I also feel you're my brother in that we have different tastes, but there are things we both love, which was family, work, people in all their imperfection, food, alcohol, talking, rage, and a desire to bring the whole structure crashing down. We amused each other.

The image of my uncles and father reminded me of something that happened between us one time. Because these guys were such men — your father and these men from Italy. And you were going through a crisis of faith about yourself and acting, a lot of things, were very upset. I went to meet you on the banks of the Hudson River, and you told me, you said, "You know what I want to be? I want to be a man. That's all. I want to be a man." Now, this is so odd, because you are such a man. You're a man in many ways many males, including myself, wish they could be a man.

The paradox about you as a man is that I always felt personally, that with you, I was seeing a young boy. A boy about Michael's age right now. 'Cause you were very boyish. And about the age when humankind, and life on the planet are really opening up and putting on a show, really revealing themselves in all their beautiful and horrible glory. And I saw you as a boy — as a sad boy, amazed and confused and loving and amazed by all that. And that was all in your eyes. And that was why, I think, you were a great actor: because of that boy who was inside.

Chase wrapped the speech with a nod to the show: "You know, everybody knows that we always ended an episode with a song," he said.

"And the song, as far as I'm concerned, would be Joan Osborne's "(What If God Was) One Of Us?"

Read the full eulogy here.

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CINCINNATI — The Village at the Lift publicity tent has massive, thick walls of white canvas rising high enough to support a second floor balcony. Normally used for large parties, the tent was eerily empty despite it being the opening Friday of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Back in a corner, sinking so low into a couch that he seemed to be touching the floor, was James Gandolfini, who passed away last Wednesday from a heart attack. But when I saw him he was in in Park City, Utah to speak about the political comedy In the Loop, his first major role since wrapping eight years as mob boss Tony Soprano on HBO’s The Sopranos.

For whatever reason, maybe Sundance gridlock, perhaps some competing publicity events, none of the other journalists showed for the interview. So I spent solo time with the normally press-shy Gandolfini inside a tent that could hold a thousand Tony Sopranos.

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She was my first and my most difficult baby, mostly because I had no clue what I was doing, despite my good intentions. You can’t call a baby bad – that’s just rude. Let’s call her … consistent. I breast-fed her all the time, round the clock, mostly because the public health nurses scared me shitless about giving her a soother – which would have been extremely helpful considering half the time she was on the boob it wasn’t for food but to go to sleep. Some advocates will tell you this is wonderful, a testament to her connection to you, but though I support breast-feeding, I will not tell you to put that baby to breast every time she cries because that baby will then be completely unable to put herself to sleep without your nipple in her mouth and this will lead to her being a cranky demon-baby and you being a sleep-deprived, sore bitch to everyone you love until you are forced to withdraw from this co-dependent arrangement because not doing so will result in you murdering her or yourself, which is far, far worse than letting a baby learn how to settle herself to sleep in the first place.

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But as the news broke last night, the sadness and shock fans expressed online began to feel, well, a little like a contest, both to be first and to feel the most.

Celebrity deaths have always been, for lack of a better word, weird, merging the abstract sadness of lost potential with the directness of having "known" the departed in some way into an uncanny feeling of the loss of a friend. But the memories you share of the deceased aren't personal -- other than the circumstances of where each viewer watched, say, Gandolfini's performances in "The Sopranos" or "Zero Dark Thirty" or "True Romance," the memories are exactly the same as everyone else's.

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“It’s an awful shock. James Gandolfini was a fine actor, a Rutgers alum and a true Jersey guy," Christie wrote. "I was a huge fan of his and the character he played so authentically, Tony Soprano. I have gotten to know Jimmy and many of the other actors in the Sopranos cast and I can say that each of them are an individual New Jersey treasure. Mary Pat and I express our deepest sympathies to Mr. Gandolfini’s wife and children, and our prayers are with them at this terrible time.”

Gandolfini died on Wednesday at age 51, reportedly of cardiac arrest while on vacation with his family in Italy.

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In another actor's hands, that scene is just your typical snapshot of a hotheaded patriarch in denial, an Archie Bunker or a Rabbit Angstrom or a "Great Santini" for the new millennium. James Gandolfini, though, knew just how to tease out the storms raging inside Tony Soprano. His bullying always had this faint hint of self-consciousness to it, suggesting the vaguest whiff of guilt behind that surly mug. When Tony felt anxious, Gandolfini made us feel anxious, too. We could hear Tony start to breathe through his nose, like a bull growing agitated at the sight of the color red. His words got percussive and clipped as his heart raced faster.

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Hollywood is just beginning to mourn the sudden and unexpected death of an actor whose portrayal of Tony Soprano was, as Salon's Willa Paskin put it, "so great that it finally made TV a prestigious place for actors to work."

Celebrities took to Twitter to express their condolences and sense of loss:

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There have been great performances on TV since Gandolfini’s mafioso king Tony, but none have been as powerful or as original: It's a performance so good it’s almost impossible to exaggerate its greatness. Gandolfini created from scratch an entire, now bedrock-seeming archetype, the character who, through the skill of his portrayer, is simultaneously charismatic and menacing, threatening and charming, winning and terrifying. His Tony was scary and pained, hulking and sometimes shockingly lithe, so brutal but so funny. Playing him, Gandolfini masterfully manipulated audiences' sympathy, held their attention, and kept their interest, sometimes against their better judgment and even, toward the end of the series, against their will. He was like a pickpocket so good you ended up just handing him your wallet, abdicating before his insane skill.

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Multiple outlets have confirmed that James Gandolfini, star of "The Sopranos," died late Wednesday while on vacation with his family in Italy. Initial reports suggest he may have suffered a heart attack. Gandolfini earned a Golden Globe and three Emmy awards for his performance on the cable series, widely hailed as one of finest dramas in television history.

HBO has released the following statement:

We're all in shock and feeling immeasurable sadness at the loss of a beloved member of our family. He a was special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect. He touched so many of us over the years with his humor, his warmth and his humility. Our hearts go out to his wife and children during this terrible time. He will be deeply missed by all of us.

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• The Sopranos are alive and well in Afghanistan.
• The California Legislature is a surprisingly lucrative cash cow.
• Never mess with the Mossad.

For more insights like these, please take a moment to subscribe to The I Files, the informative, sometimes fun, and totally free one-stop news source.

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“This Is What Winning Looks Like,” Vice

“Try doing that day in and day out -- working with child molesters, working with people who are robbing people, murdering them. It wears on you after awhile.”

So says Maj. Bill Steuber, a Marine serving on a forward operating base in southern Afghanistan. He’s referring not to enemy soldiers, but to U.S.-trained Afghan security officers who will take over once the Americans withdraw at the end of next year.

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At 49, Falco is busier than ever: In addition to promoting the season 5 premiere of "Nurse Jackie," which airs on Sunday, she's currently starring onstage off-Broadway in a new play titled "The Madrid," written by Liz Flahive (incidentally, one of the writers of "Nurse Jackie"). Like Jackie, the mother she portrays in the play, Martha, wants to flee from her life. But unlike Jackie, who relies on drugs and an affair as an escape, Martha literally runs away from her family, and no one, except her daughter, knows where she is or has any sense of why she left.

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As "Breaking Bad" finishes filming its fifth and final season in Albuquerque, the popularity of the show is providing a boost to the economy and creating a dilemma for local tourism officials as they walk the fine line of profiting from a show that centers around drug trafficking, addiction and violence. "Breaking Bad" follows the fictional character Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher turned meth lord.

Albuquerque has seen an unexpected jump in tourists visiting popular sites from the show and local businesses cashing in on its popularity. Tourists are also flocking to sites that before the show were unknown and unimportant: the suburban home of White, played by Bryan Cranston; a car wash that is a front for a money-laundering operation on the series; a rundown motel used frequently for filming; and the real-life burrito joint, which is a fast food chicken restaurant on the show. The Albuquerque Convention & Visitors Bureau has even created a website of the show's most popular places around town to help tourists navigate, and ABQ Trolley Company sold out all its "BaD" tours last year at $60 a ticket.

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His pilot, "Criminal Justice," was not picked up for a full series by the network that aired his hit show "The Sopranos." The show had a typical-for-HBO starry pedigree, with Richard Price writing and Oscar-winner Steven Zaillian directing; however, since the departure of "The Sopranos," HBO's hour-long dramas have tended toward the period ("True Blood," "Game of Thrones") or the even-more-prestige-y (Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of "Boardwalk Empire"; polarizing TV auteur Aaron Sorkin is responsible for "The Newsroom").

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OK, you don’t meet any. That’s because there is no one in the American entertainment industry exactly like David Chase, who got his start in television as a writer for the mid-‘70s paranormal series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (a pioneering show, after its fashion) and went on, many years later, to create one of the most famous ensemble dramas in TV history. Through it all, as they say, he really wanted to direct. So it is that we wind up in 2012 with “Not Fade Away,” which has all the young-man’s intensity of a debut film, but also views its characters and their lost world through the long lens of artistic distance.

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In all Chase's time toiling as a writer in television before "The Sopranos" — decades ranging from "The Rockford Files" to "Northern Exposure" — the big screen had beckoned. It reached back to his days as a teenager taking stills of "8 ½" and "Dr. Strangelove" (clear touchstones, still: one, Italian and surreal; the other, darkly comic).

After his first stab at writing a psychological thriller went begging, he turned to an idea of his since the '80s, one he occasionally kicked around in the "Sopranos" writers room.

"I love rock 'n' roll so much that I really wanted to make a movie about the music, not about the personalities involved, not about the ups and downs or the rise and fall of it," says Chase. "I didn't want to do a biopic. If it was going to be a biopic, I wanted to do a biopic about nobodies — which is what it kind of is."

"Not Fade Away," which Paramount Pictures will open in limited release Friday, is Chase's first project since "The Sopranos" remade American pop culture and, among other things, forever changed our relationship to Journey. A coming-of-age tale set amid the generational tumult of the '60s, it's the debut of the most promising 67-year-old filmmaker to come along in some time.

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Of course, San Francisco would have much more to lose in that wager, since singer Steve Perry is an avowed Giants fan who performed during the Giants run to the 2010 World Series title and even appeared in the team’s victory parade. (Perry's "Lights" is also an AT&T Park favorite.)

For Detroit, however, it’s just one of many rousing numbers in its stadium playlist, albeit one with a shout-out to the Tigers’ hometown: “Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit.” Of couse, there is actually no such place as South Detroit, unless you count Lake Erie or Windsor, Ontario. In that regard, Detroit’s adoption of “Don’t Stop Believin’” seems awfully self-deprecating, as though the team is desperate for any song that mentions the city. (Why not rock to the MC5, the Stooges or pretty much anything from that small, obscure local label called Motown?)

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Given the undisputed cultural primacy of televised serial drama in the 21st century, making the switch to feature film seems almost as much of an exercise in nostalgia as the movie itself. I can’t help drawing an analogy between Chase’s foray into the supposed respectability of filmmaking and J.K. Rowling’s recently published (and tepidly reviewed) adult literary novel. Both works are understood to be important entirely because the people who made them have been so successful in other far more popular genres. Otherwise, they would likely come and go without anyone paying much attention. As Chase must realize, there is no way on God’s green earth that “Not Fade Away” – whether it’s good, bad or indifferent – will have anywhere near the cultural currency or impact of “The Sopranos.”

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Television is in the midst of an extremely fertile period: This golden age of TV, from “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” on down through “30 Rock” and “Parks and Rec,” is a who’s who of shows that do something fresh and new, taking content, themes, language or characters in unprecedented directions. But smuggled into these shows, even the most revolutionary and cutting-edge, is something unoriginal. After the first episode, every installment of a TV show contains large quantities of sameness: The same characters, the same setting, the same premise. For all its innovation, each episode of "The Wire" featured established characters, Baltimore, that dialogue, and a worldview about the humanity-crushing nature of dysfunctional, dying bureaucracies. “Community’s” every episode may intend to blow minds and blow up genres, but audiences came to expect exactly that level of madcap energy every week. On shows like “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “Louie” (which will air in a block with “Anger Management,” and by its very excellence act as a permanent rebuke), audiences wait for the surprising moment, the one that will be so great and awesome and unlike anything we can specifically imagine.

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