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My Own Private Idaho – River Phoenix doesn’t just act – he drifts, aches, and unravels… and now we know that it was real

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My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Promotional still (1991)

Scott: I only have sex with a guy for money.

Mike: Yeah, I know.

Scott: And two guys can’t love each other.

Mike: Yeah.

Mike: Well, I don’t know. I mean… I mean, for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it… I love you, and… you don’t pay me.

Scott: Mike…

Mike: I really wanna kiss you, man… Well goodnight, man… I love you though… You know that… I do love you.

***

Watched ‘My Own Private Idaho’ for the first time. Charlie asked me if I’d seen Keanu Reeves recently because he looked old. But he was 61-years-old. River Phoenix still looks exactly the same… but that was how he left things. I remembered that I’d mentioned Phoenix before… but in one of my stories, he had appeared as a ghost. 

It wasn’t going to be called ‘My Own Private Idaho’… better than ‘Blue Funk’ or ‘Minions of the Moon’… and named after a B-52s song. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays… Prince Hal and Hotspur and Falstaff… but here it was Scott Favor, privileged bisexual, Mike Waters, narcoleptic gay hustler searching for his mother, and Bob Pigeon, coke-dealing chickenhawk. Gus Van Sant: “My films are usually about relationships. I think you make films about things you lack.”

I can’t stop thinking about River Phoenix because, I guess, I’m in love with yet another dead man.

1987… “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” – River Phoenix.

1989… Star burning bright. Beautiful. Lightness. Creative. Camera object.

1991… Indie moment. ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Realism to fantasy. Challenging the norm. Self-destructive attitudes. Dark themes. Cool culture. Downbeat hustlers. Wanderers. A chance to become an adult actor. Gus Van Sant simply being Gus Van Sant. 

Keanu Reeves laying in bed playing with his nipple. What River Phoenix needed after making this movie – a bath, a shave, an exfoliating facial scrub.

“How do you see yourself fitting in with younger Hollywood acting?” (A sweet voice). “I don’t see any of them in the perspective or in the limelight of Hollywood. I really don’t ever want to get that objective or self-consciousness of my place in this world of showbusiness.”

1993… LA nightclub. Halloween. Music blasting. Sitting on a couch. Tired. Intoxicated. Skinny. Bad skin. Ticking time bombs. Heroine. Cocaine. Morphine. Marajuana. Valium. Cold remedies. Addiction is an open secret here. And then the star exploded all over the pavement. Never did anyone move from casual drug use to death so quickly. The night that Fellini died – ‘A director’s sweet life. An actor’s brief life.’

Retrospective.

2025… ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Turning point. A troubling effect. Midnight rock sessions. Alcohol. Uncontrollable drug use. Crystal meth. Hooked. No chance of going back now. Progressive and fatal. Like ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’…if you go too near to the plant it will eat you. The best performance… but from now on he didn’t care enough about himself to look after himself. What about those he left behind? Nobody did anything to help him when he was alive… guilt… and lasting sadness.

Have a nice day!

My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Promotional still (1991)
My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Movie poster (1991)

Stolen Words / The Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision

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Klein Youth – Charlie Marseilles

“We speak of the body of the young man at his fullest development, just on the brink of maturity, a young man who has retained some of his original innocence. The model for the classic Greek was the young athlete, from an aristocratic family, who competed in the nude in the original Olympic Games. It is not until later that the natural male form was used as a medium for the expression of godliness, an idea that later became the basis for a popular religious sect. A look back through the twentieth century will demonstrate just how long the Beautiful Boy has been absent from our field of vision. Examine the popular male images of the past 60 years. How many of them have been both young and beautiful?”

Helen Ziou – Valley Advocate Amherst – April 1984

Seven cool things that I heard this week

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“ I heard Earth, Wind and Fire singing ‘Ba-dee-ya’ on the radio, and I thought, oh no, this is another step towards autumn.” – a woman on the bus referring to the song September.

“There in the shade, like a cool drink waiting, he sat with slow fire in his eyes, just waiting.”  – Johnny Hartman singing A Slow Hot Wind. 

“He comes from an old Dorset family that made grandfather clocks and had a swan’s head as their emblem.” – a posh woman boasting about the man who her daughter is marrying.

“Hey, is there anywhere to play pickleball around here?” – a student in Starbucks.

“I can hear monks chanting.” – Charlie laid in bed in the middle of the night.

“The drawback is that you always get corn dust up your bum.” – a farmer on the radio.

“Come and look at this rock, it’s shaped like your willy!” – a young girl shouting to her older brother.

You want them to be yours, but they’re not, and never will be

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Image: Alex Avgud

If someone asked me who the love of my life was, it would be the one that I’ve been waiting 15 years for. That’s how long my infatuation has lasted. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for him to realise that I am the one. But he knows all this, and isn’t in the slightest bit interested. It’s emotionally painful and challenging, and my resolve never weakens, but I know that it was never meant to be. I console myself with the things that are wrong about him. He is tall, blonde and lanky and everybody says that he has a tiny dick. He can be quite nasty. He spends money he probably doesn’t have. He is disorganised and incredibly untidy. And there’s the annoyance that everything is handed to him on a plate. A relationship would never have worked, and this one-sided love is best left unfulfilled. But despite all these flaws, love can be irrational, broken but still loved.

Keep a notebook. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain… but it never happens

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What is it with buying new notebooks? I see one that I like and end up putting it on the growing pile of unused ones, and I tell myself that one day I will put down all my thoughts and ideas until it is full, and resist the urge to start a new one. But it will never happen because there is something therapeutic about starting a new notebook. Those seductive pages that urge you to write something brilliant, but never actually get around to it.

That Moment / Once you ignored me, and now I am special

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I saw you several times and you ignored me. Why do I remember that? It was because I thought you were handsome. But ignorance turned into friendship, and I hadn’t realised how generous you were. And that generosity came from Robin Hood. Steal from the wealthy, and give it to others. I met you tonight, fresh faced and smart, a tap on the shoulder, a cheeky wink, and you gave me a bottle of beer. I doubted that you had ever ignored me. 

He understood that a work of art, or an effort to create beauty, was regarded by some people as a personal attack

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They said he was a prodigy, and I didn’t doubt it. Pour le piano. He played notes that were delicate and haunting. But those gentle sounds had meaning and showed that he recognised beauty but didn’t know what to do with it, and this was the cause of his torment.

He peered from underneath a baseball cap, sad frightened eyes, that looked at the door behind.

“When Debussy died on March 25, 1918, in Paris, it was being bombarded by the Germans….” He stopped playing, “ … “and it was raining.” I’d heard this line before but couldn’t remember where.

He walked towards the bookshelf and pulled out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes that were hidden behind Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. The holy egoism of genius. He blew smoke into the air. “I am repaired, reconstructed, remodelled, remixed, rethought, reimagined, reinterpreted, rekindled, reactivated, but not rebooted!”

***

Almost everything here is inspired by Art of Noise