When you’re growing up, exploring and discovering what kinds of pop culture spins your wheels, many of your idols have already gone.
I’ve never shared this earth with Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Marc Bolan or Marilyn Monroe. The likes of Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain, Elliot Smith and Nick Drake had vanished before I fell love with them. Even when brand new to me, each of their fates had been sealed and their stories finished, before I could know any different.
However as you get older this changes and, once or twice a year, you find your world abruptly shaken by the news that another one of your heroes has passed away.
With the likes of Twitter, I sometimes feel that the shock is intensified and drawn out. We get to hear the news in real-time, and an initial trickle of tributes quickly becomes a torrent of links, personal outpourings of grief and re-tweets that lasts for days. It’s captivating, but difficult to escape.
You feel a little ridiculous for feeling this loss, shock and grief for someone you never met. Often more emotion is shed over these figures than the passing of distant relatives.
But when you think about it, these people created the art that helped shape us as individuals: a song we shared a first kiss to, a film that made us change our whole perspective on life, a sense of style that resulted in us getting a ridiculous hair cut that will forever live on in our high school photos.
For me, my real-time loss of idols started with Michael Jackson. Amy Winehouse followed, Heath Ledger, Lou Reed, and then Robin Williams. But the one that still stings particularly hard is Philip Seymour Hoffman, who we lost a year ago, on February 2, 2014.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was a rare and fascinating actor: reserved, troubled and yet always classy. He was unconventional looking, by Hollywood standards, and despite seldom being the leading man, he would always steal the show in the least ‘look at me’ way possible. He would often play the unusual, the disturbed, the oddball but with an air of understatement that never got him pegged as a ‘character actor’.
Combine these admirable and, very adorable traits with the fact that he was often the most memorable part in some of the best films of the past twenty years: The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, The Master, Doubt, Magnolia, Capote, Happiness…and well, he’s a film enthusiast’s dream.
This is the point where could I have another gin, pop on The Smiths, get a little morose, and dwell.
However I won’t. Because what we should be doing, instead, is celebrating, discussing, sharing and remembering the legacy of work that these artists leave behind. This is who they were and what they dedicated and, often, lost their lives trying to do. Their creations are far more important than the scandal, addictions, personal struggles and final tragedy that filled endless column space.
Which is what I will do.
So now, one year on, I wish to celebrate the wonderful Lester Bangs.
We all have a favourite film of Seymour Hoffman’s for varying reasons. For many it’s the Big Lebowski, or Boogie Nights. But the beauty of his diversity of work was that we could all find something tangible, even in the lesser known roles. I have a friend, for instance, who lives and breathes State and Main – a film that hardly anyone I know has ever seen (but it’s lovely, sweet and funny and you really should watch it).
My favourite role of his was in 2000’s Almost Famous in which he played gonzo, veteran, rock reviewer Lester Bangs – a character based on the real life journalist of the same name. It wasn’t his biggest, most acclaimed or challenging role. He’s onscreen for less than nine minutes in total, but he lights up and captivates every second he’s on screen.
A jaded, yet passionate industry veteran. He was a geek who forged a career hanging out with the biggest rock stars. A realist, yet caring. He was the ultimate in being both cool and uncool all at once. For teenage, bedroom bound music nerds, Lester Bangs was what we all aspired to be.
“Music, you know, true music – not just rock n roll – it chooses you. It lives in your car, or alone listening to your headphones, you know, with the vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America.” – Lester Bangs, Almost Famous
And you know the best thing about Lester Bangs?
He gets to live forever.
To my dear, Philip Seymour Hoffman, I raise my glass to you, one year on.
Now let’s all go and watch Almost Famous. Even if you’ve seen it already, I think it’s about time you watch it again (and come on, just admit it, you secretly love the ‘Tiny Dancer’ scene).
As a person in recovery I find it kind of bemusing that you missed the tragedy of PSH’s death and celebrate his death by taking drugs. PSH was in recovery. He had successfully stayed clean for a really long stretch of time. But, like so many of us people with drug dependence issues, he slipped up and paid dearly for it.
While I appreciate your detailed knowledge of his filmography and you’re a quite a good writer, I can’t help but think you could have put more thought into your chosen way of celebrating PSH’s death. Surely abstaining, or a movie marathon, or donating to a charity which helps people with drug dependence, or even just making some delicious toast, would been a more appropriate way to celebrate the great actor’s memory than raising a glass of a drug, a drug that kills so many New Zealanders every year and contributes to domestic violence and various other social problems and economic costs.