with an “all the eggs you can eat” policy, an S&M session with the late plus-sized greeting card model Miss Jean Hill (her segment is a stone classic), visits strip clubs, a crime blotter news reporter, a faith healer/exorcist and does various other things around “the hairdo capital of America,” as Waters so lovingly puts it.

In the late 80s, I’d show my VHS copy of Way USA to anyone and everyone who visited me (people used to do quaint things like that back then). I was really keen on it and thought it was absolutely groundbreaking and hilarious (it’s aged very well). I’ve seen it so many times that as I was watching it just now, I started to realize HOW MANY of Tesco’s lines (or slight variations thereof) I use ALL OF THE TIME. And I’m not talking about a few of them, there must be 100 things he says in this half hour show that I regularly say to this day. For example, last week, sitting across from someone about to tuck into an appallingly unhealthy meal, I deadpanned “If your heart stops, I’ll kick you in the chest.” I got this from the eggs scene, which I haven’t seen since like 1990 probably, yet still quote.

In an alternate universe, Way USA would have made Tesco Vee a huge TV celebrity. Seriously folks, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. If more people knew about Way USA twenty-five years ago, if would probably be as revered today as Heavy Metal Parking Lot or the Butthole Surfers’ Entering Texas are.
 

 
Two more things: Way USA was shot on Super 8 film, so if it looks a little “soft,” this is actually the way it was supposed to look. This is, in fact, a very clean upload. However, the sort of jarring “commercial breaks” (Kembra Pfahler clad only in red bodypaint singing and swearing, a Roy Rogers spot, Tesco in San Francisco) included here have nothing directly to do with Way USA and I think come from The Devil’s In The Details, a DVD that Tesco Vee sells on his website. It’s pretty clear what’s from the show and what’s not from it, but you’ll see why I mentioned it, it would be confusing if you were seeing it for the first time otherwise. (As for the cable access footage of Kembra—who is a good friend of mine, I must ask her what that’s from!—and a few other things in the added parts, I’ll give the obligatory NSFW warning).
 

 
It’s not super surprising that fans of True Detective, the brilliant new HBO series with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, might, just might, take a cue from Rust Cohle, the compellingly uncompromising protagonist of the series embodied by McConaughey. (Come to think of it, the series is really told from Cohle’s perspective, what with the brooding, slow pans, the careful pacing, the attention to detail.)
 

 
“We Keep the Other Bad Men from the Door,” a quotation from Episode 3 of the series, serves as the title for a stunningly realized tribute website by Chicago-based Nigel Evan Dennis. The most amazing aspect of Dennis’ site is that it seems as much an obsessed investigation into the murder of Dora Lange as that of Cohle and Martin Hart (Harrelson) themselves.
 

 
All of the characters are presented in a kind of lineup, with symbols denoting their current state of oxygenated blood flow to the brain (i.e., alive or dead) as well as if they’re “good” or “evil”—a designation that seems at odds with the show’s drenched and muted view of human culpability, although to be candid I’m not entirely sure how the symbology works. There’s a remarkable graphic re-creation of a pivotal scene in Episode 4; up-to-date viewers know exactly the scene I’m talking about (no spoilers), as well as a detailed map of Louisiana, and much more.
 

 
I adore the show, and I can’t wait for the finale of the Season 1 story this Sunday evening (Season 2 will have a completely different plot; it’s hard to imagine how they will top Season 1). To my mind, the strong script by Nic Pizzolatto has been elevated by the A+ talents of McConaughey and Harrelson and especially director Cary Joji Fukunaga. It’s difficult to imagine other actors in those roles, and the direction is among the best TV has ever seen. I have started Pizzolatto’s novel Galveston (the Kindle version is a mere $2.99, so if I were you, I’d pounce), and it’s an impressive piece of work (so far)—it’s got an unprepossessing veneer but the prose can startle you unexpectedly, quite a bit like True Detective.)

Note that you can purchase handsome prints from Dennis’ site, although a few of the best ones are sold out (I suspect they’ll get restocked, though); be sure to visit before the finale this Sunday, as that seems the most in keeping with the spirit of the undertaking.
 
On a lighter note, here are some True Detective credits someone concocted in the Law & Order style:

 
via Vulture/Thank you Carol Schumacher!

 
Michael Caine was on the verge of international fame when Merv Griffin interviewed him in the summer of 1965.

Caine had just starred as Harry Palmer in The IPCRESS File, which was based on the best selling Cold War thriller by Len Deighton. The book had been hip and popular, leading LIFE magazine to claim:

“Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops…”

While Sean Connery was dominating the box office with James Bond, The IPCRESS File offered a supposedly more “realistic” take on the world of spies, or as Michael Caine explained to Griffin:

“James Bond is Clark Kent after he says ‘Shazam!’ he is Superman. Real spies are Clark Kent all the time.”

The IPCRESS File would make Caine famous. Well, you know you’ve made it when the Milton Bradley Games company makes a board game featuring your likeness:

A suspense / espionage game modeled after the popular 1965 British espionage film starring Michael Caine as “Harry Palmer, the cool British agent,” and Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, “The IPCRESS File.”

* For 2 to 4 players
* For ages 10 to adult
* Object: Get the “Double Agent” before he gets you
* Average play time 25 minutes.

Now, who wouldn’t want a game like this?
 

 

 

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Michael Caine: Behind the scenes of ‘Funeral in Berlin’
 
H/T Permission to Kill

 
Bill Maher was on a roll last Friday with a “New Rules” rant about a—ahem—maximum wage. It’s an idea whose time has come.

Did you know that during World War II, FDR actually proposed a cap on income that in today’s dollars would mean that no person could ever take home more than about $300,000? OK, that is a little low. But wouldn’t it be great if there were Democrats out there like that now, who would say to billionaires, “Oh, you’re crying?  We’ll give you something to cry about. You don’t want a minimum wage?  How about we not only have a minimum wage, we have a maximum wage?”

That is not a new idea.  James Madison, who wrote our Constitution, said, “Government should prevent an immoderate accumulation of riches.”  Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, they all agreed that too much money in the hands of too few would destroy democracy.

Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison… those guys the Tea partiers are always (selectively) quoting…

This clip is not only worth watching, it’s worth sharing with other people and encouraging them to watch it and pass it on themselves if they deem it worthy. When “the situation” the United States finds itself in, at this point in history, can be summed up so succinctly and be understood so readily by the man on the street, real change is coming. Maher articulates this matter masterfully, indeed. A very few people at the top have engineered it so that the spoils of Wall Street and the capitalist system flow to THEM and ONLY TO THEM. These lucky, er, bastards then promptly kicked the ladder out from underneath the rest of us with the help of both political parties. (Clinton signed NAFTA, ‘nuff said.)

Writing at Daily Kos, Lawrence Lewis nicely summed up another facet of “the American predicament” which has become so incredibly obvious over the past few decades, the Republican Party’s transparent fealty to the wealthy to the detriment of the working man’s lot (mind you, not that the Democrats are all that much better. They’re just not Republicans.). It is an actual class war that they’re waging, and it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to deceive their base about what they’re up to with just the standard GOP tropes of pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus and anti-gay, anti-immigrant rhetoric, when the lives of their constituents are crumbling:

The final piece of the puzzle is the Republican focus on making life more difficult for those who do have work. Republicans oppose increasing the minimum wage. They want even the employed to know economic want. Republicans oppose workplace safety regulations, and they want to destroy unions. They want workers completely subject to the whims of management, and unable to quit lousy jobs because there are no good alternatives and there is no social safety net to protect them. Under the Republican agenda, workers have to do what they’re told or suffer even worse consequences.

In short, the Republican agenda is to keep people desperate for work, with more people seeking jobs than can find them, with no laws or other forms of assistance or protection for those who can find jobs, and no safety net for those who can’t. Lack of opportunity ensures a glutted labor market, which drives down wages, forcing many of even those who do find work to seek more. Exhausting hours, inadequate pay, and broken unions ensure that workers are hungry and tired and incapable of defending themselves.

It could be called a new form of feudalism, but that feudalism actually made necessary more responsibility from the aristocracy toward the peasants and serfs than does unregulated bastard capitalism from owners and management toward labor. It is class warfare. Simple, straightforward, class warfare. For Republicans, poverty, hunger, and unemployment are not tributary outcomes of their economic model, they are deliberate means toward insidious ends. Make people hurt. Make them desperate. They will do what they are told. They will ask for no more than that they be allowed to survive another week.

Or so Republicans hope.

Everyone is starting to realize exactly—and if not exactly exactly, then CLOSE ENOUGH—what’s going down.

It simply can’t continue on like this. It’s not going to.

[And if you haven’t heard about this guy, he’ll blow your mind. Ladies and gentlemen, meet THE PERFECT Republican spokesperson, Josh Miller of Arkansas. Keep talking buddy, you are doin’ the Lord’s work…]
 

 
UPDATE: As posted on the Dangerous Minds Facebook page (thank you Eric Blahbson) Jello Biafra on the maximum wage:
 

 
These magazine and book covers of Honor Blackman, better known as “Cathy Gale” from The Avengers (no, not the ones with Scarlett Johansson) and “Pussy Galore” from what is likely the finest movie in the 007 canon, Goldfinger—I find them totally fascinating. It’s not for me to choose what imagery feminists should adopt, but to my way of thinking there’s not much that communicates “girl power” better than these images of Blackman kicking royal (legitimate) ass.

It’s not always easy to tell, but her adoption of judo and/or karate seems not to have been mere PR puffery. The books were obviously popular multiple editions. Anyone know why that black cover uses the American spelling of “defense,” even though “for copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.”?
 

 

 

“Honor Blackman’s Book of Self-Defense, in which the striking actress demonstrates ‘defense galore’”
 

“From the karate chop to the interior leg throw, here is the modern girl’s ABC of self-defense.”
 

 
Here’s an (annoyingly watermarked) interview clip in which Blackman shows a few judo moves and discusses her approach to the martial art.
 

 
via Mounds and Circles

 
Simon and Garfunkel’s 1969 television special “Songs of America” shows the two on stage, in the studio and on a concert tour across a turbulent country. Their ambitious Bridge Over Troubled Water album had yet to be released and the glorious title song was heard here by the general public for the very first time. The program showed news clips of labor leader/activist Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, the Poor People’s Campaign’s march on Washington, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, JFK and Robert Kennedy and other events that were emblematic of the era.

“Songs of America” was originally sponsored by the Bell Telephone Company, but the execs there got cold feet when they saw what they’d paid for—legend has it that they looked at the footage of JFK, RFK and MLK during the (powerful!) “Bridge Over Troubled Water” segment (approx 12 minutes in) and asked for more Republicans! (Not assassinated Republicans, just more Republicans...you know, for balance!) The special was eventually picked up by CBS.

It was directed by the comedic actor, writer and later talk show host Charles Grodin, a friend of the duo. Grodin had already been in a bit part in Rosemary’s Baby (he was the obstetrician), but had yet to gain notoriety with his role in Catch-22.

Songs heard include “America,” “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” “Scarborough Fair,” “El Condor Pasa (If I Could),” “Punkys Dilemma,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Mystery Train,” “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” “The Boxer,” “Homeward Bound,” and “The Sound of Silence.”
 

 
I was once lucky enough to see Seamus Heaney, who Robert Lowell once called “the most important Irish poet since Yeats,” give a poetry reading at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was not long after his volume Field Work had been published.

The reading was held in an upper floor of the Assembly Rooms, looking on to a busy George Street. Heaney sat at a long table, which was slightly raised off the floor, its white linen cover planted with microphones. Through failing memory, I recall the actor J. G. Devlin, and either Niamh or Sorcha Cusack, flank the poet either side, their backs to the windows, silvered and yellowed with light. Heaney said he thought he was a poor reader of his own work, and that he preferred others to read his poetry, yet, when he did read, Heaney made the words tingle.

I thought Heaney looked like one of my father’s relatives. The eyebrows, the ruddy hue, the soft down of hair, the shared Irishness of my ancestors, farmers, and coopers, and supposedly tailors out of Dublin—the stories of my forebears change depending on the tale and the telling.

I listened as the three took turns to read “Death of a Naturalist,” “Blackberry Picking,” “Digging.”

Between my finger and my thumb  
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound  
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds  
Bends low, comes up twenty years away  
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills  
Where he was digging.

There was no waste, every word used precisely, wisely, unfolding purpose, and meaning, and a shared sense of joy at what means to be alive. Outside, the Festival traffic moved on, oblivious. The memory fades, but Heaney’s poetry like all good literature maintains. Heaney died last August at the age of 74. His final message to the world, written in Latin moments before his death was: “Noli timere” (“Don’t be afraid.”) Enda Kenny, the Irish Taoiseach, remarked on the poet’s passing “He is mourned — and deeply — wherever poetry and the world of the spirit are cherished and celebrated,” Mr Kenny said. “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.”

This is Seamus Heaney interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show in 1992. Forget the sub-titles, and listen to the beauty and wisdom of the words.
 

 
After the jump Seamus Heaney reads his “Digging”...

 
The celebrity weight-loss instructor Richard Simmons became a pop culture icon in the 1980s, when the success of his book Never-Say-Diet and his Sweatin’ to the Oldies workout videos drew national attention to his preternaturally upbeat and bubbly personality. He’s still going strong. TV guest appearances have literally never stopped in the intervening years, and his following remains huge (sorry).

But one TV show he’ll probably never be invited to guest on is Duck Dynasty. Not because of its star’s recently-revealed homophobia. Indeed, though Simmons is widely perceived as a gay figure—possibly due to a combination of his off-the-charts cheer, his flamboyance, and his bedazzled dolphin shorts—he has actually never made his sexuality publicly known. No, the reason Richard Simmons will probably never be on Duck Dynasty is that he made this video:
 

 
You’re welcome.

Simmons’ YouTube channel is absolutely worth a peek, but his entire online presence is trove of untrammeled joys. His Facebook and Instagram feeds, in particular, are bottomless lodes of delightfully bonkers camp. But the TV parodies are just too much! Here are his takes on Homeland and The Carrie Diaries.
 

 
I totally owe Marlee Pickles a drink for this.

 
This is a guest post from Hal Martin, which is not his real name. Legit returns for its second series this evening on the FXX network

A new series of Legit is starting tonight. In it, comedian Jim (played by real-life comedian Jim Jefferies) looks after a severely disabled young man named Billy (DJ Qualls) in a wheelchair, whilst both live in Los Angeles with Steve (Dan Bakkedahl), Billy’s divorced brother. If you haven’t seen the first series, I would advise you all to catch up with it, then start watching the second series. And here’s why.

I was a caregiver up until recently; I stopped because the pay is lousy and the hours terrible. For six months in 2013, April-October, I had the extreme pleasure, and extreme displeasure, of working with a man of 30 named Mark who was permanently consigned to a wheelchair; feet tied down because of spasms, couldn’t feed himself, the whole tragic lot. Not going to go into what was wrong with him; suffice to say, he’d received injuries as a child that had left him wealthy from a huge settlement paid out when he received them. He basically couldn’t wipe his own backside, but was still amiable, had a decent sense of humor, could have a beer (or two) and a conversation with you, and was pretty laid back. I very much enjoyed, and loathed, working with him, for reasons that will become apparent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I got a call from a caregiver employment agency I had registered with a few weeks before to ask if I would start work that night, Friday night, 6pm, live-in (you literally live in the client’s home 24/7, normally four or five days a week), straight through until the next Saturday morning, seven days straight, when they would have another weekend replacement ready. My hours after that would be 10am Monday morning to 10am Saturday morning. I had been looking for a live-in gig so I said sure, yeah, and they assured me they were my best pal and I was the best man for the job, and I said yeah, right, whatever.

I have found out, in the caregiving world, that if you get a call for a huge case the same day it starts, or with very little notice, they are just trying to scramble to find somebody to work it. They get a big commission for an employee working it (stealing 66% of what they are paid for the employee working, in my last rip-off gig), and don’t give a damn who does the job. Caregiving is a very sexist industry for men, and it’s much easier to find work if you are a woman, so I considered myself lucky I had gotten the gig I wanted so quickly. Not that I really wanted to work 24/7 five days a week in somebody else’s house, but, well, you know what I mean.

Anyway. I drove the 25 miles to the gig from my apartment in Chicago, and found myself in a wealthy, relatively isolated suburb, marveling at the silent, sterile, empty, beautifully kept street, far from the madding city crowd. I rang the doorbell, and the door was answered by a young Ugandan caregiver guy (young African men are big on caregiving – it’s in their family cultural tradition) named Benon, eyes red, agitated, clearly stoned out of his face. I was walking into a gig in total disarray. Mark had fired his now-gone housekeeper minutes earlier, and had been having a shouting match between himself, his housekeeper (whom he accused of spying on him for the company, which she was, but that’s another story), and the caregiver I was replacing, who had been fired for neglect of his disabled charge.

Benon was babbling at me, asking me to work four days so he could work three, and blah blah blah, and I just nodded and said yeah, right, whatever, having no intention whatsoever of doing this, and annoyed I had been thrust into the middle of such a volatile situation where smiling diplomacy was the key. I introduced myself to Mark and went through into the kitchen to talk about the situation to Benon. When he told me he was from Uganda I actually tried to talk to him about some films by Ramon Film Productions, a burgeoning Ugandan film production company, to distract him and calm him down, get him talking about other, less serious things, and he, thankfully, left shortly afterwards. He’d left a shitload of stuff for me to do, and I was pissed at this, but I just told Mark to call on me if he needed me and got down to what needed to be done.

I did a couple of loads of laundry and folded them, going into Mark’s bedroom to put them away. Instantly I saw several bra and panties sets hanging off a large mirror and I thought hmmm, got a live one here, scalps, bit fratboyish, but good on him, he’s still got a sex drive, not letting him be in that wheelchair stop him. I didn’t know where any of his clothes went, so had to dig through drawers and closets, and I uncovered a few Girls Gone Wild DVDs, several featuring voluptuous black women. I shrugged and put his underwear away in the drawer with the rest of the underwear there. No concern of mine, and I could only imagine how oddly awkward it would be to know your caregiver would know your taste in porn and such because you knew they would know about and see this stuff. But I also reasoned well, in his situation, reliant on other people for help, he wouldn’t have any choice anyway, which sucked in the dignity stakes but there was nothing that could be done about it. And I’m telling you – and this is absolutely true (as is this whole story, except the names) – the first fucking thing I thought about when I saw those bras and panties and DVDs was Jim Jefferies.

Now, there is a reason for this. I wasn’t thinking about him wearing the stuff, obviously – leopardskin thongs would probably not look too good on him. The reason I thought about him was because he does an amazing, heartbreaking half-hour monologue in his set, captured on his DVD Alcoholocaust from 2010, about taking a disabled 31-year-old virgin friend of his that he has known since childhood to a whorehouse. My life has turned into a Jim Jefferies sketch, I genuinely thought, and I ruefully chuckled at the irony. I have met the amiable and hilarious comedian a couple of times in Chicago, including having a drink with him after he did that whorehouse sketch a few years back, and the symmetry did not escape me for one second. But there was a level of secret poignancy there, too. Here was this tangled-limbs helpless man, with sexual desires, young, virile to a point, but unable to go out and satisfy them himself. So he made do with pornography. I idly wondered if he had even had sex.
 

 
As it turns out, the answer to that question was yes; his father had taken him to a whorehouse when he was 21. I learned this fact when, after a couple of weeks of getting to know Mark and test out his parameters, I showed him the very Jim Jefferies monologue (“It’s so nice to be a disabled sex puppeteer!”) just discussed, which actually made me cry the first time I saw it being performed live. I thought Mark might appreciate it and he did, and told me why. It was incredible – here I was having a late-night beer with this guy, and I had just shown him something that he could relate to in an incredibly intimate way; and not one other comic on the planet could have done this. Once I jokingly mentioned being in need of a visit to a hooker myself and Mark fixed me with a wicked grin and said to me in a low, serious voice: “I can arrange that.” And he could, but didn’t (I didn’t really want it); he had done the same thing for another caregiver, apparently. He certainly loved when I took him out to a Twin Peaks restaurant and he would comment knowledgeably on the booties of the young women working there as I fed him his ice-cold beer.

I hooked up his Mac to his huge-screen TV in the living room and we watched Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Pryor stand-up, and blaxploitation films, and such. We had such fun nights, me feeding him chips as he sat and sipped his beer (he liked Bud, no real taste in beers!) or Mike’s Hard Lemonade from a straw with the bottle in his chair’s cup holder (Mark’s was a $40,000 top-of-the-range model; I used to jokingly call him “Robocop”; the thing could stand him up and everything if he needed to pee, saving him some of the indignity of having to have me do that for him).

A few years before I met him, Mark had visited a ghetto massage parlor for a happy ending. There he had met a black hooker named Sandra, a real piece of work, like some skanky bottom bitch from an Iceberg Slim book. She had been prosecuted for drug dealing, and had even been involved in a scandal involving a politician in the massage parlor; I saw the stories and her mugshot online. Well, she had seen an easy trick, an easy mark in Mark if you will, and had plied her snake-oil charms on him. He had fallen in love with Sandra and gotten married to her, and she, of course, had bled–was bleeding–him dry. First I heard of her was the case notes emailed to me the day I started. All they said was that he had a “girlfriend” and they had a supervised-by-the-caregiver “date” once a week for a couple of hours at a place to be specified each week. I thought that was cute and poignant, in a naïve way, cos I had never met her, and thought it was cool that he was trying to maintain as normal a life as he could under difficult circumstances.

And just how difficult the circumstances were became apparent the minute I met his “girlfriend” for the first time. I had by that point been briefed by his case worker on whom she was and sort of knew what to expect, but she still turned my stomach. 35, dripping crap bling, rail-thin, probably deep into drugs, instantly radiating bad electricity and I did not like her the minute I laid eyes on her. She had one tattoo on her neck from the old movie Dead Presidents of a guy wielding two guns, and another one on her right bicep of a black rose. Above the rose it said “LOVED BY FEW” and below it said “HATED BY MANY,” which may tell you something. The first time I met her she was dressed like a teenager in tight clothes, belly on display, and had on fake gold earrings that said, in letters 1.5 inches high, “TRUST NO BITCH.” How appropriate. “You can’t even make this shit up,” I thought “Mark, if you could only see what I see, man, it’s right in front of your eyes!” But of course I said nothing, as I had just started the job, and I just… watched.

This saga continues after the jump…

 
Samuel Beckett said little of his experiences during the Second World War. He dismissed his work with the French Resistance as “boy scout stuff.” Whatever his activities, they were important enough for General Charles de Gaulle to award Beckett the Croix de Guerre.

After the war, he returned home to Ireland to see his mother. He stopped off in London to visit friends, who noticed the change in him—he had lost weight, looked tired, weary, his face lined, his teeth bad.

At home in Dublin, he was saddened to find his mother ill with Parkinson’s disease. He stayed to look after her for six weeks. It was during this time that Beckett had an epiphany that was to change his life, and eventually modern literature.

One day, while out walking along the harbor wall during storm, Beckett had a vision how his life must be if he wanted to succeed as a writer.

He had always written in English, and had been long influenced by James Joyce. Facing out to the gray, lace-capped sea, Beckett understood he must write in another language, and must break with Ireland’s rich literary traditions, which were holding him back. He suddenly saw his path was not with “enrichment,” but with “impoverishment.”

“I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Beckett began to write in French, and over the following decade, he composed the novels, poetry and plays that established his reputation as one of the century’s greatest authors.

With reference to the autobiographical elements contained within Krapp’s Last Tape, this two-part documentary, Samuel Beckett: As the Story was Told is “a rare glimpse into the reclusive world of this literary giant, whose most famous work, Waiting for Godot, evokes with unnerving precision the cosmic despair and isolation of modern humankind.”