I liked Synechdoche NY, but it was one of those films that I didn't think I'd get back around to seeing any time soon.

This news doesn't make that decision any easier.

Absolutely gutted by this news.

I have many favorite roles, but for some reason Lester Bangs keeps coming to mind, and I don't even remember what movie it was, just him. Guess I should look it up.

Annie and I stayed at the SeaView Inn three years ago. It's a small 60's style place on Pawley's Island where families book the same week year after year. It's like old home week for friends who go there year after year on the same week, and some of those folks have been going for decades. We booked online and were new to the crowd. When we walked in several of them descended on us...new meat! But it was all good. They just wanted to be the first to welcome us to the fold.

I could go on and on about the people who were there. They all had their story and they were all interesting in the most "interesting" way that quotation marks can indicate. There were artists and stock brokers and actors "wives".

Among the interesting people was a nice looking lady that folks told us was Phillip Seymour Hoffman's wife. She wasn't, as it turns out, They weren't married but she was the mother of his children. They were there, too, all three of them. I remember the two girls, young and cute, and feisty, but I remember Cooper quite well. Cooper was/is the oldest. A heavy set kid, not fat at all, who soaked up every thing you told him and demanded more information at every turn. We talked about the kinds of birds over head and the kinds of shells he brought in from the surf. Most of them I knew the names of but some I didn't and he took it as his personal quest to find out and inform me of his new knowledge.

Hoffman wasn't there because he was on a movie set. "You should have been here last year," folks told us. This is an old old inn with no air conditioning or TV, and the denizens play board games, card games or actually talk with each other in the evenings. There is no TV or internet. Evenings are social times...and so it was. "Be glad Hoffman isn't here," one man told me. "He can't be beat in Charades. He wins every time."

To a person they spoke well of Philip Seymour Hoffman... And he was still alive at the time. We didn't get to meet him. His children, his baby mama, and the nanny, were all quite nice and personable, but I remember and I find myself thinking of Cooper tonight. I lost my Dad in 1961. I was eleven. Cooper was born in 2003 and is almost exactly the same age I was. He has lost his father and life will be very different and sometimes hard from now on. Cooper was a fun little guy, from what time we spent together. I hope he escapes the monkey that rode his father into the grave, and hears every one who tells him what a good person his Dad was. Cooper has all the tools to be whatever he wants to be. I'll be watching. Cooper will have a magnificent body of his father's work to hold close as he comes to understand it. I hope that he can separate the characters from the person who portrays them. I wonder if Philip Seymour Hoffman ever did?

S

Here's the original post from that trip.