Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

[Johann]

Sam Shepard is an American Legend that I really admired. So sad to learn he's died.
He's mainly known as a Playwright, but his acting was Aces, as evidenced by his Oscar-nominated turn in The Right Stuff.
Goodbye Sam.

[Chris Knipp]

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Sam Shepard was an acting teacher, coach, director, and actor. His performances were always convincing. His playwriting was in the vanguard of American theater. Just a remarkable figure of cinema and theater, a cut above. And he was devastatingly handsome, macho, and cool as well. What a guy. It will take more than one obit to cover all his contributions. But take a look at the NYTimes one, they're second to none as we know from a recent doc, Obit.

Theater:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/theater/sam-shepard-dead.html

Style:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/fashion/mens-style/sam-shepard-style-fashion.html?_r=0


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[Johann]

Yes indeed Chris, a tiny obit doesn't do Sam Justice.
A Great American.
A titan of theatre and the Arts.

[Chris Knipp]

Patti Smith writes about Sam (The New Yorker, August 1, 2017)

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Sam Shepard and Patti Smith at the Hotel Chelsea in 1971.
Photograph by David Gahr/Getty

My Buddy
By Patti Smith

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling. But most often he would call from his place in Kentucky, on a cold, still night, when one could hear the stars breathing. Just a late-night phone call out of a blue, as startling as a canvas by Yves Klein; a blue to get lost in, a blue that might lead anywhere. I’d happily awake, stir up some Nescafé and we’d talk about anything. About the emeralds of Cortez, or the white crosses in Flanders Fields, about our kids, or the history of the Kentucky Derby. But mostly we talked about writers and their books. Latin writers. Rudy Wurlitzer. Nabokov. Bruno Schulz.

"Gogol was Ukrainian," he once said, seemingly out of nowhere. Only not just any nowhere, but a sliver of a many-faceted nowhere that, when lifted in a certain light, became a somewhere. I’d pick up the thread, and we’d improvise into dawn, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs.

He sent a message from the mountains of Bolivia, where Mateo Gil was shooting “Blackthorn.” The air was thin up there in the Andes, but he navigated it fine, outlasting, and surely outriding, the younger fellows, saddling up no fewer than five different horses. He said that he would bring me back a serape, a black one with rust-colored stripes. He sang in those mountains by a bonfire, old songs written by broken men in love with their own vanishing nature. Wrapped in blankets, he slept under the stars, adrift on Magellanic Clouds.

Sam liked being on the move. He’d throw a fishing rod or an old acoustic guitar in the back seat of his truck, maybe take a dog, but for sure a notebook, and a pen, and a pile of books. He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work. . .[cont'd]
Read all of it HERE (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/my-buddy-sam-shepard).