Yaphet Kotto, the veteran actor known for his performances in “Alien,” the James Bond film “Live and Let Die” and the television series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” died March 15. He was 81.
Kotto famously played technician Dennis Parker in 1979’s “Alien” and William Laughlin alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Running Man.” He had a strong career in television as well, playing Al Giardello in the NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what he was seeing wasn’t just a movie but the future. When it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements; he found the uptown subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5; and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this is how we will do it. In the film’s iconic final shot, the space baby looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. Freedom, this shot says, is imminent.
My father was twenty-four then, and perhaps at his most world-historical: he was becoming an expert in computers. He’d worked for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, a corporate labyrinth of beige cubicles and epochal breakthroughs; a world of punch cards and reel-to-reel magnetic tape, where at least some of the employees were deadly serious about making sure to wear the company tie clip and then, once they were off duty, to switch to their own personal tie clips.
It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain that what he was seeing wasn’t just a movie but the future. When
it ended, he got up and walked out into Times Square, with its
peep-show glitz and sleazy, flashing advertisements; he found the uptown
subway beneath the yellow marquees for dirty movies like The Filthy 5; and through all of it, he thought that when humanity hurls itself into the depths of the cosmos, this
is how we will do it. In the film’s iconic final shot, the space baby
looks down at the planet to which it is no longer bound. Freedom, this
shot says, is imminent.
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