Meet me on the road, meet me where I said

It don't think it matters if you've never watched an episode of Six Feet Under in your life. Whether you've seen six episodes or sixty. If you've lived a life at all, don't watch this clip without expecting to cry. Fair warning.

Every time, right around the 4:41 mark, I start to lose it, and I usually don't get it back.

copyright Jill Butler, Ampersandology

This Day in History: Charlie Chaplin is born.

This Day in History

April 16th, 1889: Charlie Chaplin is Born.

Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was born on this day in 1889 in East Street, London, to an alcoholic father and unstable mother. Both parents worked as entertainers in the musical hall tradition, his father being a singer and his mother working as an actress. But the only enduring parent in his life would be his mother, as his parents separated when little Charlie was three.

Chaplin's mother, Lilly, had always been unstable, but saw a rapid series of downturns in her life that cracked her already fragile mental landscape. Her voice gave out around 1894, and, facing a crowd of violent booing crowds, a panicked Lilly fled the stage, leaving five year old Charlie to soothe the crowd with popular songs.

In and out of asylums, mother Lilly was finally admitted to the Cane Hill Asylum, leaving her two boys (Charles had a half-brother, Sydney) to the workhouses of South London. The Chaplin boys, staying together so they wouldn't fall apart, found themselves drawn to the music halls at a young age. Chaplin eventually emigrated to America, first travelling with Fred Karno's slapstick troupe and then falling into the burgeoning film industry in still-untamed badlands of California.

The debut of Charlie Chaplin as modern audiences know him was in 1914, in Chaplin's second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice. This was the debut of his Little Tramp costume, but this signature look seems like more of a divine accident than any great artistic statement. At least at first: the costume was pieced together in the initial days of shooting from the leftovers in wardrobe. But Chaplin definitely emerged with the Tramp intact as a character; he said of the outfit he "wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large."

From the word go, you can see the influence of Chaplin's youthful poverty in his films in the walking contradiction of the Tramp persona: a vagrant with dignity, a street urchin with a keener sense of refinement than the rich men who laughed at him. It was a sly dig then, but today we can see the Tramp as a clear neon sign: Chaplin was suggesting the richest members of our society weren't necessarily always the ones who pockets were stuffed.

Many Chaplin biographies delve into the rich tangle of Charlie Chaplin better than I could in this limited space (among them adorably designed Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey, by Simon Louvish and AJ Marriot's Chaplin Stage By Stage). But I will say this. To watch Chaplin is to observe a living social equation in his prime. He brought depth and pathos to slapstick comedy. 

This IS Charlie Chaplin: 

Robert Flaherty used to tell the story of one of these times: 'It was a
rainy winter night. Charlie, who was about eleven, had no place to sleep and was
sheltering under an overhanging roof. A solid-looking man came by, took a look
at the boy, and asked him what he was doing there.

Charlie told his story.

The man stroked his chin for a moment and said, "Well, I've a bit to eat at
my place. I've only one room, but you're welcome to stay the night if you don't
mind sleeping on the floor." They went to the man's furnished room, where
Charlie slept on a pallet at the foot of his host's bed.

Next morning when he woke, the man had gone, but Charlie found a note
saying, "If you've no place to sleep tonight, come here." Charlie had to avail
himself of his friend's help for many nights, but always in the morning the man
had gone to his work.

Charlie became curious about what that work might be. One morning he
managed to wake early. The man was taking out of the closet and measuring in his
hands a long, strong rope with a noose at the end of it.

He was the common hangman.'

Out of such experiences came the greatest comedian in the world.

-From Griffith and Mayers' The Movies. Reprinted from Self-Styled Siren.  

But in the interest of full disclosure: I've always preferred Buster Keaton.

...

The son of Sylvia Plath has committed suicide. 

If this weren't so sad, there would be something cosmically unnerving about this. 

Whatever he's selling, I'll take five.

No one has any business being this beautiful.

I Come Here to Praise Fast Eddie, Not to Bury Him

"For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble."

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

The story begins as many stories do; I met him in the countryside. I was staying in a quiet cabin nestled in the middle of the woods, at least two zip codes away from civilization. The cabin belonged to my grandfather, and my twelfth year was still hovering threateningly on the horizon (given that year 12 is the one I recognize as changing it all). The night was long and sticky, hollowed out by a day’s worth of diversion, and the isolation from even the closest of our neighbors left us with nothing to do. Admittedly, it was probably his insertion into what had been a dull night that’s made the memory so crystalline for me, even years later.

It was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and it was the worst television reception in the history of the medium. Seriously. In fact, I’m pretty sure the generator gave out somewhere before Big Daddy’s last speech and left me staring at a blank screen. It was CBC, and it was years beyond my maturity level, so I didn’t grasp what the hell was going on, for the most part. I was still operating on a Lion-King = good, anything else = bad level of quality assurance. So the nuances of the film fell on deaf ears, never mind the subtext (which they skate over in the film anyway, but that’s something I do on my own: Brick? Gay? Nah, not with those arms). So the film itself was something less than remarkable for me, with one exception. I remembered that man.

Maybe a leap for an eleven year old to make, to stamp a handsome face with a sexual buzz based on nothing more than a fuzzy television reception. He probably stole my heart that night, even if I didn’t know it at the time. In the following years, this moment had created what can be called a buzz around the name Paul Newman. Still, nothing crystallized for me until years later. Caught up in my adolescent cinephilia, hopelessly childlike in my single-minded devotion, I was gulping down the AFI 100 in fives, a list which, to the uninformed, is the logical starting point in an education of cinema (to the informed: it is not). I was rounding the Westerns of the list, something which I hated then and still hate now. It was for that reason that I came to meet the Paul Newman that would define my preoccupation; otherwise, would I have ever picked up Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Doubtful.

After I’d seen that…forget about it. No way, no how, was anyone ever replacing Paul for me. He was The Movie Star, the one face that would be pinned to my inner teenager’s bedroom wall forever, provided that my inner teen was trapped in the early 1960s. He was the Charmer, with that rapier wit, that good-natured bravado—all packaged with the assurance that, no matter what the role, there was a good man underneath the trappings. He was the Good Ol’ Boy, all impish humor and Southern sass. And, I only found this out by accident, after I was done drooling over those electric blue peepers, he was a Great Actor, distracting his audience with his tangible charms while he slipped in one thoughtful, controlled performance after another.

Today’s a sad day. Long live ol’ blue eyes and the forever graceful.

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

originally published Saturday, September 27, 2008