In Memoriam

Sep042023

Jimmy Buffett: In Memoriam

When I was 20 years old, my soul was divided between two Jims: Morrison and Buffett. One spoke to my dark brooding side, the other to my romantic, nostalgic nature. Both of them encouraged my budding interest in debauchery, but one was benign and fun, the other destructive and kind of scary. In the end, I sided with Buffett… but not the Parrothead party-tune aspect of his scene, which frankly grew dumber the more of an institution it became. “Come Monday,” “He Went to Paris,” “The Captain and the Kid,” “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” “Last Mango in Paris”… those songs about restless spirits looking for some place to toss out their anchor and the bleary-eyed survivors of the night before… those were the songs that spoke most to me. And they still do.

This one hurts.

May262023

Tina Turner: In Memoriam

I’d been aware of her from the moment she came in and sat down at the end of the bar. Any man with a pulse — and I daresay quite a few women as well — would have been. It wasn’t just the million-dollar legs, or the attitude big enough to fill a room that was empty this deep into the night. It was that smile. I’d seen her flash it at the bartender when she ordered and I knew then I’d make her any drink she wanted.

I tried not to stare, tried to play it cool and just focus on my own drink and my own business, but of course she caught me. I imagine she was used to it, but still, I didn’t want to be a creep, because I imagine she was used to that as well. So I looked away. But it wasn’t long before I wanted to look again. It was like an itch in an inconvenient place that only gets stronger the more you try to ignore it. So finally I risked a glance… and she flashed that smile again, in my direction this time, and I swear that this is what she said, stranger to stranger in some desolate watering hole in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night:

“Well… ain’t we a pair… Raggedy Man?”

(The preceding never happened, in case you’re tempted to think I’m relating a treasured memory. It’s nothing more than a rock-and-roll fantasy that came to mind on an overcast Friday afternoon as I studied a photo that’s going around and which I happen to really like. She did have one hell of a smile, though, didn’t she?)

May122021

In Memoriam: Tawny Kitaen

“She was gonna be an actress
She was gonna be a star
She was gonna shake her ass
on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.”

— Bowling for Soup, “1985”

I don’t know whether you could legitimately say that Tawny Kitaen — who died unexpectedly last weekend at only 59 years old — was any kind of actual star. She was indeed a model and an actress who worked pretty steadily in the ’80s and ’90s, enough for her face to have become familiar, but she never appeared in anything really significant. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a guest shot on Seinfeld as one of Jerry’s never-ending rotation of girlfriends, and she was a series regular on the short-lived attempt to revive WKRP in Cincinnati for the syndication market. (Her character was somewhat analogous to Loni Anderson’s role on the original series, a DJ whose intelligence is constantly underestimated by those around her because of her looks.) Sadly, she was probably as infamous for her domestic problems — she was once arrested and charged with assaulting her second husband, baseball player Chuck Finley — as she was famous for any of her work. Well, aside from those Whitesnake videos that the Bowling for Soup song refers to; for better or worse, doing the splits on the hood of a Jaguar for a heavy metal band really is her claim to fame.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here; it’s not my intention to disparage her. The truth is, Ms. Kitaen’s sudden demise has troubled me far more than I would have expected, and I’m trying to sort out in my own head exactly why. I’m not sure if I feel bad that a woman who had a tumultuous life died relatively young, or if it’s because I associate her so strongly with a particular time and place, and with the person I used to be in that moment, that her death feels like another totem of my youth toppling.

Like most everybody else, I suppose, I first became aware of her in the fall of 1987, when the video for “Here I Go Again” was in heavy rotation. It was my first quarter as a freshman at the University of Utah. I had a screwy schedule those first few months, with a big block of empty time between my morning classes and one that I could only take in the evening. I probably should’ve spent those unscheduled hours studying or writing my first novel or doing something productive, but I had just turned 18 and I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed by life at that that point, so productivity wasn’t really in the cards. I ended up killing most of that free time in the student union, either playing Gauntlet or parked near a giant projection TV that more often than not was set to MTV. I must’ve seen that Whitesnake clip a hundred times in the three-month period before Christmas break. I already knew the song from hearing it on the radio earlier that summer, and I liked it quite a bit — the lonely romanticism of the lyrics appealed to my budding self-image as a brooding loner in the Byronic mold, and I dug the heavy guitar-based sound of it — but the visual element provided by the video, i.e., the gymnastic lady in the flowing white gown… well. That appealed to me on, shall we say, an entirely different level.

She was beautiful, yes, but in an unconventional way that started with a great mass of shaggy red hair that begged to have the wind blowing through it… or your hands buried in it. Her mouth was a bit too large, but her smile was dazzling… and contagious. (She actually presaged the coming of Julia Roberts, who had a similar energy with her mass of unruly red hair and her too-large-but-delicious megawatt smile.) The thing that really struck me about this girl, though, was her eyes in a shot toward the end of the video. She’s now in the car with Whitesnake’s lead singer (and Tawny’s future husband #1) David Coverdale, and she gives the camera a sideways glance as she sings along to the chorus. Her expression is playful and sly, intelligent and forward all at the same time. She knew exactly what she was doing with that expression, and it was sexy as hell. And yes, I developed an instant crush on her. Just like a lot of other young people watching MTV in 1987.

In those days when I had no love interest of my own and desperately wanted one, I dreamed that I might find someone like her (or hell, maybe even the actual her, because if you can’t aim high in your fantasies, where can you?). She became an aspirational figure to my 18-year-old self, a rock-and-roll goddess who felt like someone you might actually know. That image was reinforced by her part on The New WKRP, where I at last heard her voice and learned her name.

Later on, when stories came out about her whaling on Chuck Finley with a high-heeled shoe, she became less aspirational than a cautionary tale. So she was one of the crazy ones, it now seemed, the sort of unstable woman you heard about in skeezy movies that often starred Michael Douglas and that I now most definitely did not want to find. The very energy that had made her so damn sexy a decade earlier had curdled into something dangerous.

A few years after that, there were stories of her struggles with drugs, an arrest for possession and then another for DUI. Rehab, followed by appearances on reality TV, plastic surgery, a face that no longer looked quite like the same person, a downhill trajectory that was all the more depressing for its utter familiarity. We’d seen it before, hadn’t we? Nothing special here, just another fading starlet turned trainwreck. But I am a sentimental slob and seeing my old crush brought low like that stirred up my protective instincts. Whenever I’ve thought about her in the last 15 years — which admittedly hasn’t been too often — I thought I’d like to put my arm around her and somehow make everything all right for her. Condescending? Paternalistic? Yeah, maybe. But I remembered the playful rock-and-roll girl with the megawatt smile and I wanted to somehow put her back together. I don’t apologize for my feelings.

And then… she died.

A rumor went around Twitter on Friday night that something had happened to her, and I felt a pang in my gut. Anne and I had just seen that Whitesnake video a few days prior and I’d wondered what Tawny Kitaen was up to these days. I hoped that her fall from grace hadn’t finally ended in the way those falls so often do: an OD, a suicide, perhaps a body pushed beyond its limit by years of bad choices just… stopping. But there didn’t seem to be any corroboration of the rumor, and if it wasn’t on TMZ, it wasn’t for real right?

Confirmation came Saturday afternoon when I took a break from a landscaping project to glance at social media on my phone. It was true; she was gone. Cause is yet to be determined, but when it is, I won’t be at all surprised if it’s one of the possibilities I just mentioned. Standing there in the yard, leaning on my shovel, I found myself thinking about the warm golden light of a fall afternoon slanting through the wall of windows on the south side of the union, and about the sheltered dark corner where the big TV was set up; I thought about the drama that had been going on at home at the time, how school was an escape for me; and I thought about the endless stream of three-minute musical fantasies that had filled my downtime with dreams of sex and glamour and fast cars and a world where wind and smoke machines made everything look so much cooler than my mundane existence. I thought about being 18 and lonely and, yes, horny, and how anything seemed possible and how it felt like there would always be time for everything. And I thought about a woman only a few years older than myself who I’d always hoped might actually like me if our paths had crossed. A woman for whom time ran out too soon, whose big claim to fame is one of those three-minute fantasies she made decades ago, and I thought about how damned awful it is that life is a process of everything you love gradually diminishing.

And then I put my phone down and went back to work because I had a project to finish, and the daylight was fading. And I found myself humming a song from 17 years ago that’s about missing a time that had been 19 years before that, an unlikely hit from a band with the unlikely name of Bowling for Soup…

Dec062020

In Memoriam: Sean Connery

When I was 20 years old, a friend of mine told me he thought I looked like Sean Connery.

I was flattered, of course. Connery had just been named the “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine — at the age of 59, no less — and who wouldn’t want to be compared to that? Still, I didn’t really believe there was any resemblance, and I said as much. I mean… Connery was Connery, and I was just… well, me.

No, no, my friend insisted, he could definitely see it… something about my dark eyes, the arch of my brows, and the shape of my recently grown beard. Something about my attitude as well, he thought, my gruff intolerance for nonsense combined with a devil-may-care twinkle. I just chuckled at the absurdity of what he was saying. And the more talking points he came up with, the more embarrassed I felt, until I finally conceded his argument just so he would shut the hell up about it. I’ve never responded well to compliments, I’m afraid; I always have this nagging fear that the person giving them is somehow having a laugh at my gullibility.

That feeling is even more intense when the compliment is something I want to believe.

This was the spring of 1990, and Connery had recently become one of my cinematic heroes in almost perfect conjunction with him catching the second wind of his career. He’d won an Oscar three years earlier for The Untouchables, he’d been absolutely sublime as Indiana Jones’ dad the previous summer, and the day my friend made his comparison, The Hunt for Red October was playing to sell-out crowds in the biggest auditorium of the multiplex where I worked. (In fact, the Red October poster was hanging only a few feet from where my friend and I were standing that day, and I remember him nodding toward it as he made his case for the resemblance.)

The funny thing is, I wasn’t even very familiar with Connery’s work at that point. I knew who he was, of course. I’d seen a few of his films over the years besides the trio I just mentioned. But until that one-two-three punch — The Untouchables, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Red October — he hadn’t made a huge impression on me. Not even his James Bond films had struck a chord at that point in my life. I was as likely to think of him as the marshal from Peter Hyams’ High-Noon-in-space film Outland as anything. But starting in 1987, those three films caused something to click for me, and really, for everybody else who was going to movies around that time, making him one of the biggest stars of the moment. And I am not ashamed to admit I developed a bit of a crush on him. Strictly nonsexual, of course, much like George Costanza had for that rock-climber dude on Seinfeld. Like George’s rock-climber, Sean was an ideal I was fascinated by and aspired to. He was just… cool. And yes, having someone say that I reminded them of him, or vice versa, made me glow inside like a belt of single malt.

You see, the spring of 1990 was a low point for me and my ego, something I’ve alluded to a few times recently on this blog. I wasn’t feeling especially cool or confident or sexy that day at the movie theater, or any other day of that difficult year. My friend had inadvertently told me exactly what I wanted — or perhaps needed — to hear. Which is probably why it embarrassed me so much, because I wanted to believe it was true. It wasn’t that I wanted to look like Connery so much as I wanted to be like him. To radiate masculinity and confidence as he did, to be absolutely, effortlessly comfortable in my own skin, as he always appeared to be.

That was the key of his appeal, I believe. Even now, after all these years of calling myself a fan and having seen many, many more of his movies than I had in 1990, I’m not certain if he was actually that fine of an actor, or if I just responded to… him. When you think about it, most of the great movie stars are essentially playing themselves, or at least some carefully curated version of themselves, and that was Connery’s true skill: being Sean Connery. When he turned up at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, that ripple of excitement that zinged through the theater wasn’t because he so perfectly portrayed Richard the Lionhearted in only 30 seconds and a handful of lines; it was because people were excited to see the man himself. Who cared what the role was?

Of course, Connery’s hot streak of the late ’80s and early ’90s couldn’t last. Over the next decade or so, he made (in my opinion) only one really good film (The Russia House), a handful of mediocre ones (Medicine Man, Entrapment, The Rock, Finding Forrester) and two of the absolutely worst flicks I’ve ever seen: The Avengers (no relation to the Marvel film) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The latter was such a trainwreck, both in front of and behind the camera, that it killed Connery’s career. After that, he decided he’d had quite enough of making movies and retired. I’ve long felt sorry that his filmography ends on such a smoldering turd instead of one final triumph. Even a cameo in the much-derided fourth Indiana Jones film, all other things being equal, would’ve been a better note to go out on.

It’s been nearly 20 years since League, and in that time, he’s mostly stayed out of the spotlight. There have been occasional rumors that he wasn’t well, that he was suffering from dementia, and I always cringed at the thought of a man whose entire image was built on vitality fading away like that. His reputation has diminished somewhat as well in the wake of the #metoo movement, thanks to a couple interviews he gave in his younger days that keep bobbing to the surface like rotten apples, and because of claims made by his first wife in her autobiography. I don’t have much to say on that subject; I have no idea if Connery was a raging misogynist in his private life or if his remarks were just badly phrased and taken out of context. And honestly, it doesn’t matter very much to me. Because what he represents to me was never strictly about him anyhow.

That Red October poster now hangs in my office at home, the very same poster from the lobby of the multiplex where I used to work. It’s watched over me for 30 years now, as hard as that is to believe. I look at it every morning when I walk into that room to prepare for my day. I looked at it for a long time on Halloween, just over a month ago, the day that Sean Connery died at the age of 90. And as I looked, I found myself thinking of the roles he played that have mattered to me for one reason or another. Captain Ramius, of course, and Henry Jones Sr., and Malone, the Irish cop who teaches Elliot Ness how to get Capone. Juan Sanchez Villalobos Ramirez from Highlander became hugely important to me just a couple years after 1990. There was Marshal O’Neill in Outland and Edward Pierce in The Great Train Robbery, as nifty a heist film as you’re ever going to find. Hell, I even thought of Zed, the barechested, ponytailed, red-diapered “Exterminator” in John Boorman’s insane 1974 sci-fi epic Zardoz; Connery’s costume in that is all the proof of his self-assuredness you’ll ever need. And of course, there’s Bond. The role that made him, the role he spent years trying to live down. As it happens, I’ve rewatched the entire series over the past year, including the “unofficial” Bond he made in the ’80s, Never Say Never Again, and I can say unequivocally that, in my opinion, Connery was the best of them. His individual films weren’t necessarily the best of the series, but none of the other actors who’ve played 007 ever had a moment like the scene where we first meet him in Doctor No. That will forever be James Bond to me.

Of course, the day that Connery died, I also thought about that spring day in 1990. About how I felt so wounded then, and how I preened at the words of a friend that I only half believed. I’m far more comfortable with myself now than I was then, and I still don’t see much of a resemblance between myself and Connery. But every once in a while when I look at that Red October poster, I find myself still wanting to imagine that maybe… just maybe.

Rest in peace, you Scottish peacock.

Oct262020

Where Eagles Fly

For over 20 years, the rock star Sammy Hagar has celebrated his birthday with an annual concert and party for fans at his nightclub in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. This year, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made the usual festivities impossible, so Sammy came up with an alternative that was arguably better: a pay-per-view performance that anyone could see, not just the lucky few who could make the trip to Cabo. The actual performance was recorded on October 8 on Catalina Island, with Sammy, his current band The Circle, and a couple special guests (Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon and my main man, Rick Springfield) playing on the beach to a socially distanced audience of boaters anchored in the harbor, and then the event was streamed online a week later.

As fate would have it, Sammy’s former bandmate, Eddie Van Halen, passed away two days before the birthday bash concert. Eddie was acknowledged during the show with a moment of silence followed by the Van Halen hit “Right Now.” It was a fitting tribute… but for my money, the better one took place during the rehearsal the night before with a song that didn’t make the final playlist.

“Eagles Fly” was the third single from Sammy’s 1987 solo album I Never Said Goodbye, which was cut in just ten days to fulfill a contractual obligation after he’d already joined Van Halen. Ironically, considering the circumstances of its recording, the album became his highest-charting solo effort, no doubt boosted by the popularity of “Van Hagar” at the time. The big singles from it, “Give to Live” and “Eagles Fly,” both had a similar sound to Sammy’s work with VH and would be integrated into Van Halen’s live shows during the years he spent with them. It also finally came out in 2015 that Eddie had, in fact, played on the studio version of “Eagles.” But even without all those Eddie connections, the overall tone of the song is just perfect for a eulogy: spiritual, yearning, a bit melancholy but also hopeful. I’ve always liked this one. It came out during my freshman year of college, another of those songs I remember from the hours I spent in the student union watching MTV on the big projection TV and also one that resonated with personal issues I was experiencing at the time. All of that history came flooding back as I watched this clip, and I’m not ashamed to admit I got a little teary. Of course, it probably didn’t help that Michael Anthony — the former bassist for Van Halen who now plays with The Circle — was visibly fighting to hold it together.

Ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses and flick your Bics (take it old-school, none of that new-fangled smartphone lighting!)… for Eddie…

Oct062020

In Memoriam: Eddie Van Halen

What I’m about to say might shock my three Loyal Readers, but I’m afraid it’s true: I’ve always been more of a casual Van Halen fan than a true devotee. A “greatest hits” kind of fan, if you take my meaning. I don’t even have a particular preference for the Diamond Dave or Van Hagar eras of the band. I like ’em both. I guess what I’m saying is that, while I always liked Van Halen, I wasn’t deeply invested in them like many of my peers. Even so, hearing this afternoon that Eddie Van Halen, the virtuoso guitar wizard who (along with his brother Alex) was the band’s namesake, had died of throat cancer was like a kick in the gut.

While the band had formed in 1972 and hit the big time in 1978, I was only vaguely aware of them until their biggest single “Jump” reached the charts in early 1984. I was fourteen. I remember seeing the “Jump” clip on Friday Night Videos — it seems like it played on the show every week for months and months — and thinking that Eddie looked like a cocky punk with that smirk of his, while Alex didn’t make much impression at all. David Lee Roth was entertaining in his outrageousness, but honestly the one I was most drawn to was Michael Anthony, the bassist. His style was the closest to my own, and he just struck me as a good guy, someone you’d enjoy hanging out with (in as much as you can tell from a music video). These guys just weren’t cool to me the way somebody like, say, ZZ Top was. I loved the song, though, and its follow-up “I’ll Wait,” and its follow-up “Panama.” I loved them so much that when I finally got the album these songs were coming from, 1984, it was something of a disappointment, as it turned out that I hated half the songs on it as much as I loved the other half. I had that experience again and again as I explored Van Halen’s catalog, both their older work and then the post-1984 era when Sammy Hagar — who I knew from his solo record Three Lock Box — replaced Roth as the band’s lead singer. As it happened, the stuff I didn’t like was almost always the songs where Eddie indulged himself with long solos that I understood were technically impressive, but just tended to irritate me. I much preferred the more radio-friendly tunes where melody dominated over show-off shredding.

However, given enough time, it’s not unusual for things that formerly annoyed you to become familiar, then comfortable, and then sometimes even beloved, and that’s what happened with me and Eddie Van Halen. His music and his sound were so ubiquitous during my coming-of-age years, such an enormous part of the soundtrack of my youth, that I gradually found myself warming to them, coming to understand what he was doing and why it mattered. (I underwent a similar process with Prince, another GenX icon I just didn’t “get” when he was in his prime.)

And then one day, five years ago, I found myself at an outdoor concert venue on a sticky summer night, clapping and screaming along with everyone else as Eddie and Diamond Dave stalked each other on an enormous stage during one of their occasional reunion tours. If I remember correctly, they didn’t finish that tour; tensions between Eddie and Dave tore them apart before the end, just as they had all those years before. I think my city was one of their last stops before it all went south. But whatever happened after they played Salt Lake, the motors were ticking along like clockwork that night at Usana Amphitheater. Eddie was 60 years old at the time. He looked trim and healthy. He looked happy, a handsome man in a plain white shirt whose youthful arrogance and pretension and rock-star bullshit had long ago been burned away by experience. He was an elder statesman in full control of his skills and his instrument, his fingers moving across the strings and frets seemingly without effort, simply a joy to behold.

I’m glad I got the chance to see him at that stage of his life. The band itself may have been past its prime, but it felt like Eddie Van Halen was just coming into his. I’m sorry he’s gone only five years later.

May222020

My Friend Jaren

I didn’t make many friends in college.

It wasn’t because I was antisocial or anything like that. The issue was that I was a commuter student. As soon as I was done with my classes for the day, I was in my little VW Rabbit with the sun roof open, blasting for home 25 miles away. That made it difficult to participate much in campus life or get to know anyone outside of class. Looking back, it’s a huge regret, one of about a hundred things I’d do differently if I had the chance.

Even with that self-imposed obstacle, though, there were a couple people I became close with during my five years at the University of Utah. A guy named Jaren Rencher, for one. He was probably the first friend I made beyond high school. We met our freshman year, way back in the fall of 1987, in a course titled “Intellectual Traditions of the West.” ITW, for short. It was kind of an introduction to philosophy, a survey of all the important thinking — the intellectual traditions, if you will — that have underpinned western civilization over the past 3000 years, everything from Plato to Henry David Thoreau to Sartre and Camus. I loved it, if for no other reason than it felt to me like what college was supposed to be like.

The class was held in a musty brick building on President’s Circle, the oldest part of the university campus, where the trees are all one hundred years old if they’re a day. It looks like Hollywood’s idealized vision of a college campus, a place where Indiana Jones would’ve taught in between expeditions. Our professor for ITW was an eccentric gentleman who favored a 1970s denim leisure suit and wraparound Terminator shades. He showed up on the first day of each academic quarter with his thick white hair closely cropped… and then as far as I could tell, he never cut or combed it again until after finals. Our fellow students were nearly as eccentric as the prof. There were a couple people I’d known in high school. There was the smarmy pale kid who’d already read all the texts and couldn’t wait to demonstrate how much smarter he was than everyone else. There was the brilliant but fragile girl from the small Idaho town who had gray eyes and wore moccasin boots year ’round. I liked her. I liked her a lot.

And there was Jaren.

I can’t remember how he and I became acquainted. The class was a nontraditional affair loosely modeled on the Socratic method; we all sat in a circle and discussed the reading for the week, rather than the prof lecturing and giving quizzes, and it’s possible one of those conversations just carried on outside the classroom. It’s equally likely I spotted him doodling the Starship Enterprise in his notebook margin and thought, “He’s like me!”

Jaren was my first true nerd friend, you see, and I say that with the utmost affection and an admission that I, too, am a colossal nerd. Oh, I’d had plenty of friends before who liked Star Wars and Star Trek and Monty Python and Buckaroo Banzai. But Jaren was different…. he was what we would now call a fanboy, in the best, nontoxic sense of that term, and he allowed me to express my own fanboy tendencies in a way that my earlier crew had not. With Jaren, I could talk about the minutiae of starship design or Klingon culture or whatnot and not worry that he wouldn’t know what I was talking about, or that he was going to think I wasn’t cool. Jaren had read Asimov and Heinlein and Burroughs; he laughed at Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” and he had seen — and liked! — Forbidden Planet. He was the sort who didn’t just play D&D but designed his own dungeons and painted his own miniatures. And yet… he wasn’t that kind of nerd, the unjustifiably arrogant, socially inept Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons type. Indeed, I remember the two of us rolling our eyes at another mutual acquaintance of the nerdish variety who just took it all too damn seriously. There’s a fine line, and unless you’ve ever encountered a CBG type, it’s difficult to explain just where that line is. But he and I were in the same place just this side of it, and the other kid was way the hell over on the other side.

Jaren went with me to my very first Star Trek convention, a one-day affair held at the airport Hilton back when these things were small and simple and most of all inexpensive. I have a photo from that day, the two of us looking impossibly young, both of us baby-faced, both of us clean-shaven — well, aside from the mustache I’d been hopefully encouraging since I was about 13 — and both of us also impossibly happy, giddy even, alongside Nichelle Nichols, the lovely actress who portrayed Uhura on the original series, my first celebrity encounter. I also remember, somewhat incongruously, that Jaren bought a small die-cast version of the Enterprise-D that day, the latest incarnation of the legendary starship as seen on the then-new Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wasn’t too sure about TNG in those days, and I remember mocking him a bit for his treason against the one, true Star Trek.

But you know how these things go. Jaren took a couple years off to go on a mission for the LDS Church, as young Mormon men do, and when he came back to school, we were in different places with our lives. Then I graduated and fell into a midlife crisis while he went on to law school. I lost touch with him. A couple decades slipped away.

Then came Facebook, which for all of its downsides and corrosive, disruptive effects is also in a very real way a small miracle. One idle afternoon as I scrolled through its endless vortex, I happened to think of Jaren and wonder what had become of him. I searched for his name. I found him and sent him a friend request, wondering if he even remembered me, and if so, how did he remember me, as a dick or a good guy or somewhere in between? The usual insecurities brought on by technological reunion. He did remember, and evidently the memory was a good one. We reconnected easily, picking up our old banter and nerdy stream-of-consciousness conversation as if it had never stopped.

We reunited in the flesh at the 2014 iteration of FanX, aka (in those pre-lawsuit days) Salt Lake Comic Con, and I have a photo from that day as well. We’re older and a lot more bedraggled than in the first photo, but no less giddy. I met his wife and family that day, and discovered that he’d managed to inculcate in his kids a love of all the cheesy old stuff that had brought the two of us together years before; I nearly cried when I heard his teenage daughter proclaim that she loved the ’78 Battlestar Galactica and the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who.

Sadly, though, the intervening years between ITW and FanX had also brought Jaren a lot of troubles: financial, career, and most ominously, with his health. I soon discovered that we had diabetes and high blood pressure in common as well as classic sci-fi shows, but in his case, the ‘betes had been a much crueler mistress than to myself. A little over a month ago, he lost his foot and part of a leg to the damn stuff.

I messaged him the night before the surgery, trying to bolster his spirits a little with bad jokes and companionable talk. I promised that, later in the summer, after he had healed and this damn coronavirus pandemic had settled, I’d come get him in my old Galaxie and take him for a ride, just the two of us like it’d been when we were 18 and immortal. I followed that with an animated GIF of the Millennium Falcon launching out of Mos Eisley. He replied with a snippet of dialog: “Chewie… we’re home.” My vision grew watery, and I imagine that somewhere, miles away in a hospital room, his did too.

His surgery went well, as did his rehab. He came home two weeks ago, just in time to welcome his Battlestar-loving daughter home from her LDS mission. All seemed well, and I was looking forward to taking him on that ride, maybe in another month or so.

And then last Saturday, my old college friend, my nerdish comrade-in-arms, a smart, funny, kind-hearted guy who had published a few short stories and never stopped encouraging me to pick up my own pen again… died. At home, surrounded by his family, completely unexpectedly. A phaser-blast out of the blue. He was just shy of 50 years old.

I can only speculate on the cause, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ve spent the last week thinking about him. About the old days in ITW, how we both crushed on the girl in the moccasin boots and on Nichelle Nichols. About the long years we were out of touch, and how many times we talked about getting together since we reconnected, but somehow hadn’t gotten around to it. How I’d hoped to recreate that old photo with him and Nichelle when she appeared at FanX a couple years ago, but again, didn’t manage to make it happen. How I’d promised to take him for that ride. And also, rather incongruously, about that little die-cast Enterprise-D I used to give him hell about. I found myself wondering if he still had it. Is it sitting on his desk or in a bookcase right now? I’ve never been inside his home. And I wonder.

I am grateful that we were able to reconnect at all. But I will forever regret the twenty-five years we lost and my failure to make good on spending real face-to-face time with him once we were in touch again. You all know that story as well, because we all do it and we all regret it when something like this happens. I knew that story, learned that lesson, years ago. Life is short, time is precious, we shouldn’t let those opportunities get away from us. And yet…

And yet.

Just for the sake of posterity, here’s what I wrote on Facebook about an hour after I got the news… my first unfiltered, unedited thoughts:

Jaren K. Rencher, from Intellectual Traditions of the West our freshman year to meeting Nichelle together… from nerdy conversations about Trek and Red Dwarf and Monty Python to middle-aged grumbling about the cards we were dealt… lost for years until the wonder of Facebook and Salt Lake Comic Con put us back in touch… now lost again to the undiscovered country. Save me a place at the tavern, dungeonmaster.

Jan182020

In Memoriam: Stan Kirsch

For most of my twenties, I was well-nigh obsessed with a television show called Highlander: The Series, which was a spin-off from the cult-favorite 1986 film about immortal warriors who live secretly among ordinary humans and can die only if their heads get cut off. If you think that sounds kind of ridiculous, well, I suppose I can’t blame you. I mean, the show is what it is: a relatively low-budget 1990s syndicated fantasy-action series that aired in the wee hours of the night, at least in the Salt Lake market. Looking back now, almost 22 years after the final episode, I have to acknowledge that it would probably be a tough sell to a modern viewer who’s not already a fan. Back in the day, though, I dearly loved it. Yes, I did.

As a young man trying to figure out who I was, I saw the kind of person I wanted to be in many of the show’s characters. Duncan MacLeod, the ancient Scottish Highlander of the title, and his immortal friends were confident, sophisticated, worldly. They traveled and read literature and knew about art and wine and whisky and food. They’d been everywhere and had friends and lovers — and enemies, as well, given the premise of the show — all over the place. They were equally at ease in an elegant chateau or a bare-brick industrial-style loft above a grimy martial-arts dojo. They hung out in a blues bar. They were cool.

And then there was Richie.

The character of Richie Ryan, played by a young actor named Stan Kirsch, was initially a sort of foster child for Duncan, a street kid that the immortal took under his wing and tried to teach how to become a better man. I think Richie was also intended to be a surrogate for the audience, an ordinary person who was naive to the existence of immortals until he chose the wrong home to try to rob, and then was drawn deeper and deeper into their world. Like a lot of young sidekick characters in TV of that era, Richie was occasionally hard to stomach. He was written as a smart aleck and could be something of a dork, and baby-faced Stan was never believably as tough as someone from Richie’s hardscrabble background would likely have been. (Maybe that was the point… a kid who acted like a tough guy and so visibly was not.) My own sense is that the showrunners weren’t quite sure what to do with him beyond a certain point. Richie was eventually revealed to be one of the immortals himself, whereupon he changed from Duncan’s child to an apprentice and then to a friend, if maybe not ever quite a peer. He gradually became less and less of a presence on the show, more a recurring character instead of a regular… and then, in a stunning development that was either audacious or boneheaded depending on your perspective, the character was killed off by Duncan MacLeod himself in the cliffhanger ending of the show’s fifth season.

The death of Richie Ryan divided Highlander fandom as thoroughly as anything that JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson ever did to Star Wars. I had just begun to explore the internet in those days, and I watched in amazement and dismay as the once-inviting Highlander message board I’d been hanging out on deteriorated into a vicious brawl between those who were fine with this latest plot twist and those who simply would not — could not! — accept it. The latter took to calling themselves Clan Denial, and somewhere in some distant corner of the World Wide Web, their cries of anguish and fury are probably still echoing. It was my first taste of the infighting that would eventually infect all fandoms in the internet age.

For my part, I thought killing Richie, at least in the manner in which it was done — i.e., at the hands of his friend, mentor, and father figure — was pretty shitty. I had never been a big partisan for the character so I wasn’t angry enough about it to go Clan Denial, but I didn’t like it, and I do think it was a factor in Highlander‘s rapid decline afterward. The show’s producers had made a mistake, and the abbreviated sixth season felt like it had a cloud hanging over it from the start. Richie — and Stan — returned for the final episode, which was a kind of riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, but, to use the modern parlance, the show had jumped the shark in a major way, and when I think back on the series now, I tend to think of it as ending before that tectonic fracture-point episode in which he was killed.

I realize I’m rambling a bit here… forgive me. I haven’t actually thought about a lot of this stuff in many years, and hearing the news last week that Stan Kirsch had died stirred up a lot of memories. Stan was only 51, just a year older than myself, and even though I was not particularly a fan of Richie — I was always drawn to Duncan, or to the mortal-but-very-cool Joe Dawson — I feel like I’ve lost a major piece of my past. I didn’t identify with Richie, but in some weird way, I find myself identifying with Stan. I just keep coming back to the closeness of our ages. He was the same age I am. And the show was such a huge part of my young adulthood, part of the whole mood and texture of that time in my life. In certain respects, it was more important to me at that time, more influential certainly, than my usual media obsessions, Star Trek and Star Wars. I was already a fan of it before I started dating Anne, but she liked the show as well and watching it together became one of our weekly rituals. I used to record the latest episode on VHS and then take the tape to her house. I remember one night when we ventured online together, possibly for the first time, looking to see if we could find anything related to the show in this new digital frontier we’d been hearing about, and the first thing we ran across was a trove of fanfiction… slash fiction, no less. We were equal parts shocked and amused by that stuff. And we even traveled to Los Angeles together to attend a farewell convention when the show wrapped production… our first convention together. We were pretty naive about the whole con scene at that time, and we utterly failed to meet most of the cast members who were there, including Stan, because we just weren’t sure how it was all supposed to work. We’ve since met Adrian Paul, who played Duncan, a number of times, often enough that I get the impression he actually recognizes our faces. But never Stan. And now we’ll never get that chance, and I feel a true, deep sense of regret about it. I just always assumed there would be time, you know? After all, we were both young enough…

I think what’s really bothering me is the fact that Stan died by suicide. I’ve seen speculation on social media that he may have been ill — some people who saw him at a convention last year say he was very thin — and of course there’s always talk about depression when someone takes their own life. But who really knows? Stan wasn’t in the public eye very much and I honestly don’t know much about him. I know that after Highlander, he guest-starred on several episodes of Friends, as well as NCIS and a couple other TV series. I know that he and his wife started an acting school a few years back and that it was evidently pretty successful. But that’s it, really. I’m sorry I don’t know more, and I’m sorry I never got around to meeting him in person. And when it comes down to it, I’m sorry that something had evidently gone wrong enough in his life or in his head that he ended up in that place.

When Highlander was first on the air, I was young enough that I really did feel immortal. There was plenty of time ahead to figure it all out and to do everything I wanted to do. I imagine Stan Kirsch felt the same way back then. So what the hell happened?

I’m feeling very mortal right now…

Sep142019

Friday Evening Videos: “Think I’m in Love”

Eddie Money died this morning at the not-very-old age of 70. Variety has the most comprehensive obituary I’ve found, if you’d like to know more about him… and I confess, I really didn’t know much.

The truth is, I’ve always sort of taken Eddie for granted. I’ve never owned an album of his, and the one time I saw him live — back around 2000 or thereabouts, along with Styx and REO Speedwagon in one of the first “triple threat” shows I attended — I dismissed him as the worst act of the evening. Looking back, I feel bad about being so snotty.

See, the thing about Eddie Money that I didn’t credit him for 20 years ago is that he was a journeyman entertainer. Not a virtuoso, not a genius, not really at home in the pantheon of flashy, strutting rock-and-roll gods… he was just a hardworking guy from New York who was easy to picture in his former career as a police officer. Dedicated to the job, out there every damn day without fanfare, like somebody in one of those golden-lighted all-American Ford commercials, doing the work to keep the country moving. I appreciate that sort of thing a lot more now than I did when I was younger.

He started logging hit singles in the ’70s, and it’s been startling today while reading the various tributes to him to realize just how many hits he had, and how many of them I’ve liked over the years. I remember singing “Take Me Home Tonight,” his 1986 song with Ronnie Spector of The Ronnettes, during after-school rehearsals for the one and only play I appeared in, and feeling pretty damn superior because I knew who Ronnie Spector was while my fellow castmates thought she was only a backup singer. However, my favorite Money song is from a couple years earlier. “Think I’m in Love” was the first single from Eddie’s 1982 album No Control, and it slams my personal sweetspot hard: guitar heavy; a catchy, propulsive sound; a certain sense of drama but an overall upbeat tone… this is the kind of song that makes me want to put the car windows down and drive faster than I ought to. The song went to 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the video was a staple of MTV’s early playlists.

It is also kind of batshit insane. Which of course all the best early videos were.

Rest in peace, Eddie Money. I’m going to crank this up now and fill the crisp, early fall air with some good rock and roll…

Dec112018

In Memoriam: Melvin Dummar

I’ve just learned of the passing of Melvin Dummar, the one-time Utah gas-station owner who claimed to have run across a hypothermic old man on a cold night in the Nevada desert and given him a lift to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. You all know this story, or at least you ought to, as it truly is the stuff of urban legend: The old man supposedly was Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, and not long after Hughes’ death in 1976, a handwritten will turned up that named Dummar as one of the inheritors of Hughes’ immense fortune, in gratitude for his act of kindness. Sadly, a probate court determined the “Mormon Will” — so-called because it also named the Mormon Church as a beneficiary — was a fake, and Dummar spent the rest of his life drifting from job to job, and place to place, trying to live down his reputation as either one of the most inept forgers in history or a complete crank. He eventually landed in Pahrump, a town on the Nevada/California border not far from Vegas, where he died last Saturday at the age of 74.

I’ve written about Dummar on this blog a number of times. He was something of a legend in these parts when I was a kid… if not exactly a hometown hero, at least a local character. One of ours, if that makes sense. But in addition to the local-interest angle, I’ve always been drawn to tales of the little guy standing up to the establishment, and Dummar’s tale fit perfectly into that category that includes pirates, eccentrics, and renegades of all stripes. The fact that the establishment crushed the little guy in this particular tale only made it all the more compelling for me. And it probably doesn’t hurt that Paul LeMat, the actor who played Dummar in the 1980 film Melvin and Howard, has always reminded me of my dad.

For what it’s worth, I believe Dummar’s story.

Not just that he gave Howard a lift, but I also believe that the Mormon Will was the real deal, likely one of many that Howard produced toward the end of his life as drugs, mental illness, and neglect took their toll on him. I further believe that Hughes’ inner circle of advisors, bodyguards, lawyers, and sycophants took advantage of their boss’ mental condition to fatten their own wallets, that they were responsible for the appalling conditions in which he evidently spent his final years, and that they weren’t about to allow any gas-station attendant from Willard, Utah, to have a slice of their pie. In my opinion, they pulled out all the stops to discredit Dummar and the will, and sadly, Dummar helped them through several naive blunders of his own. This is all far more into the realm of conspiracy theory than I usually like to venture… but it is what I am convinced of. The tale of Melvin Dummar is a tragedy, in my opinion, a rags-to-riches story that would’ve been the end-all, be-all of that genre if it hadn’t been strangled in the crib by a gang of craven villains.

Not that any of it matters now, forty years down the road. And not that we’ll ever really know, since everyone who was there is now dead. I only hope that Melvin Dummar had found some peace of mind in the end.

Howard Hughes and Melvin Dummar, both pictured in their younger days.