A Robin Williams mural that went up in my neighborhood today

Image from i.redditmedia.com and submitted by 2totwo
image showing A Robin Williams mural that went up in my neighborhood today

nobody_likes_soda on September 23rd, 2018 at 21:13 UTC »

You ain't never had a friend like me...   RIP.

SuperSane on September 23rd, 2018 at 21:39 UTC »

(excerpt from Robin Williams’ biography, while preparing for his role in Awakenings)

Oliver Sacks allowed Robin to study the personal film footage he had made while treating encephalitis patients, and Robin found it extremely moving to see these people come out of their catatonic states, even temporarily. As he later said, it was like watching “something that seems apparently dead, but yet the human mind and spirit shines through that. They would be like this”—here he affected the frozen face of one such patient—”and he’d say, ‘Watch,’ and all of a sudden they would come back, and you could see they were there. And then they would go out again. . . . He said he was only going on that faith, that they were there.”

Sacks also brought Robin with him on his rounds at Bronx State Hospital, where he cared for geriatric patients. Though Sacks had previously helped Dustin Hoffman prepare for his role as an autistic savant in Rain Man, he saw Robin as a unique case study unto himself, unlike anyone he’d encountered in the realms of medicine or art. After one hospital visit where he let Robin meet with a group of disturbed patients, Sacks observed afterward, “He had absorbed all the different voices and conversations and held them in his mind with total recall, and now he was reproducing them, or, almost, being possessed by them.” Robin, he said, had an “instant power of apprehension and playback, a power for which ‘mimicry’ is too feeble a word (for they were imitations full of sensitivity, humor, and creativity).”

A few weeks later, Sacks was talking with Robin, having bent himself into a pensive pose, when he noticed that Robin was mirroring his stature. “He was not imitating me; he had become me, in a sense,” Sacks said. “It was like suddenly acquiring a younger twin. This disquieted both of us a bit, and we decided that there needed to be some space between us so that he could create a character of his own—based on me, perhaps, but with a life and personality of its own.”

Sacks could not help but talk about Robin in neurological and somewhat esoteric terms. “Robin has an almost instant access to parts of the mind—dreamlike parts, with phantasmagoric associations—that most of us don’t,” he said. He compared Robin to Theodore Hook, a nineteenth-century British Writer and artist whose talents included the ability to improvise entire operas in which he would sing all the roles. “For Hook, as for Robin, the demand never let up,” Sacks said. “But Hook never had a chance for quiet inwardness—he drank heavily, and he died in his fifties. Robin’s brilliance, however, is considerably controlled. He’s not in its grip.”

TooShiftyForYou on September 23rd, 2018 at 21:44 UTC »

This is in Chicago, the birthplace of Robin Williams