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Would you keep me in the trouble loop?
I did not like this afternoon's news that James Earl Jones has died. I had last seen him barnstorming the Depression-era South with the rest of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) as the Josh Gibson equivalent to Billy Dee Williams' Satchel Paige. Thanks to the majority of the minimal TV of my childhood being PBS, I may always think of him as the host of Long Ago and Far Away (1989–92), sitting in his study with its walls of night sky and carefully clicking the shutter on the next incremental adjustment of his own maquette and figurine, that instantly recognizable and deeply beautiful voice resignedly counting off the thousands and thousands of frames left in a stop-motion film. I never saw him on stage. I have yet to see some of the beloved scenes that people are sharing from Matewan (1987) or Conan the Barbarian (1982) or The Great White Hope (1970), which is where my mother first saw him after hearing about his 1964 Othello. When inevitably I was shown Field of Dreams (1989), he and Burt Lancaster were my favorite parts. He was constellation and landscape. I had not wanted Return of the Jedi (1983) to be a memorial rewatch.
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I've never seen his King Lear! I assume he was amazing.
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