The Long Goodbye
Marlowe is then hired by Eileen Wade, who asks him to find her missing husband Roger Wade, an alcoholic novelist with writer's block whose macho, Hemingway-like persona is proving self-destructive, resulting in days-long disappearances from their Malibu Colony home. While investigating Eileen's missing husband, Marlowe visits the subculture of private detoxification clinics for rich alcoholics and drug addicts. He locates and recovers Roger and learns that the Wades knew the Lennoxes socially, and suspects that there is more to Lennox's suicide and Sylvia's murder. Marlowe later incurs the wrath of gangster Marty Augustine, who wants money returned that Lennox was sent to deliver to Mexico City, and threatens Marlowe by maiming his own mistress.
The Long Goodbye
Brackett says her first draft was too long, and she shortened it, but the ending was inconclusive.[21] She had Marlowe shooting Terry Lennox.[24] Altman conceived of the film as a satire and made several changes to the script, like having Roger Wade commit suicide and having Marty Augustine smash a Coke bottle across his girlfriend's face.[24] Altman said, "it was supposed to get the attention of the audience and remind them that, in spite of Marlowe, there is a real world out there, and it is a violent world".[25]
Numerous contemporary reviews complained of Altman's handling of the noir genre and Gould's portrayal of Marlowe. Time magazine's Jay Cocks wrote, "Altman's lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire".[40] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times found the film "quite sleek, marvelously and inventively photographed ... The problem is that the Altman-Brackett Marlowe, played by Elliott Gould, is an untidy, unshaven, semiliterate, dim-wit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper and would be refused service at a hot dog stand. He is not Chandler's Marlowe, or mine, and I can't find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can't be sure who will."[41] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film "is not a movie version of the Chandler mystery that anyone with a liking for Chandler could possibly enjoy ... If you are not prepared to shuffle along from scene to pointless, protracted scene with klutzy old Elliott, there will be little to occupy your time or offset your annoyance."[42]
The novel opens outside a club in Los Angeles called the Dancers. It is late October or early November; no year is given, but internal evidence and the publication date of the novel places it between 1950 and 1952. Philip Marlowe meets a drunk named Terry Lennox, who has scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship over the next few months, having drinks, especially gimlets, together at bars. In June, Lennox shows up late one night at Marlowe's home in "a great deal of trouble" and needing a ride to the airport across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Marlowe agrees as long as Lennox does not tell him any details of why he is running. He later finds $500 left to him by Terry.
Marlowe removes and reads the pages, finding a cryptic self-analysis by Wade which hints at repressed trauma he doesn't quite understand alongside a clear statement that once a good man died" for him. Marlowe keeps this evidence. He hears a shot upstairs and rushes up to find the couple struggling over a gun in Roger's bedroom, the bullet having gone harmlessly into the ceiling. Marlowe sits with Roger until the latter has taken some sleeping pills. As he is leaving, a distraught half-naked Eileen enters a sort of trance and attempts to seduce Marlowe, thinking him to be a former lover of hers who died in the Second World War. Marlowe refuses with difficulty and crashes on the couch downstairs, getting completely drunk so that he passes out instead of being tempted to go back to Eileen's room. The Wades' houseboy Candy makes threats against Marlowe. The next morning Eileen behaves normally and Marlowe leaves.
Marlowe refuses to let the story lie, and when the authorities decide to forgo an inquest because it will show them up, he steals a photostat of Eileen's confession from the police. Marlowe contacts a reporter he knows in order to make sure the confession is printed, even though the reporter warns him that he'll make numerous enemies by doing so. Marlowe replies that he has been trying to say goodbye to Terry Lennox for "a long, long time." A few days later Marlowe is assaulted by Menendez, who is then arrested by Ohls in a setup. Ohls explains that Marlowe was intentionally left in a position to steal a photostat because the police wanted to trap Menendez in a felony, and Ohls knew that Marlowe's scruples and stubbornness would lead him to do the best he could to clear Lennox's name.
Later, Marlowe is visited by a Mexican man who claims to have been present when Lennox was killed in his hotel room. Marlowe listens to his story but rejects it and offers his own version, ending with the revelation the Mexican man is none other than Lennox himself, who has had cosmetic surgery. Lennox attempts to make amends for the trouble he has caused Marlowe but is rebuffed. While Marlowe claims that while he doesn't judge him for what he did, he returns the $5,000 bill and says Lennox is "not here anymore." Lennox is hurt by this and leaves after saying goodbye. The novel ends with Marlowe listening to Lennox leave and faintly hoping he might return but instead explaining that he never saw him again.
Gagarin and Wheeler took up the challenge and embed complex electronica into the multi-faceted landscape. Peter Jørgens' outré percussion adds a tribal dimension while guitarists Moliné and Temple along with clarinetist Darryl Boon complete this unique fusion of techno meets trad rock meets... the avant garage.
Butler: In the mid-twentieth century there was an explosion of postwar inventiveness: dialysis, the respirator, the ventilator, the defibrillator, the pacemaker. We invented a panoply of devices that both prevented sudden death and in some instances literally brought people back to life. But when we eliminated sudden death, we also eliminated natural death, and we lost the distinction between saving a life and prolonging a dying.
Butler: Palliative care is for anyone with a chronic, incurable illness. It focuses on improving the quality of your remaining life, whether you have one year to live or fifty, and whether or not you choose to receive life-prolonging treatments. It offers practical aid and addresses how your disease is interfering with activities that give your life meaning for you.
Hospice offers the same benefits as palliative care but is more oriented toward the final passage to death. But Medicare pays for hospice only if you promise to forgo all life-prolonging treatments. And you can qualify only in your last six months of life.
Then comes active dying, which can last anywhere from three to ten days or even longer. You want to have hospice to help your whole family adjust to the coming death and make it as comfortable and as meaningful as it can be.
Likewise, I can think of no greater gift to give a dying parent or spouse than to put him or her on the pathway to a peaceful and timely death free of unnecessary suffering, even if this means opposing the advice of doctors or having intense discussions with other family members. For many people the best death is still a home death. And getting on the pathway to a home death means facing the fact that death is coming long before it knocks on the door. It means bringing in palliative care and then hospice. Otherwise you may find yourself calling 911 in a panic, which means a trip to the ER and often the ICU.
In hospice they talk about the five things you should say to a dying loved one: thank you, I love you, please forgive me, I forgive you, and goodbye. The good news is that you can start saying the first four anytime.
Seven years ago, at the age of seventy-nine, my mom was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease, a rare side effect of cardiac medications. She had already endured many surgeries to prolong her life. She submitted to a lung biopsy only under the condition that she not be put on a ventilator.
My wife and I are entering our retirement years and beginning to contemplate our own long goodbyes. We have living wills with medical directives, but I am also making copies of the Katy Butler interview to send to all three of our children.
Although The Long Goodbye: Live at Madison Square Garden isn't LCD Soundsystem's only live recording, it is easily their most definitive. Recorded during their farewell show, the album captures the band's final performance in its entirety, leaving nothing out as James Murphy and company play their way to early retirement. The celebratory energy of the explosive opening track, "Dance Yrself Clean," makes it clear that this show is meant to be a party and not a wake, and to that end LCD Soundsystem spend the next three hours working their way through their incredible back catalog, delivering everything from their iconic first single, "Losing My Edge," to the sprawling "45:33." While no one likes to see a great band call it quits, fans couldn't ask for a better goodbye than one that gives them the chance to relive the band's final show whenever they want, making The Long Goodbye an essential buy for hardcore fans of the now-defunct dance-punk outfit.
It would be another year before Matt and I managed to schedule a reading in Philly to confirm my suspicions that I was on the right track, then three more until, in October 2018, a production of the new draft went into rehearsal at Theatre Exile. Even then it took watching rehearsal room run-throughs, another bout of rewriting, and attending a preview and another performance near the end of the run to further evaluate and refine the new sections and at long last determine the ultimate fate of that meta-theatrical disruption (I turned it into an optional appendix). 041b061a72