This isn't like ELLIOTT SMITH dying--he was my imaginary friend, my voice-in-the-headphones, my 'How's it going, man? Yeah, I'll teach you how to craft perfect pop songs out of diminished ninth chords--call me, we'll hang out and have a beer and talk about girls' buddy.

Brando was more like the mysterious, maddeningly beautiful new-girl-in-class that sat alone -- front row, third from the left -- and filled my head between 2:00 and 2:45 during Wednesday afternoon mathematics (or at least while ON THE WATERFRONT was playing), who I always swore I'd find out more about, ask around, discover her favourite ice-cream flavour, the first song that made her cry; all that.

I never did, of course, and now I hear that she's married, living on another continent.

I can't eulogise this guy. I wasn't a 'fan', didn't follow up, take enough notice. All I know is that when I see him in recent interviews half-smiling as if the keeper of some very private, very black joke, declaring -- with the same dying fall in the timbre of his voice as that in the 'contender' speech -- that he never made any great movies, that greatness should be a word reserved for Rembrandt paintings and Mozart chamber music... all I know is that I want to weep.

When I watch him in ON THE WATERFRONT, I oscillate between fearing him-- wanting to be his little brother, have him poke his finger into the chest of some guy twice his size in defence of me, have him school me in becoming a fuckin' man, teach me to tear lightning bolts from the sky and pick my teeth with them-- I oscillate between that and wanting to viscerally hug the bastard. Watching Paul Newman doesn't fuck me up like this. Watching Bogart or Mitchum or even Dean doesn't fuck me up like this. Infuriating blood-spattered sing-song angel-- who do we look to in 2004 for anything even remotely Brando-esque?

Johnny Depp and Sean Penn, essentially. Depp: the young and the beautiful and the Dionysian, yet to be 'punished' in the manner of Keats/Rimbaud/Axl Rose/Brando, chameleonic, obscenely talented, dark-eyed as though silent witness of otherworldly debaucheries by starlight long ago, filled to bursting with an unspeakable ache, APOCALYPSE NOW-ready. Penn: the only other actor I can picture making the 'contender' speech, really making it-- being perpetually about-to-weep and yet guardian of 'thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'.

Enough of this. Music next week...

© Reuben Ham

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