I saw My Own Private Idaho in the theater when it was released back in 1991. I mention this because the seemingly-timeless ‘Idaho simultaneously feels like a movie of its time, and of my time. In the 1990’s Generation X took over the culture: Nirvana, Bill Hicks, Tarantino. Anna Nicole Smith brought back the bombshell, and Ben Stiller had a television show on MTV. Independent movies exploded in the 1990s and a number of homegrown storytellers emerged to spotlight a crop of smart young actors like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Those two looked just like our friends who were leaving college and stepping into a recessed economy where creative young people flourished on strong coffee and clove cigarettes, and decorated themselves in thrift store style. My Own Private Idaho is one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations, it’s a great story about growing up, and I’m reminded of the movie because the 1990s most timeless film screens at midnight on Friday at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville.

My Own Private Idaho came out in September of 1991 at the beginning of my last year in college in Michigan where I was growing my hair long, writing my first newspaper stories and living in an off-campus apartment. On Halloween night in 1993 River Phoenix died at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. He was two months younger than me. I’m a Gemini. He was a Virgo. Generation X is haunted by the Age of Aquarius and it’s inextricably linked to America’s 1960s. A generation of rockers, rebels, hedonists, hellions, and righteous rabble rousers caused our seismic cultural shift after World War II, but Generation X was the result. Manson, Kennedy, MLK, LSD, Mutually Assured Destruction – the 1990s wrapped them in cynicism, side-eyed them with suspicion, and eventually steered the culture from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll toward satire, techno and MDMA. 90 is 60 upside down, and the more things change the more they stay the same. River was our Janis.

My Own Private Idaho tells the stories of two friends from different worlds: Mike (River Phoenix) is searching for his long lost mother. Mike is also the film’s narcoleptic narrator, and the images director Gus Van Sant creates to evoke Mike’s dreamlike reveries are the film’s visual signature. Van Sant is one of our most consistently challenging filmmakers, but ‘Idaho’s many indelible – if ineffable – frames make this movie the auteur’s most poetic. Mike and his friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) are both young prostitutes who live on the streets in the Pacific Northwest. They get picked-up by both men and women, and sometimes sleep in places like abandoned apartment buildings. They belong to an underground network of prostitutes and drug addicts who serve as a freaky foster family of runaways and throwaways. Secretly, Scott has a very different background from Mike and the other street kids, and his story borrows from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV” and “King Henry VI.”

Cinematographers John J. Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards lens some gorgeous pictures here, but ‘Idaho’s quiet beauty is effectively contrasted against the grimy scene that Mike and Scott move through, and the angular, off-beat performances by many of the non-actors cast in the film. At one point Van Sant was planning to shoot his script using only real street kids that he knew in Portland. In the end he cast many of them as Mike and Scott’s fellow hustlers and they help to ground the film’s time-lapse tapestries in a real-feeling milieu of black coffee and blowjobs, cigarettes, sentiments and heartache.

My Own Private Idaho is a love story focused on Mike’s deep alienation and the numbness that results from his drug use and his sleep-inducing condition. Because Mike can’t find his mother and re-connect the fundamental break that defines his sense of himself, he instead simulates something like love with the strangers he engages with for money, and he projects his feelings onto those around him no matter if those feelings are appropriate or reciprocated. My Own Private Idaho is a deep, sometimes surreal vision of complex people with complex feelings trying to negotiate the connections and boundaries that define friends, family and lovers. And it’s also about the damage that can result when those connections and boundaries become confused, constraining or sometimes suddenly severed.

At one point in “King Henry IV,” Shakespeare writes about how people sometimes make decisions to transform themselves. But My Own Private Idaho reminds us that we are forever part of the people we come from, and the film’s final scenes seem to say that life is a but dream, but not a dream we get to choose or one we can wake from.

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Bill Hicks is probably the greatest comedian of Generation X. The only competition for that title might be Chris Rock, and both of them are automatic candidates for any top ten list of all-time-best stand-ups. Yesterday we marked the 23rd anniversary of Hicks’ death from pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994. Of course, Hicks was funny, but, more importantly, he wasn’t afraid to be not funny when making a point about hypocritical politics, the evils of war and racism, the possibilities of higher consciousness. That said, Hicks always had another zinger at hand and his ability to snap from raunchy to real serious and back again was nearly without match — only Carlin might’ve taken the Texan at that kind of quick-draw contest.

Celebrating the man and his amazing body of work, here’s an epic 200 video playlist featuring Hicks’ greatest stand-up specials along with interviews, albums, and documentaries…

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20 years ago, comedian Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer and the greatest comic of his generation disappeared forever. Hicks was working on a new CD when he experienced the first symptoms of the disease that would take his life. That project found Hicks mixing his stand-up with his own musical recordings to create a concept record he described as “my Dark Side of the Moon.” The posthumous release tells the story of the great earthquake that will shear California from the West Coast, creating a new Utopia in Arizona Bay.

In honor of the man and his raging, relentless art here is Arizona Bay in its entirety…

Stay Awake!

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Surfing the web last week, researching the history of Syria and the country’s recent civil war in anticipation of what looked like and inevitable and soon-to-come missile strike on the country by the U.S., I discovered this treasure: A great little YouTube compilation of nearly all of comedian George Carlin’s searingly satirical bits on the hypocrisy of the American government and American culture. A lot of user-edited content on the site is, of course, garbage, but this career-spanning compendium of raving rants and word wizardry by the master is the exception to the rule.

According to Brainfeed.ca’s description of the video:

George Denis Patrick Carlin (May 12, 1937 — June 22, 2008) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, actor, and writer/author who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums. Carlin was noted for his black humor as well as his thoughts on politics, the English language, psychology, religion, and various taboo subjects. Carlin and his “Seven Dirty Words” comedy routine were central to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which a 5–4 decision by the justices affirmed the government’s power to regulate indecent material on the public airwaves.

The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin’s routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. His final HBO special, It’s Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death. In 2004, Carlin placed second on the Comedy Central list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, ahead of Lenny Bruce and behind Richard Pryor. He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decade Johnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

I’m a huge fan of stand-up comedy and as a performer and speaker, I’ve been studying the form for years, attempting to glean some understanding of how performers who take to the stage with nothing but a mic and a head full of stories and opinions can captivate an audience in a way that a loud-ass rock band might envy. I’ve read books, listened to interviews and studied endless numbers of comedy albums and concert films during my self-education. I love Pryor, Bruce, Oswalt, Cosby, Rock, Degeneres, Seinfeld, Galifianakis, Hedberg and Hicks, but, for me, nobody is a brilliant as George. I wonder what he would say about this most recent mess we’ve gotten ourselves into?

Here’s the video:

Who is your favorite comedian? Why? Teach me something I don’t know!

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The Dark Poet

Hicks was a favorite comedian on Letterman’s old Late Night show and the television venue was Hicks’ most consistent national audience. After a routine taping, Hicks left New York expecting to see himself on television that night. He didn’t. Letterman decided to censor Hicks, pulling the performance. The decision was made all the more tragic by Hicks’ untimely death in February, 1994.

In 2009, Letterman showed a lot of class by inviting Hicks’ mother to his new show, taking responsibility for the censorship and apologizing to her and his audience for his decision. He then aired Hicks’ censored performance for the first time.

Hicks has said that the performance had been pulled because he made fun of Pro-Life groups who supported the show. Letterman doesn’t get specific, but what is amazing about the content is that – despite the dated references – the power of the man’s imagery and delivery remains undiminished more than a decade later.

Here is the entire Letterman apology episode brought to you by our YouTube Channel.

As an added bonus, here is what may be Bill Hicks’ last interview. This long, funny chat took place on an Austin, TX public access program shortly before Hicks’ death. He talks about the Letterman censorship, his Counts of the Netherworld television project, the tragedy at Waco and takes calls from a number of viewers.

Enjoy!

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Love,  Joe

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