Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: July 8, 2022.

Friday, July 8th, 2022

For the historical record, since everyone is on this like a fat man on an all you can eat buffet: Shinzo Abe. Alt link. The Mainichi. Japan Times.

Larry Storch. 249 acting credits in IMDB: beyond “F-Troop”, they include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp”, “Airport 1975″…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. “Portrait in Blues“, season 8, episode 1.)

Edited to add: NYT obit for Mr. Storch, which probably went up as I was writing this.

Gregory Itzin. Credits other than “24” include “Airplane!” (and “Airplane II: The Sequel”, but he went uncredited in that), “Street Hawk”, “Lou Grant”, and “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | 7 Comments »

Obit watch: July 7, 2022.

Thursday, July 7th, 2022

Bradford Freeman. He was 97.

Mr. Freeman was a private first class assigned to a mortar squad in Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. He took part in the unit’s jump behind Utah Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, carrying an 18-pound mortar plate strapped to his chest. Landing in a pasture filled with cows, he helped a fellow soldier with a broken leg hide before joining the rest of his squad.
He fought with Easy Company in its battles with the Germans in France, its parachute drops into the German-occupied Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge, in bitter cold and snow.
He was unscathed in the fighting at the Bulge’s strategic town of Bastogne, Belgium, but he was wounded at nearby Noville in mid-January 1945. “A Screaming Mimi came in howling and it exploded in my leg,” he told the American Veterans Center in an April 2018 interview, referring to the nickname given by G.I.s to the Germans’ devastating multiple rocket launchers. He returned to Easy Company in April 1945 and participated in its occupation of Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s abandoned mountain retreat near the Austrian border, and then in the occupation of Austria.

According to the paper of record, he was the last surviving member of Easy Company.

Ni Kuang. Interesting guy: he wrote a bunch of screenplays for Shaw Brothers movies, and went on to write a lot of Chinese SF and fantasy. He also hated Commies.

His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.
In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:

There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.

When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”
“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.”

I saved James Caan for last because I wanted to put in a jump. NYT.

Possible spoilers follow for two of his best movies:

(more…)

Posted in Books, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 4, 2022.

Monday, July 4th, 2022

Peter Brook, noted theater director.

Mr. Brook was called many other things: a maverick, a romantic, a classicist. But he was never easily pigeonholed. British by nationality but based in Paris since 1970, he spent years in commercial theater, winning Tony Awards in 1966 and 1971 for the Broadway transfers of highly original productions of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He staged crowd-pleasers like the musical “Irma la Douce” and Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”

…

But he was also an experimenter and a risk-taker. He brought a stunning nine-hour adaptation of the Sanskrit epic “The Mahabharata” from France to New York in 1987. In 1995, he followed the same route with “The Man Who,” a stark staging of Oliver Sacks’s neurological case studies. In 2011, when he was 86, he brought an almost equally pared-down production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” (he called it “A Magic Flute”) to the Lincoln Center Festival.

Joe Turkel. He was the rare Kubrick repeater (the bartender in “The Shining”, one of the executed soldiers in “Paths of Glory”, and a thug in “The Killing”) Other credits include “The Sand Pebbles”, “Blade Runner”, and “Ironside”.

Bruno ‘Pop N Taco’ Falcon. Credits include “Breakin'”, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey”, and “Captain EO”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 1, 2022.

Friday, July 1st, 2022

Richard Taruskin, musicologist.

An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.
“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”

…

His words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” by critiquing the veracity of “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov” (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book’s positive reception “the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.”

…

Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for “historically authentic” performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book “Text and Act,” he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn’t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of “authenticity.” And many did.
“Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,” he wrote in The Times in 1990. “To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.”

…

“I have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,” he wrote in 1994.
Mr. Ross said: “Whether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.” Mr. Taruskin’s polemics, he added, “ultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.”

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 30, 2022.

Thursday, June 30th, 2022

This one goes out to Lawrence:

She was known as the “Red Headed Ball of Fire,” a title given her for her stature — she was a diminutive 5-foot-1 — and her fiery hair. She found the moniker, which was often shortened to “Ball of Fire,” corny. But Betty Rowland was a burlesque queen nonetheless. A headliner in the racy variety shows’ glory years in the 1930s and ’40s, she worked well into the ’50s.

Betty Rowland was 106 when she passed on April 3rd. Her death was not widely reported until recently.

John Visentin, the CEO of Xerox. He was 59, and passed due to “complications from an ongoing illness” according to a company statement.

Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels. Cancer got him at 83.

In 1972, he and three others were acquitted of murdering a Texas drug dealer and setting a home on fire.

…

Barger was sentenced to 10 years to life behind bars in 1973 after he was convicted of possession of narcotics and a weapon by a convicted felon.
He was paroled in November 1977 after serving four-and-a-half years of his sentence, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.

…

In 1979, he was among 33 people indicted on charges of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act…Barger was acquitted in 1980 after a split verdict.

…

In 1987, Barger was arrested on charges relating to narcotics, weapons and explosives as FBI agents and state law enforcement carried out a series of raids.

…

Barger was convicted of conspiracy in October 1988 and was sentenced to four years in jail.
He was released from FCI Phoenix in November 1992 after serving three-and-a-half years behind bars.

Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not up when I originally posted.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 29, 2022.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

Hershel “Woody” Williams, big damn hero and Medal of Honor recipient. He was 98.

His Medal of Honor citation:

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as demolition sergeant serving with the 21st Marines, 3d Marine Division, in action against enemy Japanese forces on Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands, 23 February 1945. Quick to volunteer his services when our tanks were maneuvering vainly to open a lane for the infantry through the network of reinforced concrete pillboxes, buried mines, and black volcanic sands, Cpl. Williams daringly went forward alone to attempt the reduction of devastating machine-gun fire from the unyielding positions. Covered only by four riflemen, he fought desperately for four hours under terrific enemy small-arms fire and repeatedly returned to his own lines to prepare demolition charges and obtain serviced flamethrowers, struggling back, frequently to the rear of hostile emplacements, to wipe out one position after another. On one occasion, he daringly mounted a pillbox to insert the nozzle of his flamethrower through the air vent, killing the occupants, and silencing the gun; on another he grimly charged enemy riflemen who attempted to stop him with bayonets and destroyed them with a burst of flame from his weapon. His unyielding determination and extraordinary heroism in the face of ruthless enemy resistance were directly instrumental in neutralizing one of the most fanatically defended Japanese strongpoints encountered by his regiment and aided vitally in enabling his company to reach its objective. Cpl. Williams’ aggressive fighting spirit and valiant devotion to duty throughout this fiercely contested action sustain and enhance the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service.

According to the paper of record, he was “the last survivor among the 472 servicemen who were awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in World War II and the oldest living recipient of the medal”.

(Alternative link.)

Lawrence’s tribute from 2019.

Margaret Keane, the painter of big-eyed children.

In 1970, on a trip to San Francisco, Ms. Keane told a reporter that her former husband had painted none of the big-eyed waifs, and offered to prove it with a demonstration of their respective painting abilities in Union Square. The media splash drew crowds. Ms. Keane arrived with paints and easel. But Mr. Keane did not show up, and he continued to play the part of the successful artist.
In 1986, Ms. Keane raised another dramatic “paint-off” challenge — this time in a Honolulu court, where she had brought a defamation suit against Mr. Keane for falsely claiming that he had painted her work. Her lawyers argued that a painting demonstration was the only way to settle the case. A judge agreed.
In less than an hour, Ms. Keane executed a big-eyed urchin. Mr. Keane, who represented himself in the case, said he had a sore shoulder and could not lift his arm to paint.

Posted in Art, Heroism, History, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 28, 2022.

Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

Mary Mara, actress. Credits other than “Law and Order” include three episodes of a spinoff of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, “ER”, “Nash Bridges”, and “Dexter”.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 22, 2022.

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022

Jaylon Ferguson, linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. He was 26.

Maureen Arthur. Beyond “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, she was also in “The Love God?” as “Evelyn Tremaine” (the wife/cover girl of pornographer “Osborn Tremaine”). Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Night Gallery”, “Mork & Mindy”, “CPO Sharkey”, and “Get Smart”.

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 21, 2022.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2022

Gleycy Correia, former Miss Brazil. She was 27: reports state that she died from complications of a “routine operation to have her tonsils removed”.

Caleb Swanigan, former Purdue and NBA basketball player. He was 25 and apparently died of “natural causes”.

Catching up on a few I missed while I was on the road, just for the historical record:

Mark Shields, TV pundit.

Tim Sale, comics artist.

Jean-Louis Trintignant, French film star. 146 acting credits in IMDB.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2022.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2022

Baxter Black, former “large-animal veterinarian” and NPR guy.

Black was keenly aware that he didn’t sound like anyone else on public radio, with former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards recalling that “he knew our audience and he knew how he fit in.”
“He would gear some of his commentary in that way, like the people who were against …. fur coats, use of fur, and Bax thought you should recycle roadkill and use the fur as clothing for dolls,” Edwards said. “So Barbie would have a fur coat from a dead possum or something. That was one of his tweaks at public radio right there.”

Posted in Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2022.

Monday, June 13th, 2022

Philip Baker Hall. THR.

Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Quincy M.E.”, “The Man with Bogart’s Face”, “Ghostbusters II”, “The John Larroquette Show”, and “Cradle Will Rock”.

NYT obit for Julee Cruise, which makes explicit something that the other obits only implied:

Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Movies, Nixon, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 12, 2022.

Sunday, June 12th, 2022

Here’s a name to conjure with, for those of us who were fans of High Weirdness By Mail and related stuff in the 1990s: Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Mr. Wilson’s book “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,” was a slim volume first published by Autonomedia, Mr. Fleming’s company, in 1991. Mr. Wilson wrote it under a pseudonym, Hakim Bey. (He liked to pretend that his made-up alter ego was a real person.)
The book’s central premise was that one could create one’s own stateless society — the goal of anarchy — with simple and poetic acts like creating public art and communal exercises like dinner parties. It quickly acquired a cult following, particularly among those who frequented the aisles of alternative bookstores looking for inspiration on how to sidestep or disrupt the capitalist mainstream.

…

“T.A.Z.” seems to take its cues from the Situationist Manifesto and its prose style from Allen Ginsberg. A sample: “Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earthworks as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects.”
Additional bullet points include exhortations to boycott products marked as Lite; hex the Muzak company; go on strike; dance all night; start a pirate radio station; put up posters; home-school your kids or teach them a craft; don’t vote; be a hobo.

…

He worked out his disillusionment with the failed promise of the 1960s — the revolution that never came — in provocative writing that appeared in avant-garde journals like Semiotext(e), where French intellectuals like Michel Foucault mingled with American Beats like Ginsberg and William Burroughs and radical feminists like Kate Millett and Kathy Acker, the postpunk novelist and performance artist.
By all accounts, Mr. Wilson was erudite about the recondite, a prolific author of some 60 books on topics ranging from angels to pirate utopias and all manner of renegade religions. He was for years an East Village fixture and the host of “The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade,” a late-night program on WBAI, Manhattan’s countercultural radio station. On his show, he might declaim on higher mathematics, play a selection of esoteric music like Sufi chants or Greek rembetika, and review zines, the D.I.Y. journals that flourished in the late 1980s and ‘90s.
But because his writing often included erotic imagery of young teenage boys, he was controversial.
“I always had a fairly conflicted position about how to handle the issue,” Mr. Fleming said. “Whether to downplay it or try to defend it in some way. He identified as gay, but I never knew him to have a sexual partner, or an actual sex life. His sexual practices were what I call Whitmanesque, imaginal only.”

…

“He was a fascinating character,” said Lucy Sante, the cultural historian and author of books, like “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” that tell stories of urban fringe dwellers. Ms. Sante often took Mr. Wilson to lunch — as many did; it was understood that you would pick up the tab — in Woodstock, N.Y., where Mr. Wilson was living for a time.
“He knew a lot about everything,” Ms. Sante said. “The thing we had in common was an interest in dropout culture, in all the ways of not participating in the charade of modern life. And he was encyclopedic in his knowledge of all that material. He was an eccentric, but also I think what he was doing was scattering bread crumbs for others to pick up.”

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 10, 2022.

Friday, June 10th, 2022

Julee Cruise, musician. You probably recognize the name from “Twin Peaks”:

Cruise’s best-known work is her single “Falling,” whose instrumental version written by composer Angelo Badalamenti, served as the theme song for Lynch’s belovedly weird 1990 Twin Peaks TV series, later winning a Grammy for best pop instrumental. The singer with the haunting voice also had cameos as a roadhouse crooner in the series and the 1992 spinoff movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; she sang the closing credits on an episode of the 2017 Showtime TV reboot, Twin Peaks: the Return.

She also toured with the B-52s (“from 1992-1999 as a fill-in for member Cindy Wilson“).

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 9, 2022.

Thursday, June 9th, 2022

Two interesting obits from the NYT for somewhat obscure people:

Jim Murphy. He specialized in history books for kids.

“I really love doing research,” he said. “I look at it as a kind of detective work. I would prefer to research forever and ever. The hard part is doing the writing.”

I’m a little old to be his target audience, but the books on yellow fever and the “blue baby” operation sound right up my alley.

Oris Buckner. He was a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department in the 1980s – the only black homicide detective at the time.

Then things went to hell. Briefly (the obit goes into more details) other homicide detectives beat witnesses to the killing of a police officer until they implicated two men, then killed both men, along with the girlfriend of one.

Mr. Buckner testified against the other officers. The local grand jury refused to indict them, but seven officers were eventually charged with federal civil rights violations. Three were convicted and sentenced to five years.

Mr. Buckner suffered for his decision to come forward. He was ostracized by his colleagues. He received death threats. He was demoted from homicide detective to traffic cop. Though he was finally promoted to sergeant in 1995, his career was effectively over.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 8, 2022.

Wednesday, June 8th, 2022

Jim Seals, of Seals and Crofts.

Paul Vance, most famous for “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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