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‘River Phoenix’s death has startled and depressed everyone I know, even people who had previously dismissed movie stardom as a form of corporate-induced mass hypnosis. About 72 hours after his fatal collapse, a cynical friend and I happened on a recent television interview in which the earnest young actor was laying out his future plans, and we burst into horrified tears. Weird. That’s what we keep saying: Weird that he’s dead; weird that we care so much. Phoenix seems to have been admired by a whole lot of people in relative secrecy- an artist whose work insinuated itself into viewers’s good graces, no matter how faltering its particular vehicle, nor how initially cold-hearted his audience.
‘To wit: As I write this, Hard Copy, hardly a show known for its moral fortitude, is heaping praise on a paparazzi photographer who couldn’t bring himself to document the actor’s dying convulsions. The word on the streets, even in the gossip columns, had always had Phoenix living a pretty honorable and pristine existence relative to the goings-on of his peers- a poetry-reading, vegetarian, open-minded, Democratic life, free of Shannon Doherty’s creepiness, Judd Nelson’s self-destructiveness, Mickey Rourke’s bombast. Occasionally you’d hear about him standing tensely and unsociably on the fringe of some art gallery opening; S/M performer Bob Flanagan, once a member of the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings, remembers Phoenix staggering drunkenly onto the stage during one of their skits. But big deal. He was a kid.
‘Mostly he seemed, if anything, too serious, too incapable of relaxing into a benign mindlessness, even for a minute. In a recent issue of Detour magazine, he positively excoriated many of his fellow actors for being ego-driven, and spoke of wanting to move not just out of L.A., but out of this wretched country entirely. Nonetheless, he did continue to live here, and he did apparently die under the influence of drugs at a trendy local nightspot. So it’s hard to know what to think right now. Death always focuses people, even if the demystification process takes years in some cases. It shouldn’t with Phoenix, since his sincerity and forthrightness have never been in question. Ultimately, barring unforseen revelations, his name, his work, will acquire that particular cult holiness that people naturally create to fill in the blanks around the prematurely taken.
‘Phoenix will be our James Dean, just like so many pundits are predicting. Meanwhile, by default, his fellow “outsider” types like Keanu Reeves, Matt Dillon, et al., are stuck being our Marlon Brando, if they’re lucky. And that’s because actors can’t compete with their fans’ imaginations, and the accomplishments we’ll fantasize for a hypothetical mature Phoenix can’t help but outstrip the potential feats of the bona fide middle-aged Phoenix. Life’s funny, and even a little disgusting, that way. Comparisons between Phoenix and James Dean are lazy, not to mention ubiquitous at this point, though they did share several of the qualities that separate great actors from mere signifiers of glamour. Both were extremely attentive to detail yet seemingly incapable of submerging their actual emotions under an artifical personality.
‘No matter how peripheral Phoenix’s role — the scatterbrained junior hippie in I Love You To Death, the poet/Casanova in The Life and Times of Jimmy Reardon, the loyal, spooked son of Harrison Ford’s megalomaniac in The Mosquito Coast — he was always a little more perceptive and soulful- more real- than anyone else onscreen. Even in as offbeat and dislocated a milieu as the Portland street-hustler scene of My Own Private Idaho, Phoenix’s Mike stood out as unusually lonesome- someone who was afraid of, and simultaneously astonished by, his squalid conditions, who desperately sought affection from others while at the same time avoiding sympathizers like the plague. It was a performance that, like most of Dean’s, seemed to distill the confused melancholy of an emerging generation.
‘Phoenix was the son of hippie parents. He sometimes described his acting style as an attempt to represent how he felt upon trading his family’s blanket humanism for the film industry’s hatred of the unrepentent individual. Actress-performer Ann Magnuson, who co-starred with Phoenix in Jimmy Reardon, once remarked to me with a kind of amazement how solid and unspoiled he seemed even then, in the teen-idol phase of his career. As someone who entered showbiz with her own mixed feelings, she wondered how or even if he’d survive its multifarious forms of corruption. Maybe that very struggle explains why, as he aged, his performances exuded ever more sadness and pointed discomfort. His best recent work found him playing overgrown kids who clung for their lives to youthful notions of a perfect romantic and/or familial love. In a profession that divides its young into marginalized wackos with integrity like Crispin Glover and John Lurie, or hipster sellouts like Christian Slater and Robert Downey, Jr., Phoenix was that once-in-a-decade actor honest enough to connect powerfully with people his own age, and skillful enough to remind members of an older generation of the intensity they’d lost.’ — Dennis Cooper, Spin Magazine, 1993
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Stills
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Further
River Phoenix @ IMDb
‘The Short, Happy Life of River Phoenix’
Rio’s Attic: The River Phoenix Encyclopedia
The River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding
My River Phoenix Collection, a Fanpage
Thew River Phoenix Blog
The River Phoenix Discussion Group
RIVER PHOENIX WAS HERE Documentary Official Website
Book: ‘River Phoenix: A Short Life’
Peter Bogdanovich interviewed about River Phoenix
‘My Love-Hate Relationship with River Phoenix’
The Death of River Phoenix Discussion Forum
River Phoenix Forever, a Spanish Fan Blog
Fuck Yeah River Phoenix
Fuck Year River Phoenix’s Hair
River Phoenix Lovers’ Journal
A Boy Named River Phoenix tumblr
‘A decade without River Phoenix’
‘The Strange Saga of River Phoenix’s Final Film’
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Nonfiction
Interview 1987
Interview 1988
Interview 1991
River Phoenix hometown tour
Trailer: ‘River Phoenix Was Here’, a documentary
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Juvenilia
A young River & Joaquin Phoenix in ”Afterschool Special: Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia”
River Phoenix’s Emotional Performance In ‘Surviving: A Family In Crisis’ (1985)
Very young River Phoenix sings ‘Rock Around the Clock’
River Phoenix in ‘Family Ties’
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Songs for and by
River Phoenix singing ‘Lone Star State of Mine’
Japanther ‘River Phoenix’ (live)
Aleka’s Attic ‘Where I’d Gone’
Panter ‘River Phoenix’
John Frusciante & River Phoenix ‘Height Down’
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Last Interview
A few days before his death, on October 31, in L.A., River Phoenix was interviewed by Premiere Magazine on the set of his last movie, Dark Blood, in Utah. He was 23 years old.
Your movies often contain an important social or political message. Is it a deliberate choice from yours?
River Phoenix: What inspires me first is the quality of the written word and script, and not some strategy. At the time of Mosquito Coast, I didn’t choose my parts yet. I went to a casting and I had the chance to join in such a movie.
Most young actors seem to make more commercial choices than you, is it right?
RP: Maybe some of my movies would have been successful if I hadn’t played in… These commercial stuff, I consider them as a pollution of mind. I don’t want to contaminate my work or my convictions with things that won’t contribute to my growth or to the development of my art.
Generally, how do you deal with a part?
RP: Usually, I write the detailed biography of the character. For me it’s the only possible way. To play a sad scene, many will only for example think of their mother’s death. I consider it’s a mistake for an actor to cross the boundary that separates him from his character. Because then you impose him your own references. That’s why I need to have landmarks that only belong to my character. For example, for My Own Private Idaho I wrote a lot. And once the movie was done, I burned it all.
Why?
RP: Everything was on the screen.
Was this also not to use it again?
RP: That’s right, even if, as an actor, I’m growing richer and learning with each character. And a new character will then be able to raise from this compilation of parts.
You’re vegan?
RP: I’m not eating any animal flesh and I don’t feel having the right to take the soul of any living creature. But the movie character, on his side, belongs to the natural food chain, like Native Americans or Inuit. He’s entitled to live on earth’s natural resources.
Could you describe what you enjoy as an actor?
RP: When you look at the movie history, you realize that there are gaps and missing links. My ultimate goal is to try to give in a competent way a voice to characters who haven’t had the chance to talk yet, those who never expressed themselves so far. Even if I’ve not always been able to do so. For me, the ideal recompense, what really fulfills me, is to create something new. Not only to be original at any cost or to be the first one to do it, but because these blanks need to be filled. Besides, I could play the same character again and again, in a different way each time. As many times as I have atoms in my body.
Are you satisfied with what you’ve achieved at this point in your career?
RP: Honestly, I don’t think this way. I never think of me as an actor. I see all of this as new experiences each time, like as many different lives. As many reincarnations. So when I watch my last movie, I’m unable to judge or to be critical. For me, it’s past, and I don’t feel any connection to it anymore, like if it was somebody else than me that I’m not responsible for. I immersed myself in another life that the character appropriated. He expressed himself through me, not the other way around.
It sounds like you’ve always taken care to separate your private life from your actor’s work.
RP: Absolutely. Quite often, when actors have such a strong charisma in real life, eventually it has to affect the characters they play. For myself I’m not charismatic in that way. I’m not a “performer”. Ideally I would stay mute as River. That’s the reason why, for a long time, I’ve said the opposite of what I really thought. In interviews, I’ve also played to be characters that I wasn’t. I’ve lied and often contradicted myself to dumbfound people. It’s all over now, because I have nothing left to hide. Eventually, I’m quite an ordinary person.
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14 of River Phoenix’s 25 roles
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Marvin J. Chomsky Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985)
‘Robert Kennedy and His Times is a 1985 American television miniseries directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, based on the 1978 Robert F. Kennedy biography of the same name by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’ — Wikipedia
Trailer
River scenes as Robert Kennedy Jr
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Joe Dante Explorers (1985)
‘For the children who watched in darkened theaters as Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix flew through space in a tricked out Tilt-A-Whirl carriage, the 1985 coming-of-age adventure “Explorers” was a defining moviegoing experience. The film is about a group of three boys drawn into deep space by media-loving aliens. The family sci-fi film is still beloved by a dedicated, albeit small, group of fans — those who may find it hard to believe that the cult film remains a sore spot with director Joe Dante. “It’s not a movie I revisit much,” the director told TheWrap during a recent interview, citing the film’s bad reviews and abysmal box office performance. Phoenix wasn’t thrilled about playing a geek, Dante recalled. “For him it was always a performance because he was vehemently not that guy,” he told TheWrap. “When a girl would come by he would always take the glasses off.”’ — The Wrap
Excerpt
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Rob Reiner Stand by Me (1986)
‘Until Stand By Me, the only film River Phoenix had appeared in had been the teen flick Explorers; he had yet to really make his mark. But in Chris Chambers, he was able to exude that tenderness, vulnerability and understated cool he would eventually become known for. In a particularly heart-wrenching scene, Phoenix sits at the trunk of a tree, the campfire flickering in the foreground, and has a breakdown because he thinks he’s worthless. It was a tough one to get right. Director Rob Reiner asked the actor to think of a time when an adult had let him down. “When someone that you really looked up to, and really loved, wasn’t there for you,” he said. The next take, he got it. Reiner never did find out what Phoenix was thinking about. “He kept crying after that scene and I had to go give him a hug. It is a hard scene to play and then snap out of.”’ — collaged
Excerpt
Excerpt
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Peter Weir The Mosquito Coast (1986)
‘The little Foxes are a rosy brood, and Helen Mirren plays archetypal Mother Fox with an eloquent, Meryl Streepish glow. She and the kids — River Phoenix as Charles, Jadrien Steele as Jerry, and kid models Hilary and Rebecca Gordon as the freckly twin girls — form a perfect family tableau. And Conrad Roberts becomes a part of the extended family as the compassionate Creole boatman who ferries the Foxes to their new tropical home. This fantasy family of pliable progeny never challenges Fox’s increasingly dangerous tyranny. Like Fitzcarraldo before him, Fox is transfigured by the tropics, a stranger in a stranger land. Theroux’s theme is handily adopted by Australian director Peter Weir, who works from Paul Shrader’s strange screenplay. Weir, who also directed Ford in Witness, has reworked the theme of cultural alienation time and again in such films as The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Here Weir wrestles with similar notions, but with an uncustomarily comic touch. So Mosquito Coast is stripped of its significance and deteriorates into an epic spoofed.’ — LA Times
Excerpt
Excerpt
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William Richert A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988)
‘In his first starring performance, Phoenix plays Richert’s alter-ego, a middle-class dreamer in an upper-middle-class suburban world of mansions and country clubs and keeping-up appearances. Goodbye centers on Phoenix’s hapless attempts to scrounge up enough money to travel to Hawaii with blueblood girlfriend Salenger instead of following in his dad’s dispiriting footsteps and attending modest McKinley college in the heart of downtown Chicago. Goodbye belongs to the curious literary subset of fictions concerned with what young men do with their penises. I am, as a rule, not a fan of movies or books about brooding young hunks whose overpowering sexuality renders them irresistible to beautiful women. Yet I found it entirely plausible that every woman Phoenix encounters wants to fuck his brains out. There is a sweetness and a vulnerability to Phoenix’s performance that nicely undercuts the locker-room machismo of a guy making a movie about what a stud he was as a young man. Phoenix makes his character’s serial womanizing—in short order, he lapses into romantic clinches with a coffeehouse pick-up, Baxteresque buddy Matthew Perry’s bitchy girlfriend (Ione Skye), Salenger, and lonely older woman Ann Magnuson—seem like part of a noble search for experience and truth rather than a sleazy bid to score as much tail as possible.’ — Nathan Rabin
Trailer
Excerpt
Watch the Director’s Cut of the film here
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Richard Benjamin Little Nikita (1988)
‘Jeffrey Nicolas Grant (River Phoenix), a brash hyperactive high school student lives in a San Diego suburb with his parents, who own a successful garden centre. Keen to fly, he has applied for entry to the Air Force Academy. During a routine background check on Jeff, FBI agent Roy Parmenter (Poitier) finds contradictory information on his parents, making him suspect that all is not as it should be. Further investigations reveal that they may be ‘sleeper’ agents for the Soviet Union with a teenager son, Jeff Nicholas. Unable to arrest them as they haven’t actually done anything yet, Roy continues his investigation, and moves into the house across the street from the Grant family. He warms his way into their confidence.’ — Wikipedia
Trailer
Opening
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Sidney Lumet Running On Empty (1988)
‘In Sidney Lumet’s latest movie, Running on Empty, River Phoenix portrays Danny Pope, a. k. a. “Mike Manfield” and several other fictitious names. He is 17, in a state of emotional hibernation, and a mystery to his teachers. Yet he performs Mozart’s Fantasia, K. 497, well enough to move an entrance jury at the Juilliard School of Music to remark, “You are very talented, you know.” The pianism in the movie was the work of local pianist Gar Berke, who coached Phoenix for six months prior to filming. Berke’s rendition of Mozart is slower, more meditative than traditionally performed, but exudes the melancholy desired. While on camera, Phoenix synchronized his fingers with a prerecorded tape of Berke playing. It is an amazing feat by Phoenix, who until Running on Empty never studied piano and yet manages to keep alive the illusion that he’s actually playing for extended periods of time.’ — LA Times
Excerpt
Excerpt
Running on Empty – Interviews: River Phoenix, Christine Lahti, Judd Hirsch
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Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
‘It was a touch of genius on the part of Steven Spielberg to cast River Phoenix as the young Indiana Jones. The director needed a youthful actor for a clever sequence explaining how our favorite archaeologist got his trademark hat, bullwhip, chin scar, fear of snakes, etc., so he enlisted the 19-year-old Phoenix for the role. The actor was fresh off of Little Nikita and Running on Empty, so it must have been pretty exciting to leap into a beloved adventure series. Mr. Phoenix was quite excellent as the young Indiana Jones, delivering a performance that was half of an homage to Harrison Ford and half just plain ol’ heroic derring-do. It’s a clever and very likable little performance, and one that indicated a little “action hero” potential from the young actor.’ — Scott Weinberg
Excerpt
RP in ‘IJatLC’ documentary
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Lawrence Kasdan I Love You to Death (1990)
‘While the action takes us where we might expect — both to the hospital and to jail — its resolution does not. Joey emerges from his ordeal a changed man and refuses to press charges. “Somebody puts a bullet in your brain, it makes you think.” In reaching for a climactic coming-together, the filmmakers seem quite consciously to be reaching for that Moonstruck feeling. But here Kasdan doesn’t show Norman Jewison’s precision-grip sense of timing and structure. I Love You to Death is both pleasing and baffling. It’s a movie oddly out of touch with itself, simultaneously anarchic and flaccid. You can laugh at it, even love some of it, but just as likely, you’ll slip off to a dreamy world all your own.’ — The Washington Post
Excerpt
Excerpt
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Nancy Savoca Dogfight (1991)
‘River was an absolute pleasure to work with and to be around. He bought a banged up Volvo wagon (his weekly per diem matched my weekly salary!) and chauffeured all his fellow “Bees” and me around town when we had days off. He picked up dinner tabs and made life at the Warwick hotel amusing and unpredictable. One night he and his younger brother, then known to all of us as Leaf (now Joaquin), showed up with motorized toy speedboats that we proceeded to take down to the hotel pool and put to the test. If my memory serves, Rob Lowe was in the vicinity (jacuzzi), dating – and eventually marrying – our makeup woman at the time. River was thoughtful and sweet, not an ounce of territorial actor neurosis, a rare quality. He was also pure as the driven snow, a quality that scrambles like an ant down a drain in a stiff rain in Tinseltown.’ — Lars Beckerman
Trailer
Excerpt
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Gus Van Sant My Own Private Idaho (1991)
‘It’s been 20 years since River Phoenix’s death, and Gus Van Sant’s 1991 road movie My Own Private Idaho is still almost unbearably sad to watch. It isn’t just that Phoenix’s charisma and promise are on full display, though Idaho ranks alongside Running On Empty and Dogfight among his best roles. It’s the way Van Sant’s script leaves Phoenix in a state of constant vulnerability, like a turtle without its shell. At times, his character’s narcolepsy—in which he suddenly, unpredictably falls into a deep sleep—feels like a narrative contrivance, an ongoing deus ex machina calibrated to pivot the story in whatever direction Van Sant decides to take it. But it’s really more a metaphor for a lonely, loveless drifter who has no defense against a world that can take his money, his heart, and his life. Phoenix and his character aren’t one and the same, but they share an openness and sensitivity that’s keenly felt in My Own Private Idaho. They’re prey for a rapacious world.’ — Scott Tobias
Excerpt
Excerpt
‘My Own Private River’: film constructed of ‘Idaho’ outtakes
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Phil Alden Robinson Sneakers (1992)
‘Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) Sneakers is a slightly dated, yet engrossing and humorous thriller about computers, cryptography, espionage, secrets, deception and betrayal. An industrious person could make the argument that this little-known gem – that came and went from theaters without much fanfare in the fall of 1993 – was a sign of things to come! Five techno savvy guys, led by Redford, who has been wanted by the feds since the early 1970s, are called upon to recover a black box that contains an array of computer chips that allow any computer or program to be cracked. This was one of the last films to feature the unbelievably talented River Phoenix, who died of a drug overdose on October 31, 1993, roughly a month or so after the film was released in theaters.’ — collaged
Excerpt/commentary
Excerpt
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Peter Bogdanovich The Thing Called Love (1993)
‘In Phoenix’s first scene, it is obvious he’s in trouble. The rest of the movie only confirms it, making The Thing Called Love a painful experience for anyone who remembers him in good health. He looks ill – thin, sallow, listless. His eyes are directed mostly at the ground. He cannot meet the camera, or the eyes of the other actors. It is sometimes difficult to understand his dialogue. Even worse, there is no energy in the dialogue, no conviction that he cares about what he is saying. Some small part of this performance may possibly have been inspired by Phoenix’s desire to emulate James Dean or the young Brando in their slouchy, mumbly acting styles. And maybe that’s how Bogdanovich and his associates reassured themselves as they saw this performance taking shape. After all, Phoenix came to the project as one of the most promising actors of his generation, and perhaps somehow an inner magic would transmit itself to the film. It does not. The world was shocked when Phoenix overdosed, but the people working on this film should not have been. It is notoriously difficult to get addicts to stop their behavior before they have found their personal bottoms, and so perhaps no one could have saved Phoenix, who was not lucky enough to find a higher bottom than death. But this performance in this movie should have been seen by someone as a cry for help.’ — Roger Ebert
Trailer
Excerpts
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Sam Shepard Silent Tongue (1994)
‘Enough with the Rehashing of how River Phoenix, 23, overdosed on cocaine and heroin last Halloween outside the Viper Room, in L.A. Either Phoenix is reduced to another drug casualty for the just-say-no crowd to duck over, or he’s romanticized into pinup martyrdom – a James Dean for the ’90s. Phoenix’s talent and memory deserve better. He was an actor, an uncommonly gifted one. Evidence of that can be found in Silent Tongue, a haunting tale of love, death and shame in the Old West. It is Phoenix’s penultimate performance: The last film he completed, Peter Bogdanovich’s sweet but silly Thing Called Love, went swiftly to video. Silent Tongue, a mesmerizing mess written and directed by Sam Shepard (no acting this time), is a more apt swan song. It shows Phoenix at his ambitious best.’ — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Trailer
Excerpts
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George Sluizer Dark Blood (2012)
‘Dark Blood is a film directed by George Sluizer, written by Jim Barton, and starring River Phoenix, Judy Davis, and Jonathan Pryce. The film wasn’t completed due to the death of Phoenix shortly before the end of the project and remained unfinished for 19 years. Dark Blood consisted of roughly five weeks of on location shooting in Torrey, Utah and was scheduled to complete three weeks of filming interior scenes in Los Angeles, California on a sound stage. Filming was never completed due to Phoenix’s death on October 31, 1993. Production halted while insurers and financiers tried to determine if the movie could be completed, but with important scenes still needing to be shot the film was abandoned on November 18, 1993. For the 2012 release, these missing scenes were replaced with Sluizer providing narration.’ — collaged
Trailer
Excerpt
the entirety
*
p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Thanks for the tweak. I’ll pore over it. Baudrillard has never been a biggie for me, so this’ll be good to maybe enlarge what I know and think. All the luck needed in the world for your tonight. Being the center of attention is always really stressful, but, when it pays off, the effect is pretty killer. Let me know how it went obviously. politekid’s book is supposedly in the hands of my concierge, so I’m about to go bug him for the handover. ** _Black_Acrylic, In that late 60s period, you really could be an eccentric stylist with a pop song and wind up top ten. Nowadays if you do more than tweak the formula a little, you’re doomed to cult status. Amazing about Monday. Man, that’s such good news. I hope the place is as accommodating and fruitful as your imagination needs. Yay. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Right? And he was still performing his stuff complete with intact falsetto into his eighties, mostly in Vegas, of course. Happy weekend, Tosh. ** Carsten, AC is still considered a luxury here, but I think the French are starting to wise up. Okay, yeah, major understanding about trying to time your trip here when the summer is acting normal. It does act normal here occasionally for four or five days spurts. Yes, I haven’t seen you in a billion years, man. Will be great whenever it happens. The sound of the World Cup broadcast is basically the muzak of Paris right now. Cool head is a challenge, but I do like a tough challenge. You too. ** Steve, I think the World Cup is perhaps unusually (?) vis-a-vis the US a big deal in LA, and not just because it’s partly happening there. Or so I’m informed. The heat is the deciding factor in my weekend plans of course. I was going to go to a reading last night at After8, but that place boils inside when it’s hot, so skip. Today is supposed to be the ‘cool’ day meaning it’ll only be 94 degrees, so maybe I’ll risk venturing around. ** laura w, Yeah, Paris used to be famous for magically evading EU heatwaves and staying weirdly fresh, but apparently not anymore. People here are literally panicking. It’s trippy. And awful. I did see ‘Obsession’. I liked it. I didn’t like it as much as ‘Backrooms’ because it’s more kind of a better than usual horror-adjacent movie as opposed to a kind of weird film that happens to be horror adjacent, but I thought it was pretty smart and well done. I totally get why it’s exciting filmgoers. You liked it, right? ** HaRpEr //, Lou Christie is kind of a minor visionary in the formulaic pop song genre, I think. Or a bull in its china shop. I think ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ would be a perfect album if it didn’t have ‘Mind Gardens’ on it. I would say the Byrds’ weirdest and arguably best album is ‘Notorious Byrd Brothers’ maybe. I should get that complete Sarah Kane book. Noted. Yeah, she’s really something. ** Laura, Have fun. With LC. My shitty AC is saving my life or at least brain so far, so I’m nothing but admiring of it. Acceptable, yes. Me, I want an igloo with an ice machine inside it. ** Caesar, Hi. I am overheated but okay. No, the heatwave is still in its infancy. It’s going to get much worse starting on Sunday or Monday, they predict. I would kill for winter. Almost literally. RT isn’t a genre film. I think people who haven’t seen it mistakenly guess it’s a horror film, but it’s really not a horror film at all. The new film is going to be even less genre though. Hopefully people will have a hard time describing it in a word or two. Wow, crazy about the one day sell out! That’s wild. Uh, I don’t think I really have a type, or maybe I mean I don’t know if I could create a description of what my type is if I have one. I think my novel’s have a type, but my novels are just a piece of me. Do you have a type? Enjoy not being excessively heated this weekend. ** Right. I thought I would let you luxuriate in the performances and being of River Phoenix this weekend. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 
Funny I always thought of RP as being exactly the DC “type”, but maybe not.
The bad news is that Scotland were beaten last night by Morocco who are a majorly good team. That leaves us needing snookers = being 1 of the 8 best 3rd-placed teams, but you’d need a degree in maths, statistics and clairvoyance to know what other results are best. Or we could just beat Brazil which would change everything again.
@laura w: Glad to hear my shameless attempt at self-promotion tickled you. I suck at that. I wish I could just create & the universe would do the rest. But the times are ugly & we poets gotta hustle.
@DC: I guess this is as good a time as any to admit that I never got what the big deal was with River Phoenix. Is it cause I’m straight?
Among his “outsider” peers I always preferred Mickey Rourke & Matt Dillon. And I do get the cult of James Dean, but I guess with River I have a blind spot.
I got invited over for the world cup tonight, so I’ll be watching that with my neighbors. Germany vs. Côte d’Ivoire. Silently rooting for the latter. Call me a traitor to my people, I don’t care, haha…
I’m curious: where do people cool off in Paris? You can’t swim in the Seine, right? In Munich the main river (Isar) has a couple of spots with calm, shallow riverbeds that people do swim in. Plus a bunch of lakes near the outskirts of town. Here, close to Malaga, the beaches are packed these days. But I prefer the tranquility of the pool.
Hi Dennis,
Be still, my heart! I saw the thumbnail teaser for this post on Facebook and ran straight here. I got into River’s work a couple years ago (likely thru Stand By Me) when I was fresh into undergrad, and he’s stuck with me ever since. Such a tremendous talent, and so heartbreaking how his life ended. I haven’t read that final interview until now, quite somber knowing what was to come.
A couple of standout performances to me; Running On Empty, of course. The fact he was playing the correct notes of the piano was a lovely touch, since most actors don’t even try to make it look like what they’re miming is correct. Too bad they dubbed over him in the final cut, I’m sure he would have played the tunes just fine.
My Own Private Idaho and Dogfight are such polar opposites in terms of character, and he just nails them. I also love how ambiguously written the endings both are. I’ve never actually seen Jimmy Reardon, but know of its infamy within his filmography. Thanks for linking to the director’s cut, perhaps I’ll give it a watch later tonight. This is probably such a silly comparison since I’m seeing the still out of context, but that picture of River as Jimmy Reardon, laying amongst the tall grass kinda gives me vibes of the third vignette from Like Cattle Towards Glow.
You have to wonder what would have been, had things not gone the way they did … it seems like he really wanted his band to take off. I wonder if he would’ve eventually stepped away from acting to pursue that deeper. I spoke to his sister, Rain, once over the phone about Aleka’s Attic and a few other projects they were involved in together at the time. She is a real gem. Oh, I could just go on and on. He’s one of the very few people I will shamelessly gush about. Thank you for this!
Hope you are doing well, and curious to hear about what you’ve been up to. I’m still chipping away at music stuff, in the spare moments I have for it. I’ve also been working at the local public library for a few months now and am really enjoying it. Funnily enough, one of the books I was checking in this morning was a series of essays on Punk and the 1980s Culture Wars – there was a rather lengthy write-up about your early poems / projects in one section of the text. Is it strange to you when people write about your work from that analytical / social commentary lens? I suppose it depends on their overall intention.
Talk again soon!
Good to see this day again, Dennis. I might have mentioned I saw My Own Private Idaho again in January on a big screen. River Phoenix’s performance is still amazing.
Saw the new Gregg Araki yesterday. It’s very funny and clever. Olivia Wilde’s performance is excellent.
Hope this heat passes Paris soon…
Bill
you saw the new Araki, so jel! <3
hi Dennis!
ah River… mostly impossible mushy lusty love of every teenage bisexual =) My Own Private Idaho still makes me messy and clearly he should have died hereafter. your piece about him was great. i try to think of him in character and sort of narcoleptic bc then he can sort of be Schrödinger’s guy <3
early Lou Christie’s got me! ty! ^_^ Lightnin Strikes, what a fuckboy lol. wishing loads of fafo on the guy in that song, like i hope his trusty girl fucked his dad and all of his brothers and his mate w the bigger body count and his boyfriend on the side too… Rhapsody in the Rain is just a great song, and it also makes me happy it came out way back when, bc man the angels were telling him to fuck on, you get it. he had to. honestly i was in at Two Faces Have I, it meant more than he said didn’t it. any way i’m v into that wah wah sound of like the first teenagers™️ ever, what’s not to love. wish you could still be a bit of a weirdo to public acclaim lol.
uh got Sam Farhi’s book in the post today and i’m having a v good time, he’s great.
kissing, petting your manuscript etc. hope it does smth.
aren’t igloos super warm on the inside? idt that’s what we want rn, maybe one of those olden, super high-roofed arabian houses to suck up the heat lol
still need writing chasers for in between my chapters, ugh, tell me to write about licking stamps at this point and i will. srsly prompt meee
<33
Did you ever interview Phoenix?
I still need to catch up with your Lou Christie Day.
I caught Gustavo Vinagre and Vincius Coutho’s THE PASSION ACCORDING TO GHB yesterday and quite liked it. Vinagre’s films tends to mix documentary and amateur porn, sometimes with sci-fi/fantasy elements. This one takes place during a chemsex party, except that the drugs are invisible. (But the sex is real.) In the final scene, it shifts into reality, with a harrowing interview with a man struggling with meth addiction.
The day before, I caught a much different film about addiction, Ross McElwee’s REMAKE, which is equally strong. The year in film looks better than it did just a week ago.
Well, the top line is it went really well, and everything after this first paragraph is just me letting my neuroses run their course. The vibe was really good, the turnout was pretty good (James said really good for a debut with zero name pull), the physical space did exactly what I wanted, the music was expectation-exceedingly great, everyone seriously clicked with Tadhg and Charlotte’s material. I think we made a sufficient point of not doing what I wanted to make a point of not doing. I felt very happy. It probably helped when I got ambushed with a bouquet of flowers. All of it depended on the generosity of some people who are extremely dear to me and I hope they feel like they got something from it too or at least got a big whiff of my gratitude re: their existence.
The crowd was mostly a mix of my and James’s friends, and people from the performance and weird/thumpy music worlds. There weren’t many ‘book people,’ but I guess I had a penny drop about the fact that I’ve been hanging myself on the approval of this strata of people whose work I tend (there are definitely exceptions) to find uninteresting at best, and whose attitude to their and others’ work I often find dystopian. I feel a little done with that now.
Obviously all my high-flying conceptual whatever probably fell by the wayside, which doesn’t detract from anything, and probably the fact that we maybe-hopefully cradled a special and earnest vibe is more important anyway. But I guess I keep drifting towards seeing things in terms of different in degree versus different in kind. Or, like, continuums and imagining a clean break. I think that I can be a very credulous person. Maybe what I want is to be able to infect other people with that credulity. Maybe I’m secretly more of an idealist than you. Well, I guess you’re an optimist, not an idealist. But I still feel like there’s this screaming conflict between the literary and the social, and like there has to be some way to explode that which leaves everyone going, oh, that’s bleak, that’s right.
This whole writing thing feels very real now.
Hey Dennis, hope you’re well. River Phoenix is definitely cute, and seems weirdly considered from his interviews. I feel like the only person alive who doesn’t find younger people dying more tragic than older people dying. I saw Stand by Me, that anecdote about him crying for a reason he never revealed is so :-(. This feels like a very good memorial. Hope you’re well. Love from here.
god! river phoenix! predictably he’s one of those actors whose movies i will watch any time i unearth one. the first movie i saw him in was stand by me, one of those films that far outstrips the novel (would be curious to know which films you think that about btw- i also feel that way about the princess bride which makes me wonder if rob reiner as a director just has the magic touch or if he picks suitably mediocre novels to make into great cinema, as it’s a lot harder to make a great novel in great cinema imo). those kid actors were unreal.
fun river phoenix fact: he was originally supposed to be in interview with the vampire but died before filming started. that’s why christian slater is in that movie doing his best river phoenix. slightly funny.
my phavorite river phoenix film is predictably my own private idaho. beautiful film. later i watched mysterious skin and began to formulate a theory about 1990s-early 2000s gay movies and their obsession with casting a blond lead and a brunet lead. and the blond is either crazy and/or innocent and the brunet is either world-weary and/or evil.
i haven’t seen obsession yet, but the friends of mine who have really liked it.
hope your weekend was great! i’m off to find a truly evil book.
Hi Dennis! Sorry been in the mountains, will be back in the city for good (or at least for about a fortnight) on Friday. Been very adventurous. Got bitten by a snake, which was thrilling. Tell you all about it later. The blog’s been interesting because there’s been no network so I’ve kinda just walked along the mountainside till it loads, but images basically never do so it’s a much more textual experience. One can, of course, visualise River Phoenix. Hoping this comment reaches you.
Hey, hope you survived the heat this weekend. ‘Mind Gardens’ is very contentious, yes. There’s better ‘Revolver’ adjacent tape loop experiments on the album. It for sure seems like a copy rather than the ‘real thing’. ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ is probably their best, I agree, but I have a real thing in particular for that early kind of psychedelic pop that still includes nice baroque touches. ‘Odessey and Oracle’, for example.
Ah, River. ‘My Own Private Idaho’ took apart my mind forever when I saw it first as a teenager. The performances across the board, and how fascinatingly stilted the dialogue seems in its modernised Shakespeare, and all of the freeze frames and how serene it is and how spaced out and distant River is when he delivers his lines.
I first watched it right after seeing ‘Fox and his Friends’, and to this day I’m certain that Gus Van Sant took the ending from that (being robbed while unconscious).
Anyway R.P. is one of the few actors that I’ll watch in absolutely anything. There’s a really good video online btw of him interviewing hustlers in preparation for ‘MOPI’. Viewable here if anyone is curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYPaTeeS_jA
Anyway, I’m very excited because I think my novel is very nearly done. I’ve been working on parts of it intermittently for four years but only in this exact form for one. I have that feeling where I know that I’m basically done with it since all of the adjustments I’m making are just changing words and bits of punctuation here and there. I’m very happy with it after spending some time away from it, and am praying that publishers agree.
Hey there Dennis! Hope all is well for you
Seeing River Phoenix today arose this memory in me. When I was 10, there was a night where I was supposed to be sleeping at my nan’s place. My dad lived there at the time. In the middle of the night, he wakes up me and my brother and says that we need to leave the house. His partner is outside and the four of us walk up the street to her place. I was wearing a Kermit onesie whilst being carried on my dad’s lap. My brother wore a Cookie Monster one, and was more overtly confused about what was happening.
We ended up at my dad’s partner’s house, and it was about 3am. By that point, our eyes were dead shot, and we weren’t going to sleep again any time soon. We sat together in the living room, and he asks us if we’d like to watch a film. The only options were the Wayans brothers movie Little Man and Stand by Me. We chose the second option.
It’s fascinating to me because I feel like I associated River Phoenix with this state of lucidity that has hardly much to do with who he was or the performances he carried out. Rather, I remember my dad pointing out who he was, the fact that he died young, and the proclamation that he was special. I remember trying to figure out that speciality, but then gave up as I chose to surrender my attention to the film. The tree sequence of him crying stuck out to me, for his character is wishing to be somewhere else where he is perceived with less ambiguity. There’s a power to that which resonates with my emotionally disarmed state. When the film ended, I remember lying to sleep in a room that didn’t have a curtain. I stared outside and thought about the group of friends in Stand by Me finding something miraculous in the back garden. Perhaps a severed hand or something less definable. I wasn’t in a place I could call home, and back then I was a lot less secure in myself than I am now.
Today I just arrived in Brussels to see Hugo. The travel was somewhat manageable, and I was fortunate to see my partner for a bit just before I left. We live in different ends in the UK, and London is the closest place that we can meet each other. Today has been a really nice first impression of Brussels. I visited a smoke shop and tried these edible lollies. They weren’t great, but it was fun to try something new. We stayed in and watched some movies, including a rewatch of The Sixth Sense. I have a conflicting relationship to Shyamalan in the sense that the work I’m often drawn to the most from him are his lesser well received works. My favourite of his films is The Village, and I’m one of the few that finds merit in Lady in the Water. I suppose I’m fascinated with his engagement with youthful perspectives and how they can act as a guiding force on their own. It’s a consistent element I see in films that I find an appeal in.
Not sure what we’re going to do tomorrow, but I’m excited for what’s to come. Wish you a nice start to the week ^w^