"Let's pretend this coffee is champagne... to celebrate life... like the rich, classy people do."

I'd love to see a movie, in the style of "Frost/Nixon" or "My Dinner with Andre"...

... made from the conversations between Eugenio Scalfari and Pope Francis. 

This is as close as I can get:

"A dropout from a life of privilege, [Taylor] Mead allied himself with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other early leaders of the San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s..."

"... before settling in New York to eke out a living as a member of its thriving arts underground." I loved this man. I'm glad to see he lived to the very old age of 88.

Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, who cast Mead in a moving vignette that closed his 2003 film "Coffee and Cigarettes," considered Mead one of his heroes.

One of my favorite movies. Here's the movie that made me a big fan: Andy Warhol's "Lonesome Cowboys."

He was a familiar face on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he wandered the streets with a notebook, read his poetry in coffeehouses – often against a background of a Charles Mingus recording – and fed feral cats in the predawn hours....

Born on the last day of 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Mich., Mead was the son of a wealthy businessman and his socialite wife who divorced before he was born. He floated through boarding schools and a number of colleges before his father found him a job in a brokerage house, which was not to his liking...

Here, you can watch the Taylor Mead segment of "Coffee and Cigarettes" on YouTube, but it will look a lot better — and the entire movie is recommended — on Amazon instant video or DVD.

Goodbye to Taylor Mead. Real tears shed for you here at Meadhouse.

ADDED: "Let's pretend this coffee is champagne... to celebrate life... like the rich, classy people do."

IN THE COMMENTS: betamax3000 said:

I was feeding apple slices to the baby alligators in the sewer through an open manhole cover when the headlights came upon me like two drunk angels. The police had beaten my dead horse before, and I sure was not going to stick around this time for another pony ride. Through the alley I went, past the passed-out vagrants and the virgin hookers and the baking-powder salesman who looked like Woodrow Wilson, then down the stairs to the jazz club in the basement below the Italian restaurant that served great Chinese if you asked right. I had my usual -- gin with an orange marmalade chaser -- when I heard someone call my name above the honk-and-skitter of the saxophone trio: it was Speedy Johnny, free from jail. The cops had busted him for contributing to the delinquency of minors with intent to double-park, and now he looked as pale as a night-school oyster.

More in that vein, inside.

Are Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton "even allowed to be in the same movie?"

"Doesn't this... mess with the talented, very pale actress space-time continuum?"

***

You know, I have a big problem with actresses these days looking too much alike. In an age of plastic surgery, there's a standardized insipid beauty that wrecks a lot of movies and can be downright confusing. But Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton don't represent that problem at all. They carry on the old tradition of highly distinctive beauty. Yet, even within that tradition, there can be too close a resemblance.

And then there's that wonderful "Coffee and Cigarettes" scene where Cate Blanchett plays 2 different women who look and act entirely different. Snippet:

"She walks, talks, sings, smells like Bob Dylan."

Heath Ledger raves about Cate Blanchett's "incredible transformation" into the character of Bob Dylan, whom she plays in the new movie "I'm Not There." Cate is one of a bunch of actors -- Ledger, included -- who play Dylan in the film. But Cate's the best -- "beyond astounding."

I can believe that. If you assemble a lot of actors in a film that's kind of a big acting competition, she wins. I observed this in "Coffee and Cigarettes":

When a movie is broken into a series of vignettes as this one is, critics usually can't resist saying which vignette is the best and grousing that some vignettes are better than others. With an ordinary movie, it doesn't seem worth saying that some scenes are better than others! But with each vignette, you get a new set of two or three actors, so it's hard not to single out, for example, Cate Blanchett. Patty Duke style, she plays two cousins who have the same face, but different hair, clothes, mannerisms, attitudes.

She was utterly fascinating and brilliant.

Convergences.

When John was in town we watched the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes" one evening, and then the next day we listened to that Rufus Wainwright song "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk." Later, I was in the café and didn't like the music they were piping in, so I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.

I'd been too busy this week to do my Wednesday morning drive to listen to "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan," but I went to check the website to see when the replays of the new show were, and I saw the theme this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding. Now When it's time for one of the replays, so I'm going to get in my car and go for a drive. If I kill myself in an accident, be sure to say she died doing something she loved, and link to this post. Have a cup of coffee and talk about convergences, including whatever it was my car converged with.

UPDATE, after hearing the show: More convergences. On the death theme, Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes," the part where Iggy Pop tells Tom Waits he ordered coffee for him and then worries if that's okay.

Rewatching "Coffee and Cigarettes."

I'd rather rewatch a movie I love than watch something new. Much as I'd like to add more titles to the list of movies I love, the rewatching experience is so much deeper and more pleasurable. You can't really see things the first time. The other night we were going to rewatch "My Dinner With Andre" (my most rewatched movie), but then we hit upon the somewhat similar "Coffee and Cigarettes" (which I watched -- and blogged -- a year and a half ago).

So, yeah, "Coffee and Cigarettes" turned out to be nicely rewatchable. I found new appreciation for the lesser scenes. Aware Bill Murray was going to be insignificant, I got so much more out of watching him drink that coffee straight out of the carafe. Knowing where the longueurs were, I relaxed and took in the luscious black-and-white photography -- all those checkered tablecloths and checkered tiles, seen from above with circular coffee cups and swirly cigarette smoke.

Speaking of photography, the "My Dinner With Andre" DVD is horrible. Every time I think of watching it again, I have to air the same complaint. At least this time, I had a new way to say it: It's like watching the movie on YouTube.

"Coffee and Cigarettes."

I loved the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes" (which is newly available on DVD). Keep in mind that two of my favorite movies are "My Dinner With Andre" and "Slacker" before regarding my opinion as a recommendation. Here's the beautiful "Coffee and Cigarettes" website.

When a movie is broken into a series of vignettes as this one is, critics usually can't resist saying which vignette is the best and grousing that some vignettes are better than others. With an ordinary movie, it doesn't seem worth saying that some scenes are better than others! But with each vignette, you get a new set of two or three actors, so it's hard not to single out, for example, Cate Blanchett. Patty Duke style, she plays two cousins who have the same face, but different hair, clothes, mannerisms, attitudes. The final vignette is especially poignant. It features Taylor Mead, so unrecognizably older than he was in the Andy Warhol movies -- like "Lonesome Cowboys" -- where we loved him so much.

I must get back to watching "Dead Man," which, like "Coffee and Cigarettes" is directed by Jim Jarmusch. I watched about a third of that movie once and then got distracted by something -- too long ago to remember what. I'll have to go back to the beginning now. But the gorgeous black and white photography of "Coffee and Cigarettes" -- which looked great on the Sony HDTV -- makes me want to get back to "Dead Man." Longtime readers may remember that I bought "Dead Man" along with four other DVDs back in March when I went on a Johnny Depp-focused buying spree.

Paglia on Zappa.

Camille Paglia reviews a new book about Frank Zappa in the NYT Book Review. True to Paglia form, she emphasizes Zappa's Italian background. The book, by Barry Miles, is just called "Zappa," but Paglia titles her review "Freak Out!" after Zappa's first album. I can't hear that title without guilt, because a friend of my brother's loaned me the album, an expensive double album, 35 years ago, and I've never given it back. For the last 30 years or so, I haven't remembered the person's name or had any idea how to reach her. So it's really just a permanent burden of guilt. But here's some Paglia on Zappa (and Miles, whom she doesn't seem to like very much):

Miles, who knew Zappa, often seems ambivalent about him. There is a gap between the ''juvenile and prurient'' Zappa he describes and the one we see in the book's sensational photographs, which show a man of burning magnetism and piercing intellect. Miles calls Zappa a ''cold nihilist'' who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ''cynicism and misanthropy,'' he detects Catholic guilt and ''deep-seated problems with women.'' Zappa was ''stuck in a 50's time warp'' -- yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.

Whatever the meaning of the S-and-M and fetish imagery in his songs (a theme that makes Miles squirm), the picture painted here of Zappa's family life is troubling. When not touring (which he loved to do -- Miles calls him a ''road rat''), Zappa spent 10 to 18 hours a day holed up in his cavernous basement studio in his Tudor mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He was a born tinkerer and a groundbreaker in early digital production.

Addicted to black coffee and cigarettes (he was fiercely antidrugs), he slept during the day and saw little of his family. His second wife, Gail, said, ''Frank did not do love.'' When she was 13, Moon Unit slipped a note under the studio door to ''introduce'' herself and her ideas. The result was the hit song ''Valley Girl,'' a phenomenon when it was released in 1982. Because he thought formal education a waste of time, Zappa took his children out of school at 15 and refused to pay for college.

Painful. But "black coffee and cigarettes" -- that reminds me, I'm in the middle of watching "Coffee and Cigarettes," and liking it very much. I'm up to the scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and I'd only meant to stop for a minute to go see if the Tom Waits fan in the house wanted to watch that scene, and I got sidetracked by my laptop and that Paglia review!

A few things about movies.

"Ray" is still getting a lot of good reviews, but it's not "100% Fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes anymore. I don't have to read many reviews to absorb the basic message: Jamie Foxx is great, Ray Charles was great, but biopics are a drag.

I see "Finding Neverland" seems to be drawing good reviews. I'm glad. Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet are extremely popular in my household.

Three new DVDs arrived in the mail yesterday: "Purple Rain," "Coffee and Cigarettes," and "Super Size Me." I put "Super Size Me" in the DVD player, not because it's the one I'm most interested in, but because I was planning to listen to it from the next room while taking a bath and then watch part of it until I fell asleep, and it seemed to be especially susceptible to that abusive treatment. I noticed that "Super Size Me" -- which turns into a big attack on McDonald's -- starts with a line like "When I was a kid, my mother cooked dinner for the family every night." So the real culprit here is not McDonald's, but all of us non-June-Cleaver mothers. But you can't make a movie against us, so better to switch to a corporate scapegoat.