Anthony Bourdain's Tribute to Harvey Pekar
A Friend
The Original (Goodbye Splendor)
A few days ago, the city of Cleveland lost a truly great and important
man. And I'm not talking about LeBron James. A hundred years from now,
few--other than a few sports nerds--will remember him as much more
than statistics on a long ago basketball court.
They will, however, remember Harvey Pekar, whose life and works will
surely remain an enduring reference point of late 20th and early 21st
century cultural history. Like those other giants of their eras,
Twain, Whitman, Dos Passos, Kerouac, Kesey, the times he lived in
cannot adequately be remembered without him.
It is true enough to say that he was the "poet laureate of Cleveland"
or to describe his American Splendor as "Homeric", but those
descriptives are still inadequate. He was the perfect man for his
times, straddling...everything: the underground comic revolution of
the 60's, the creation and transformation of the graphic novel,
independent film, television, music (the classic jazz he championed
relentlessly throughout his life).
He was famed as a "curmudgeon", a "crank" and a "misanthrope" yet
found beauty and heroism where few others even bothered to look. In a
post-ironic and post-Seinfeldian universe he was the last romantic--
his work sincere, heartfelt, alternately dead serious and wryly
affectionate. The last man standing to wonder out loud, "what happened
here?"
His continuing compulsion to wonder what's wrong with everybody else
was both source of entertainment and the only position of conscience a
man could take.
After all, Cleveland, the city he lived in and loved, had, he reminded
us, lost half it's population since the 1950s. A place whose great
buildings and bridges and factories had once exemplified 20th century
optimism needed its Harvey Pekar.
"What went wrong here?" is an unpopular question with the type of city
fathers and civic boosters for whom convention centers and pedestrian
malls are the answers to all society's ills but Harvey captured and
chronicled every day what was--and will always be--beautiful about
Cleveland: the still majestic gorgeousness of what once was--the
uniquely quirky charm of what remains, the delightfully offbeat
attitude of those who struggle to go on in a city they love and would
never dream of leaving.
What a two minute overview might depict as a dying, post-industrial
town, Harvey celebrated as a living, breathing, richly textured
society.
A place so incongruously and uniquely...seductive that I often
fantasize about making my home there. Though I've made television all
over the world, often in faraway and "exotic" places, it's the
Cleveland episode that is my favorite--and one about which I am most
proud.
That show was unique among over a hundred others in that everything--
absolutely everything--went perfectly and exactly as planned. Unlike
every other episode, pretty much everything had been "written" (or at
least planned out) in advance: the look, the American Splendor
graphics, destinations, subjects and content. In the middle of a
blizzard in the dead of winter, we got exactly what we were looking
for. We wanted American Splendor and that's what we got.
This is due entirely to Harvey (and the incredible Joyce). Harvey may
have had a reputation as cantankerous, TV-averse and difficult but
from the very first minute he and his family were a delight. They
opened up their lives to us in every way they could. They were exactly
as they appeared in the great graphic novels and in the film--only
warmer and even nicer.
The look, the tone, the sound, the whole feel of the episode that
followed was Harvey's. There was a moment at Sokolowski's I'll always
remember as quintessential Pekar--that perfectly encapsulated the way
we all felt absorbed in to PekarWorld. We'd just finished shooting a
scene with Harvey, Toby Radloff and Michael Ruhlman--and Danielle,
Harvey's daughter, who'd been hanging out off- camera, temporarily
went missing--out of Harvey's watchful gaze. I remember looking at
him, swiveling his head frantically, the very picture of parental
concern and exasperation and actually SEEING comic book curlicues,
exclamation points, question marks and smoke emanating from his head.
He had made the world around him his world. We were--all of us-- just
passing through.
A few great artists come to "own" their territory.
As Joseph Mitchell once owned New York and Zola owned Paris, Harvey
Pekar owned not just Cleveland but all those places in the American
Heartland where people wake up every day, go to work, do the best they
can--and in spite of the vast and overwhelming forces that conspire to
disappoint them--go on, try as best as possible to do right by the
people around them, to attain that most difficult of ideals: to be
"good" people.
"Our man" as Harvey often referred to himself in his work, was a good
man. An important man. A "great American" is an expression that has
been cheapened with over-use, but if these words ever meant anything,
they surely describe Harvey Pekar.
He was great. He was American.
For him to have come from anywhere else would be unthinkable. He will
be remembered. He will be missed.