Remembering Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs, by Jaan Uhelszki
bangs.jpg (Photo credit: triley60)
That night, after I interviewed Hoffman, I went back to my hotel room and had a dream about Lester, something that happens with some regularity. In every dream, he isn’t dead, but instead has been hiding out somewhere. Waiting. This time, I asked him where he had been. He told me Florida. “I’ve just been waiting for you to get it right,” he told me.
Well, Philip Seymour Hoffman certainly got it right when he played Lester in Almost Famous. And maybe tonight I’ll go to sleep and bump into Lester and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Lou Reed arm wrestling and arguing about whether Jim Morrison is really a drunken buffoon posing as a poet and the Guess Who, who had the courage to actually be drunken buffoons, are the real poets. Or maybe the three of them are the real poets.
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