O Captain, my Captain!

Little did I know when we were recording the most recent podcast that it would become so sadly topical:  today the world mourns the loss of Louis Vincent “Captain Lou Albano” Albano, who passed this morning at the age of 76.

I feel shaken by his death.  We were just talking about the guy.  And I hadn’t so much as thought of him in years.  In years.  And now he’s dead.  It didn’t make any sense.  Oh, I know all about the law of large numbers.  While the odds of me talking about a specific celebrity and having them die shortly thereafter are low, the odds that someone, somewhere in the world will be talking about ANY given celebrity shortly before his death are probably pretty close to one.  So in the grand scheme of things, what happened to me today is not all that strange.  It probably happens to hundreds of people every day, and will probably happen to all of us, if we wait long enough.  But it had never happened to me before.  And it felt weird.  It didn’t make any sense.

That was how I felt today at about 3:00, when I heard the news.  Two hours later, I had an epiphany.  Of course it didn’t make any sense!  This was Captain Lou Albano, often imitated, never duplicated!  NOTHING about his life made any sense.

It's amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you. See ya.

Patrick Swayze’s father was a rodeo clown, and his mother was a dance teacher. His first artistic calling was to the ballet. Is there any greater evidence in popular culture that the artist’s soul transmutes?

The arts is more than learning technique, more than honing craft – artists tune themselves as conduits for the expressions, emotions, energies, sympathies, all the quantifiable and unquantifiable good graces of human existence. By learning one, you are learning all of them – so when at some point somebody comes along, takes away your dance shoes and hands you a surfboard, or a horse to ride, a fake gun to fire, lest we forget – a microphone in a studio, or a potter’s wheel – once you figure out what to do with it, you know how to regard it; you know what it means.

And then maybe somebody gives you back your dancing shoes and a pretty girl to dance with who nobody puts in a corner – and  you become a legend. And then you leave us (sometimes in Spanish) . . .

Patrick Swayze, deeply spiritual artist, pop culture icon, star of stage and screen, has died at 57.

We had the time of our lives, Patrick. And we owe it all to you.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, John Perich, and Jordan Stokes to overthink the tragic ends of Michael Jackson, D.J. AM, Ted Kennedy, and Reading Rainbow.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 61 (MP3)

Guest Overthinker Trevor Siegler shares some personal reflections on the recent celebrity death we haven’t covered.

The passing of Ed McMahon earlier this week actually signaled the end of an era. The sidekick of Johnny Carson for more than thirty years on “The Tonight Show,” McMahon was an easily-caricatured personality mostly because he was just as exaggerated and ebullient as his many imitators. It would be a shame to remember him simply as the man behind the catchphrase “Here’s Johnny,” or as the Human Laugh Machine because of his oft-imitated guffaws at Carson’s jokes. Though he played the straight man (and butt of many jokes) to Carson’s witty wise-cracking host, he was in many ways more of an innovator than his more recognized and feted colleague.

Ed McMahon, in short, is in many ways the common thread for such reality shows as “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent,” and Punk’d,” in that he did it first (and arguably better). In the Eighties, he was not just Johnny’s loyal foil but a host in his own right, helming the shows “Star Search” and “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes.” You can argue about the relative merits of each show (such as whether any real “stars” were discovered or whether already known “stars” like Connie Selleca and Corbin Bernson merited ridicule), but Ed McMahon helped make such formats popular again for television audiences. It’s hard to say that there’s a direct line between Ed and Susan Boyle or Ashton Kutcher, but the debt is hard to miss. 

The greatest recording artist of all time and the dominant fantasy woman of two decades of American life died today, Thursday, June 25, 2009. On the way to their rest, they followed not too far behind the hero of Kung Fu, a man who himself had become enough of a mystery that a great film was built around metacasting him.

I would wish none of their three deaths on my worst enemy. These were not people who died “ripe” in the way of pre-Shakespearean Lear, surrounded by family and friends and comforted that their lives were taken neither cruelly nor too soon. For their reasons, these were ugly deaths. I will not go into further detail on them, but it bears note, because in our day of media saturation, this is a big part of their stories and what these lives, looking back, mean to all of us.

When Bea Arthur passed, I felt I lost someone I knew. As a performer, she connected with people on the level of a cogent internal and external identity. She crafted human characters in a way that reinforced our mutual humility and dignity. Performers often comfort us by shedding light on the mysteries of identity and stitching together the broken parts of our common experience. Watching Bea Arthur act, and hearing she died, made it easy to be human.

Losing Michael Jackson like this, Farrah Fawcett like this, and David Carradine like this does no such thing.

Overthinking It would like to bid farewell to Bea Arthur, who has died at the age of 86 of cancer.

Believe it or not, I’ve wondered from time to time what it would feel like when Bea Arthur died. She’s been playing older women on television since before I was born, but always stern, strong vigorous ones with a humanizing touch of whimsy and joy at living. She never seemed to falter in the face of aging, just as she never stepped off her unique center of gravity on our culture – declining the passivity or ingratiating tendencies associated with so many female character actresses and comediennes, while refusing to disrespect or disregard her own femininity.

As part of her life’s work, Ms. Arthur redefined the boundaries of “womanliness,” and when she’s been a traditional butt of jokes, it’s often been at least in part because people knew her, and her image, could take it. It’s often hard to define where acting falls in the scope of the greater mission of art, but I would say Bea Arthur gives us a great example – she created characters in such a way, uniquely and independently from writing and direction – that she has expanded the sense for our culture of what things mean.

It would be a cruel world indeed if the passing of Ron Silver were to go by without at least some comment from OTI.

So, let us just say that we love Mr. Silver, we especially loved him in Timecop, and we will miss him.

And that I hope* that he finds greater forgiveness and salvation than Skin did, when he meets the big District Attorney in the Sky.

* I cannot ascribe this hope to all OTIers, because some OTIers do not hold out hope for a hereafter, which, regardless of its philosophical merit, is pretty unkind to Ron Silver.

The writer of Man of La Mancha passed away on December 21. However, in accordance with his wishes, his wife didn’t let anyone know until after Christmas, “so as not to spoil anyone’s holiday.”

A little TOO quixotic. And yeah, I really do think.

(By the way, read to the bottom of the article. Turns out before he was a writer, he was a hobo. Yes: a hobo.)

Sorry to once again be the (late) bearer of bad news, but the (late) Bard of Brachiosaurs, Michael Crichton, has died. Barring a mosquito that drank his blood on a beach vacation, then rested on a tree only to be stuck in the sap, trapped in amber, and preserved for millions of years until his DNA is extracted and cloned by intelligent lizard-scientists, the author of Jurassic Park will not give us any more books.

This news came as a surprise — Crichton apparently kept his cancer pretty secret, and he was only 66, but even though he’s a pretty major figure in our culture (at least I think so), he’s not really a celebrity, so I guess the surprise that he had been gravely ill and was no more was in itself not especially surprising.

I mean, everybody’s gotta go sometime, right? And if you’re going to go, better to go, you know, after your medical practice and after your big basketful of bestselling novels have pretty much all been made into generally classy movies of a variety of success ranging from “meh” to (somewhat briefly) “highest grossing movie ever.”

What I’m saying is that he had a good run, and I wish we could all do as much for people as Michael Crichton did.

If I may indulge, a few personal thoughts on Mr. Crichton’s achievements, what he’s meant to me, and why I’m sad to see him go…

From Isaac Hayes’ breakthrough 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, which remains one of the great achievements in American pop music.  If you only know him as Chef from South Park, you owe it to yourselves to give his music a listen.  If you already know his catalog backwards and forwards, you owe it to yourself to listen again.

He will be missed.