"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Wrote C.S. Lewis, quoted by David French, in "Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being 'Never Trump'" (NYT).

That's a free-access link, so you can see for yourself what 4 lessons French learned.

But I liked the C.S. Lewis quote in the abstract. It's so abstract! The "highest reality," eh?

And now, this blog has a theme today: reality. This is only the second post of the day, but the first post was about a NYT column called "Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality?"

Is there a sense — at the NYT and elsewhere — that reality is at stake, that it's out there, eluding us, and we need to struggle to get a grip on it, and we are losing?

I am reminded of Trump's saying — on the Joe Rogan podcast — that when he became President, "it was very surreal." But: "When I got shot, it wasn't surreal. That should have been surreal. When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew exactly where I was hit.... I knew exactly what happened.... With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience.... And all of a sudden I'm standing in the White House, and it was very, very surreal...."

I am reminded of Elon Musk's "There's no truer test than courage under fire."

And: "Reality, what a concept!"

"I thought Robin hated me. He had a habit of making a ton of jokes on set. At 18, I found that incredibly irritating."

"He wouldn’t stop and I wouldn’t laugh at anything he did.... There was this scene in the film ['Dead Poets Society'] when he makes me spontaneously make up a poem in front of the class. He made this joke at the end of it, saying that he found me intimidating. I thought it was a joke. As I get older, I realize there is something intimidating about young people’s earnestness, their intensity. It is intimidating – to be the person they think you are. Robin was that for me."

Said Ethan Hawke, quoted in "Ethan Hawke on Richard Linklater Transcendentalism Project, Politicization of Pandemic in U.S." (Variety). Robin = Robin Williams. 

I clicked on that because I was interested in Richard Linklater's "transcendentalism project." It seems that Linklater is writing a screenplay about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their friends. As Hawke puts it: "They were the first leaders of the abolition movement; they were vegetarians; they fought for women’s rights. Rick is obsessed with how their ideas are still very radical. This could be a super cool movie and Rick is writing it right now." But Variety adds that Linklater "has been working on a movie about Transcendentalism since 1999, according to an interview in The New Yorker in 2014."

From the New Yorker article:

I suspect Scott Adams asked this question because he believed he was actually the first, but...

2012: https://t.co/dRe28WJR6r

— Christina Martin (@CMM123) September 12, 2020

Robin Williams didn't tweet it. But he said it very well.https://t.co/PtdK8C4HV7

— L (@SomeBitchIKnow) September 12, 2020

https://t.co/SHLCTWKNDj

— L Hamlin (@walkingfree) September 12, 2020

Trailer for the new HBO documentary about Robin Williams.

A little oppressive to happen upon this in a week of 2 celebrity suicides...

"Then Wolf Blitzer says: '63 is so young!' And then I looked up with a little hope, because I'm about the same age as Robin."

"And then I realized: '63 is so young' is a phrase you never hear relative to anything but death. '63 is so young to be playing in the NFL'? There's nothing!"

Said Garry Shandling, who died yesterday — so young! — at 66.

And, here, Marc Maron just reposted — out from behind the pay wall — the interview he did with Garry Shandling in May 2011.

Jon Stewart, we're told, flipped out when the one black writer on "The Daily Show" criticized him for using a "Kingfish"-type voice to make fun of Herman Cain.

Wyatt Cenac was the only black writer on "The Daily Show" back in 2011, when Jon Stewart took to mocking the various GOP presidential candidates, including Herman Cain. In an interview with Marc Maron, Cenac said:

"Oh no, you just did this and you didn’t think about it. It was just the voice that came into your head. And so it bugged me.... I've got to be honest, and I just spoke from my place... I wasn’t here when it all happened. I was in a hotel. And I cringed a little bit. It bothered me.... [Stewart] got incredibly defensive. I remember he was like, What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice. I was like, 'There’s no tone. It bothered me. It sounded like Kingfish.'"

That is, Kingfish, the old Amos 'n' Andy character.

According to Cenac, Stewart "got upset... stood up and he was just like, 'Fuck off. I’m done with you.' And he just started screaming that to me. And he screamed it a few times. 'Fuck off! I’m done with you.' And he stormed out. And I didn’t know if I had been fired." Cenac went outside and "I was shaking, and I just sat there by myself on the bleachers and fucking cried. And it’s a sad thing. That’s how I feel. That’s how I feel in this job. I feel alone."

ADDED: I hadn't finished listening to the podcast when I wrote this post, but now I have. It's important to recognize that Wyatt Cenac came across over the course of an hour-plus interview as a very unhappy man. When he was a kid, his father was murdered. He is estranged from his mother, who, based on his description, seems mentally ill. He avoids any contact with her and feels that she's been like a "stalker" in his life. Marc Maron told him that he has "a chip on your shoulder."

The material about Jon Stewart must be understood in this context. Look at what Cenac said in the interview. It does not reveal how Cenac expressed himself, other than that he used the "Kingfish" comparison. We can gather that Cenac perseverated on the subject and felt that, as the only black person on the writing staff, he had to represent black people and not let them down. That is, he seemed powered by righteous energy, and it sounds as though, after he was listened to, he just kept going, insisting that a bit they wanted to do should be dropped.

How long did that go on? Stewart did listen and was respectful up to a point, a point at which he snapped. I wish I could see a full transcript. I suspect, based on listening to over an hour of a very revealing interview, that Cenac tried everyone's patience, had some heavy psychological issues, and that he had to be squelched as they worked on the material for their daily show. I think they did have some empathy for Cenac and they respected his voice. That comes across in even in Cenac's subjective version of the story. But they could not give him the power to veto sketches and to drag down all the energy as they faced a deadline.

Here's the segment that Cenac wanted to stop them from airing. In it, you hear the original mocking of Cain, Fox News's use of it to portray Stewart as racist (and Fox News said "Amos and Andy" before Cenac arrived at his opinion), and Stewart's response, which was a whole big jumble of old clips of him doing various voices (including Jewish, Italian, Mexican, German, Donald Trump, and gay):

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

ALSO: Based on the interview, it's hard to believe that Cenac has a career in comedy. He wasn't funny and didn't try to be funny. Recently, I listened to the Marc Maron's interview with Robin Williams, which was recorded less than 4 months before Williams killed himself. Williams was far more upbeat than Cenac and made many funny observations. I don't remember Cenac saying anything even faintly amusing.

Hostile Christmas negativity at its Hollywood worst.

Here's Robin Williams in the mean old man role in "Merry Friggin' Christmas." They must have counted on and intended to exploit Williams's long-term reputation as madcap and lovable, but now his suicide looms over every non-life-affirming line:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

I'm sure the film ends life-affirmingly, since there's no sign that this Hollywood product is anything but cynically formulaic. I'd rather watch a melodrama about an old actor who decides to make a movie like "Merry Friggin' Christmas" — because it's his best offer at the time — and agonizes over how to go on living. Something more like...

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

"What To Expect From The Emmy Awards’ Robin Williams Tribute."

What is the TV material other than "Mork & Mindy"?

There are 6 things at the link, but not including the pre-"Mork & Mindy" material — from "Laugh-In" and "The Richard Pryor Show" — that I embedded on the original "Robin Williams has died" post.

"When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind."

"I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not. I no longer take this person seriously. I may be able to appreciate what he or she did artistically but it’s impossible to feel bad for them. Their life wasn’t cut short — it was purposely abandoned. It’s hard to feel bad when the person did what they wanted to. It sucks they are gone, of course, but it’s the decision they made. I have to respect it and move on."

That's not the only point Henry Rollins makes in "Fuck Suicide." My son John focused on one of the other points over at Facebook, where I'm participating in the comments. I'm choosing to focus on this because it made me reflect on the way I feel when artists who have spoken to me kill themselves. Unless they are in the final throes of a fatal illness, their suicide reveals something about the mind that gave rise to the art, and it infuses that art with different meaning.

"Robin... was afraid Bobby [De Niro] was going to blow him off the screen."

"I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’ So it was my job to keep Robin from being funny. We had a shorthand signal for when he got a little flamboyant, improvising," said Penny Marshall, the director of "Awakenings."

She curled her fingers tight and dropped the fist to her groin: “It meant ‘More balls.’ ”

"With the lights out, it's less dangerous... I feel stupid and contagious...."

An old song lyric evoked by the new headline "The Science Behind Suicide Contagion."

Publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly and definitively linked to a subsequent increase in suicide, especially among young people. Analysis suggests that at least 5 percent of youth suicides are influenced by contagion....

There’s a particularly strong effect from celebrity suicides....The idea is to avoid emphasizing or glamorizing suicide, or to make it seem like a simple or inevitable solution for people who are at risk. 

I've noticed, in the coverage of the Robin Williams suicide, a grasping onto the belief that he felt compelled: He couldn't help it. That's comforting for survivors, and with some celebrities, everyone feels like a survivor, but it unwittingly sends the message to those who feel drawn to suicide that it's hopeless and that if you succumb, you won't be blamed; in fact, you will have made a profound statement of the magnitude of your pain, and it will fill the survivors with love and understanding (as opposed to the new load of problems and questions that you've created and escaped).

The end of the linked article — which I read after linking to the old Nirvana tune — discusses the Kurt Cobain suicide. It "bucked the pattern" — suicides decreased —  assertedly because journalists were careful to adhere to suicide prevention guidelines. There is no mention of the impact of the uniquely dramatic public performance of Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, reading his suicide letter out loud and interspersing her outraged commentary: 

I don't really think it takes away his dignity to read this considering that it's addressed to most of you. He's such an asshole. I want you all to say 'asshole' really loud.... God! You asshole.... And I'm laying in our bed, and I'm really sorry. And I feel the same way you do. I'm really sorry you guys. I don't know what I could have done. I wish I'd been here. I wish I hadn't listened to other people, but I did. Every night I've been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and think it's him because his body's sort of the same. And I have to go now. Just tell him he's a fucker, OK? Just say "fucker." "You're a fucker." And that you love him.

"I was aware too that this burbling and manic man-child that I watched on the box on my Nan’s front room floor... struggled with mental illness and addiction."

"The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.... Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt. What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was?... That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore?"

Wrote Russell Brand.

ADDED: Brand is an interesting (if purple) writer. I like the verb "burble," and had just used it myself, before reading this, in a comment on an earlier post: "Hate speech. When is it cool and cute and something to burble about?"

AND: "The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/Came whiffling through the tulgey wood/And burbled as it came!"

"My favorite photos of family are framed in my house, not posted on social media, and they‘ll remain there."

"My family has always been private about our time spent together. It was our way of keeping one thing that was ours, with a man we shared with an entire world. But now that's gone, and I feel stripped bare."

"It is tempting to just whine about how Hollywood is so risk-averse that they will reboot or sequalize any remotely familiar 1980′s/1990′s property they can find."

"But these announcements never fail to make me a little sad. The stench in the air isn’t greed or fear of the new, but rather a token amount of desperation."

From an April 18, 2014 Forbes article titled: "Robin Williams Making 'Mrs. Doubtfire 2' Should Make Us Sad."

"He could go anywhere in the world — and stay in the best hotel..."

"... and he chose to go where anyone can go — and take a flier on the accommodations."

I say, in a comment at Facebook.

Robin Williams has died.

And they are saying "suspected suicide"!

ADDED: This is very sad. He's exactly my age, and I remember how much we loved him in the 1970s. The first comedy album I ever bought was "Reality... What a Concept."



AND: First appearance on the "Tonight" show, 1981:



AND: Here he is, again with Johnny, 10 years later:

"The Academy was simply asking for trouble by giving extra attention to [Cory] Monteith and not Larry Hagman and Jack Klugman."

"Yes, you could argue that it’s not clear where you draw the line. Do you stop after Klugman while eschewing names like Charles Durning, Annette Funicello or Bonnie Franklin? Maybe, maybe not."

What is clear is where you don’t draw the line. You don’t draw it where it leaves out two actors who were major TV stars across the decades. Frankly, though Monteith became a target, I’m not sure you include [Jonathan] Winters in a special Emmy memory before Hagman and Klugman, and I say that as a big fan of Winters and someone who didn’t watch “Dallas.”...

In particular, based on how important Hagman was to CBS, thanks to “Dallas,” his exclusion really is inexplicable. More than one person has wondered whether Winters’ link to Robin Williams, whose new CBS series debuts this week, was the reason that Winters got the nod.

Man, this is just an ugly conversation.

Death and commerce... is it really that ugly?

"You may be amazed at the lack of finger-wagging or reminders that acid was illegal and perhaps bad for you."

The Nation is surprised that the NYT had nothing but fun with the old story of Dock Ellis pitching a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

If it seems almost routine to throw a no-hitter now, then consider one that was not.

Forty years ago, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates raised the degree of difficulty to new, well, heights. He threw a no-hitter with Richard M. Nixon calling balls and strikes and Jimi Hendrix, wielding a Fender Stratocaster instead of a Louisville Slugger, digging in at home plate.

Or at least that is what he thought while pitching under the influence of LSD.

Who knows what really happened, but it's Ellis's own voice that's the soundtrack of this animation by James Blagden:



And here's the Robin Williams interpretation:

When did Bruce Springsteen start looking like Robert De Niro?

Oh, strangely De Niro was there too. And Obama, of course. Obama said De Niro had "emotional audacity." I love when the Prez uses his own buzzwords to praise other people.

And why wasn't Robin Williams there? Because Springsteen appears to be wearing Mork from Orc suspenders.