2018 marks 45 years since the death of The Dragon, Bruce Lee. The filmmaker, dancer, philosopher and martial arts pioneer died mysteriously on July 20, 1973. Lee’s death has long been the subject of conspiracy theories ranging from a poisoning by a jealous lover to a mob hit by the Chinese Tong, and the rest of the story of Lee’s rise to super-stardom is as rife with myths and legends as it packed with hard-hitting lessons about racism, struggle and, ultimately, excellence.

One of the reasons we’ve never had a clearer picture of the actual man is because in more than four decades since his passing Lee has never been the subject of an authoritative biography — until now! Bestselling author Matthew Polly joins our Art Fight Podcast this week to talk about his new book Bruce Lee: A Life. We discuss Lee’s mixed Eurasian heritage, his younger years as a child film star and dance champion in Hong Kong, and his rise to international film star and godfather of mixed martial arts.

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I saw a preview of the new screen version of Stephen King’s IT tonight. I’d have to think about it a little more to write a full review as I just got home and I need to stop working for the night and watch some hurricane news which has been really scary. Hurricane Irma is a real life monster bearing down on Florida, but there are plenty of reasons to be wary of going to see IT: it’s very scary, very gory, and even a bit questionable in terms of how far the onscreen violence goes in scenes where little kids are concerned. Obviously the vulnerability of children is a huge part of what makes IT terrifying, but there are at least a few sequences I’d have preferred to keep off-camera.

That said, most of the scares are right on point and feature great set-ups and killer make-up and digital effects. This Pennywise is an amazing monster and I’m sure IT will make a great showing in the technical categories come awards season. But the best part is that this flick is also funny and it features an amazing cast of kids. The masterstroke is that this version of the story only features the kids’ experiences with the monster and not their second confrontation as adults. This splitting of the story makes this condensed version super intense, and this movie is going to be so successful that there is no doubt that there will be a sequel. Get your scary movie season started right away by springing to see this one in the theater. In the meantime here’s Biography’s 2002 take on King and the weird worlds he creates…

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Today I found out that a new Gary Gygax biography just came out this month. Gygax is credited with creating Dungeons & Dragons, giving birth to modern role playing games, and inventing an approach to adventure gaming that has had a massive effect on table top play and video gaming alike.

I still have a warm spot in my heart for the game and the early art that became inseparable from the TSR brand. Of course, I’m also old enough to remember the paranoia and outrage that the game generated with its connections to the occult and the perceived behavior modification that was said to result from kids getting lost in the characters they portrayed in the game.

Today’s spooky Halloween post looks at the all to real terror that was inspired by an odd set of dice, a few painted miniatures and imaginations running wild inside the game and out. Here is a dark, and kind of sad, but nonetheless ridiculously sensational look at the game from a 60 Minutes episode from 1985…

Stay Awake!

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I first heard about Nina Simone while reading Sam Shepard biographies which always mention his working as a busboy at the Village Gate, refilling the diva’s ice water glass during her performances in New York in the 1960′s. It was only years later that I fell under her spell and I still think her take on Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” might actually be the definitive version of what many consider to be his signature song.

Nina was an idiosyncratic piano player and an even more bizarre performer who voiced sexual passion and personal outrage with an often stone-faced countenance that resulted in multi-leveled, nuanced performances that were uniquely her own.

While fans of Simone anxiously await the release of the new documentary about the singer which will be released through Netflix this summer, here is a French production from 1992 that tells the singer’s tale as well as it’s recently been told. Here’s the IMDB…

In this up-close and personal portrait of vocalist and musician Nina Simone, the singer herself and a number of friends, relatives and connaisseurs tell excerpts of her path in music and life. Remarkably, the documentary was able to follow Simone on a visit back to her childhood home, and her mother and siblings are interviewed. Simone also discusses her participation in the civil rights movement and voices opinions that would be controversial then and now. Ultimately, this is a strong portrayal of the pain that was Nina Simone’s. Written by Peter Brandt Nielsen

Ladies and gentelmen, Nina Simone: The Legend…

Stay Awake!

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I read a lot of great books last year, but one of the best was a new biography of cult actor Lance Henriksen. Published by a new Nashville book concern, Not Bad for a Human is a necessary read for Henriksen fans and anyone else who is interested in a fascinating look at how this artist finds his unique characters.

I was asked to review the book for the online art journal ArtNowNashville.com

A Portrait of the Artist on a Book Cover

In the television series Millennium, and in movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Aliens, Hard Target and Dead Man, Lance Henriksen is the bad guy you root for and the good guy you’re afraid to trust. The actor with the deep, gritty voice always brings complexity to cliches when embodying his characters, but never more so than when standing in his own shoes. Henriksen’s new biography is deep and delirious, cracked, crazy and carefully crafted. It’s also one of my favorite books of the year.

On the first page of Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen, the reader is greeted with an illustration of the book’s subject in his most famous big screen role as “Bishop” – the sympathetic android from the film Aliens. He’s pictured here just after one of the eponymous monsters has literally torn him in half – wires and tubes swim from beneath his ribcage, a pool of shiny white liquid spills across the page. The illustration is a fitting beginning to a life story that is simultaneously messy, absurd, painful and iconic.

The actor describes his first 20 years of life as “total chaos.” Abandoned by his dad as a young boy, the actor gave his first performances – claiming he’d traveled with his merchant marine father to exotic locales in Borneo and Fiji. Henriksen’s mother was a waitress who’d survived the Great Depression through charming but humiliating cons. Henriksen describes her as a good woman with real dreams but no skills to realize them. The pair often got by on creative scams with Henriksen cast in the role of the pitiful child. While the actor found real love and warmth among his grandparents and aunts, his stints at orphanages, foster homes and boarding schools found him becoming an illiterate dropout after the 3rd grade.

Henriksen crafted his own understanding of the world in the anonymous silence of movie theaters and in the boundless possibilities of the open road. “A lot of movies from that time told the same story,” Henriksen explains. “A man is born, he marries, he has kids, he dies. I thought ‘I don’t want my life to be like that. I want to live a thousand lifetimes!’” This thirst for experience saw the actor becoming a seasoned hitchhiker while still in his early teens, but it was in acting that Henriksen found the supportive, respectful family he’d always yearned for. Moving to New York, Henriksen embarked on a stage-acting career that found him regularly cast in angry-young-man roles, treading the boards in both New York and Boston and connecting with the community at the Actors Studio. It was the need to memorize scripts that slowly but surely taught the actor how to read.

In Not Bad, Henriksen revisits his first appearances on screen in unforgettable 1970′s films like Dog Day Afternoon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Network. Playing minor characters in major movies, the actor was eager to show more of his chops. This lead to his pursuit of larger roles in small-budget genre films like Damien Omen II and Savage Dawn. The nearly-disastrous shooting of Piranha 2: The Spawning almost cost the actor his life. Instead, he found a close friend in James Cameron – the film’s young director. The connection would eventually bring Henriksen his breakthrough role in Aliens.

Henriksen’s book is penned by writer/filmmaker Joseph Maddrey. Maddrey’s prose is familiar, but focused. He ties up loose ends, creates effortless segues and illuminates Henriksen’s remembering with clarifying context. This frees the actor to ramble in running rants that blast the page with big blocks of separated quotations that are by turns profane and profound – and almost always hilarious. Henriksen’s anecdotes, recollections and revelations are the priceless stuff the book is built around, and this structure finds the actor’s voice coming through loud and clear, allowing the reader to experience Henriksen’s story directly from the man himself.

Laugh out loud funny, Not Bad for a Human manages to be both a poignant biography as well as the blazing-bright documenting of a life lived for art’s sake. While this volume would be a welcome addition to any cinephile’s bookshelf, it should be required reading for beginning actors. Henriksen isn’t giving lessons here, but he is offering a rare, inside-out glimpse at what it means to live the actor’s life.

Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen
Softcover
Author: Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey
ISBN: 978-0983432500
Publisher: Alexander Henriksen Press
Limited Edition Hardcover Publisher: Bloody Pulp Books

Joe Nolan <3