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Linc Stark - Luke Perry.

Started by Sven2, March 05, 2019, 12:13:58 PM

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Sven2

Linc: (to Shaun) You know, I was a grom just like you once, always in the water. Totally stoked 24/7. I felt like I was tapping into something bigger. And I'll tell you, a lot of people can paddle out there and get that rush, but to be able to give them a taste of it just by watching, no, that's something different. And I never had that. Not like you...and your dad...and your grandpa. But I could see that people would pay to see those who could do it. And I made some money. And I made some mistakes. Your dad, Butchie, was one of them. I was young, and he was changing the sport. All I could see was that him being a bad boy was good for business. I thought the image was the thing. What I see now, what it's taken me years to see, is the thing itself–that's the thing. And I don't have to show them any more than that.

Mitch: To get them to buy the thing that you want to sell them.

Linc: Well, what if I'm selling them the thing for itself?
Do no harm

SaveJFC Admin

Work here, Cass.

Sven2

#2
In Praise Of Luke Perry's Quietly Excellent Turn on 'John From Cincinnati'
By Sean Malin
@cinemalins

Mar 7, 2019


If you had never seen Luke Perry before – as I hadn't when David Milch's much-hyped first series after Deadwood, the quasi-Christian surfer epic John From Cincinnati, premiered on HBO in 2007 – you might be shocked to learn that he was not just the profoundly expressive character actor behind one of the show's semi-villains, Linc Stark.

As the greedy owner of Stinkweed USA, a pro-surfing gear company and agency that presaged websites like The Chive, Perry was quietly excellent: unscrupulous and conniving, yet soulful and empathetic, often in the same scene. His Stark was something of a fox in a henhouse, a promoter who ate the souls of his loose-hanging wards, including former surf prodigy Butchie "The Beast" Yost (Brian Van Holt) and Butchie's son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher).

When John From Cincinnati was cancelled after its first season, I was stunned; when Perry was not nominated for an Emmy for his supporting performance (not to take anything away from the wonderful Bruce Greenwood, who was also snubbed), I was angry. The role had turned Perry into both a household name – in my house, at least – and the face of douchebaggery par excellence. To this day, it occurs to me that he went unrewarded for the role simply because people were still shaking off the brain-fry they experienced seeing the sweet, appealing Dylan McKay squeal with avarice as the predatory Linc.

Only after the series ended did I learn that Perry's past work as an actor – Buffy, Beverly Hills, 90210, The Fifth Element – was famous. I was born in the early '90s, too young to watch any of those projects in their time, and can honestly say I'd never heard of him. It was simply by coincidence that the early days of my parents' Sex and The City-inspired HBO subscription coincided with my own late-night exploration; in those years, I'd stumble on little curiosities, Tell Me You Love Me one night and Little Britain USA the next. Those were days of heady, eccentric programming on the network – and John From Cincinnati was emblematic of this new direction (until it wasn't.)

As history has noted, John From Cincinnati was always a peculiar show: slow, ruminative, a little confused tonally. It was a heritage saga and a Christ parable, a place piece and a screed against child labor, a show about the poor and about the wealthy. Even David Milch, its creator, had problems categorizing it: "Ostensibly it is about a family of surfers who seem to have become more and more disassociated from themselves and from good surfing," he told the New York Times.

Perry stood outside of and atop the ensemble. He was not a member of the Yost surfing clan, nor was his stunt casting as successful as, say, that of Ed O'Neill as the quirky bird-owner Bill Jacks. 7 years after the 90210 finale, the role of Stark allowed him to shave off any residual charm he had left on his external character and burn it. If Linc ever smoldered in the show, it was with disappointment and internal fury, never with the seductive warmth that had made Perry famous in the previous decade.

Appropriately, after the HBO show was cancelled a day after airing its first season's finale, Perry became something of an actor reborn. Eulogies continue to mention that he was a teen heartthrob, but in that simple label is a disrespectful omission of the nearly 20-year career Perry had after 90210. Perry was willing to turn the joke on himself in Community and Raising Hope just as he was showing up in dramas produced by Terrence Malick and Mario Van Peebles. One of his final roles will be in Quentin Tarantino's next movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And although I've never seen it, I know that Riverdale was a big success for him, that his career never went the expected places, and that he continued to explore what it meant to be a colossal star right up until his tragic death earlier this week at the age of 52.

Still, he'll forever be remembered first in my mind for bringing John From Cincinnati down from its pedestal of the surrealistically religious into the world of the sublimely human. His face was beginning to weather then and his hair was dyed a chlorine-tinted blonde – the face of a middling surfer gone to seed. But it was a beautiful face, and the one I will always summon when I think of him.

from:
https://decider.com/2019/03/07/luke-perry-john-from-cincinnati-cult-corner/

Do no harm

Sakamotox

It's a very good story. Expressing the insidiousness in conversations

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