There aren’t too many people who I’d be really that impressed to meet. To be perfectly honest/obnoxious I’ve already met most of the people who I ever wanted to meet, or else they’re dead. Just three people come to mind who I’d be humbled to find myself face to face with and all are women: Oprah Winfrey, Patti Smith and Rachel Maddow.
In the above clip, Rachel Maddow shows why she’s such an important, even necessary, figure in the American media. Although David Letterman is obviously throwing her well-intentioned, and respectful softballs, she says here what more sane and responsible people who have an audience should be saying about Fox News, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart: “Scaring white people is good politics on the conservative side of the spectrum.”Bravo, Ms. Maddow, keep it up!!
Back in my Z Channel days, no actor seemed to show up more often—or was more welcomed by me—than England’s late great Oliver Reed. In his 40-year career, Reed made nearly 100 films ranging from The Brood, The Devils, Tommy, Burnt Offerings, to the film that killed him (in a Maltese pub, of course), Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
I think even as a kid, I was able to identify Reed’s onscreen appeal. It’s the same element missing from so many of today’s career-focused actors: joy. Reed loved performing, loved having an audience. As might be expected from the man who once famously said, “My only regret is that I didn’t drink every pub dry and sleep with every woman on the planet,” Reed loved life, loved living it, and he clearly planned to squeeze from it every possible drop of pleasure, pinball wizards and haunted houses be damned.
Even “King of Cool” Steve McQueen proved no match for the Oliver Reed lifeforce. The story goes that McQueen flew to London to discuss a project. Putting business aside for a bit, the pair went on a marathon pub crawl which resulted in Reed vomiting on McQueen. The project was never consummated.
Fortunately, we have all those many great films to remember Reed by. But now, thanks to YouTube, we can revisit some of his more memorable small-screen performances. Reed was a frequent, frequently drunk, guest on television both here and in the UK.
In a testament to the saccharine and stage-managed nature of our current talk show landscape, witness below as Reed gropes feminist writer Kate Millett on British TV’s After Dark. Thanks to After Dark’s supplying of Reed with a “booze buffet” before and during taping, what starts out as a sober-minded discussion on militarism, masculine stereotypes, and violence to women, soon devolves into something else:
And that’s just the mesmerizing endpoint to an escalating, tour de force Reed workout you can watch in its entirety here: I, II, III. But even on the dog-and-pony circuit this side of the Atlantic, Reed was no more willing to dilute his behavior. His face-off with David Letterman follows below:
I have been a longtime Harvey Pekar fan, discovering him—along with the great Brother Theodore—during the early years of David Letterman’s show in the 1980s. He was always totally hilarious and curmudgeonly on his Letterman appearances. I view Pekar as original of a self creation as Groucho Marx, Charles Bukowski or his friend Robert Crumb. American Splendor, the film about Pekar’s life, starring the always wonderful Paul Giamatti as Harvey and featuring Harvey as himself, is one of my top, top favorite movies of all time, it’s a masterpiece.
Now Harvey Pekar is collaborating with four artists on a weekly web comic on the Smith website:
Pekar Project seeds were planted when Pekar discovered artist Tara Seibel, a fellow Clevelander. They began collaborating on stories for her blog, Rock Cityy Comix. For The Pekar Project, Pekar has formed a band including editor Jeff Newelt and four artists: Seibel, Joseph Remnant, Rick Parker, and Sean Pryor. Just as Duke Ellington composed pieces with a particular featured soloist in mind, Pekar is tailoring each true-life tale to these artists?
