IMDB. Everybody plays up “Ghostbusters”, but he also did “Stripes”, produced “Animal House”…and let’s not forget “Cannibal Girls”. (Never seen it, but it sounds like it could be fun.)
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: February 14, 2022.
Monday, February 14th, 2022Obit watch: February 13, 2022.
Sunday, February 13th, 2022Ian McDonald, co-founder of King Crimson and Foreigner.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Lars Eighner. I’m not sure how many people outside of Austin recognize that name. For those long time Austinites, this should be a blast from the past.
Mr. Eighner lost his job and spent three years homeless on the streets of Austin with his dog. He wrote periodically for the “Austin Chronicle”, and eventually published Travels With Lizbeth about that experience. He published two other books after that, but those were less successful.
I’m going to put this last obit behind a jump. I’m noting it because it’s a sad sundae with chopped sad and a sad cherry on top.
Obit watch: February 11, 2022 (supplemental).
Friday, February 11th, 2022NYT obit for Douglas Trumbull.
NYT obit for Bob Wall. Includes the Bruce Lee vs. “O’Hara” fight from “Enter the Dragon”.
Obit watch: February 11, 2022.
Friday, February 11th, 2022Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of the human immunodeficiency virus.
It’s complicated.
…
From this sample Dr. Montagnier’s team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus.
The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS.
The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS. Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones.
When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute.
And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress.
There was a lawsuit: an out-of-court settlement was mediated by Jonas Salk.
Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. And in 2002 they appeared to have resolved their rivalry when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, not him, in awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barré-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.”)
…
…
…
Last May, he added fuel to the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines by claiming, in a French video, that vaccine programs were an “unacceptable mistake” because, he said, vaccines could cause viral variants.
And in January, in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal written with the Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, he criticized President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The authors said it was “irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for the government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen.”
Obit watch: February 9, 2022.
Wednesday, February 9th, 2022Douglas Trumbull, noted SFX guy.
Some of his credits:
- “2001: A Space Odyssey”
- “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”
- “Blade Runner”
- “The Andromeda Strain”
- “Silent Running” (director/effects)
- “Brainstorm” (director)
He also did effects and was an executive producer on “The Starlost“, and did effects for the first movie based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
I can’t find it online now (I tried both DuckDuckGo and Bing) but I have a vivid memory of an advertisement in the late 70s/early 80s, possibly in “Scientific American”, featuring Douglas Trumbull endorsing HP calculators. When the time came, that was a big motivator for me to go the RPN route.
Obit watch: February 7, 2022.
Monday, February 7th, 2022George Crumb, composer.
“Black Angels” (1970), one of Mr. Crumb’s best-known works and a reaction to the Vietnam War, was an early example of his imaginative eclecticism. It is scored for an amplified string quartet and features techniques such as tapping the strings with thimbles. A mournful fragment from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” string quartet is interrupted by fierce bow strokes and human shouts.
The grimly claustrophobic music of the first movement, “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects,” was deemed sufficiently scary to be used on the soundtrack for the horror film “The Exorcist.”
…
Other pieces were equally theatrical and sometimes featured ritualistic elements. A recording of whale songs made by a marine scientist inspired his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” for electric flute, cello and amplified piano (1971). The performers wear black half-masks; Mr. Crumb also specified that (where possible) the performance take place under blue lighting. He used various extended techniques, like strumming the piano strings with a paper clip, to create eerie sonorities.
Each movement of his orchestral piece “Echoes of Time and the River” (awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1968) features processionals in which small groups of musicians move around the stage in patterns and directions specified in the score — requirements Mr. Crumb later acknowledged were rather impractical.
Obit watch: February 3, 2022.
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022John C. Koss, headphone innovator.
Mr. Koss and his friend Martin Lange Jr., an engineer, developed a portable stereo phonograph in 1958 that they called a “private listening station.” It had a turntable, speakers and a privacy switch that let users plug headphones into a jack. But most of the headphones available, like those used by telephone operators, shortwave radio users and pilots, were incompatible and not stereophonic.
So they rigged up cardboard cups that contained three-inch speakers and chamois pads from a flight helmet, and they attached them to a headband made of a bent clothes hanger covered with a rubber shower hose.
“And, oh man, whew, it was just bouncing in my ears,” Mr. Koss said in an undated video interview on the Koss Corporation’s website. “It was a great sound. Now the whole thing was there. Anybody that listened to it, it was like the first time you drove in a car or the first time you did anything.”
…
Jean-Jacques Beineix, French director. His first movie was “Diva”.
I wanted to see “Diva” when it was theatrically released because: moped chase in a subway. But at the time, this was impossible for me. I don’t recall it ever playing when UT had a film program. But now, it is available in a reasonably priced Kino Lorber blu ray (affiliate link). And I believe it is on the list: if not, it will be shortly.
He also directed “Betty Blue”, which seems to have divided critics. Interestingly, before “Diva”, he worked as a second assistant/second unit director on several films…including “The Day the Clown Cried”.
Sister Janet Mead, Australian nun…and, with all due respect, musical footnote.
Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat — she had a three-octave range and perfect pitch — became an instant hit in Australia, Canada and the United States. It soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during Easter time in 1974, and she became one of the few Australian recording artists to have a gold record in the United States.
The record sold more than three million copies worldwide, two million of them to Americans. Nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for best inspirational performance, it lost to Elvis Presley and his version of “How Great Thou Art.”
Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” famously covered by the Byrds in 1965, “The Lord’s Prayer” is one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken from the Bible.
…
She later described the period of her record’s success as a “horrible time,” largely because of demands by the media.
“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talk-backs and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Shunning the spotlight, she declined most interview requests and all offers to tour the United States.
…
Obit watch: February 2, 2022.
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022Bob Wall, noted ass kicker.
He was in three out of five Bruce Lee films post 1968: “The Way of the Dragon”, “Enter the Dragon” and “Game of Death”. (He played O’Hara, the bad guy’s bodyguard, in “Enter the Dragon”.)
…
Monica Vitti, Italian actress. She was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movies (“L’Avventura”, “La Notte”, “L’Eclisse”).
She was also “Modesty Blaise” in the 1966 movie.
Obit watch: February 1, 2022.
Tuesday, February 1st, 2022Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub (United States Army – ret.) has died. He was 100.
General Singlaub trained resistance fighters in German-occupied France and rescued Allied prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II. He conducted intelligence operations during the Chinese Civil War and in the Korean War while assigned to the C.I.A., and he commanded secret Army forays into North Vietnam and neutral Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s to ambush Communist troops.
A sturdy 5-foot-7 with an enduring military brush haircut, General Singlaub seemed fit for combat long after his last war. He was “the kind of guy you’d like to have on your side in a barroom brawl,” Pat Murphy, an acquaintance and the publisher of The Arizona Republic at the time, told The New York Times in 1986.
…
But for all his military feats, General Singlaub’s career ended over issues of grand strategy.Mr. Carter removed him as the military’s chief of staff in South Korea in May 1977 after he told a reporter for The Washington Post that the president’s plan to withdraw American troops there could lead to another North Korean invasion.
General Singlaub later maintained that his remarks were off the record, an assertion disputed by The Post. But Mr. Carter was outraged at what he perceived as a challenge to civilian authority.
His order recalling General Singlaub from Korea was the first action of its type since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the Pacific commander when MacArthur advocated extending the Korean War into China.
After being reassigned to Fort McPherson in Georgia, General Singlaub criticized the Carter administration’s military policies again in April 1978, in a talk before R.O.T.C. cadets at Georgia Tech. He called Mr. Carter’s decision not to produce a neutron bomb “ridiculous” and “militarily unsound” and criticized the administration’s efforts to give up control of the Panama Canal.
The Army ordered him to report to the Pentagon immediately, announcing a day later that it had accepted his request to retire.
He was also involved (as a private citizen) in the “Iran-Contra affair”.
General Singlaub told Congress that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, while a National Security Council staff aide, had approved of his being highly visible in his support for the contras. The goal, General Singlaub testified, was to take public attention away from the secret government program. Colonel North was eventually convicted of obstructing Congress, destroying official documents and accepting an illegal gift, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal.
General Singlaub, who acted as a private citizen in helping the contras, was never accused of wrongdoing in the investigation. But in his 1991 memoir, “Hazardous Duty,” written with Malcolm McConnell, he bristled at what he considered the defaming of his character.
“For a decade I’d been smeared as a right-wing fanatic, even a crypto-fascist, by some members of the media,” he wrote. “I’d always found this ironic, considering the fact that I was one of a handful of American soldiers who had risked torture and execution by both German and Japanese fascists while serving behind enemy lines in Europe and the Far East.”
Moses J. Moseley, actor. He was a “pet zombie” in “The Walking Dead”.
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.
Obit watch: January 31. 2022.
Monday, January 31st, 2022NYT obit for Howard Hesseman, which was not up when I posted yesterday.
Mike the Musicologist sent this over, with the observation that it had been posted yesterday:
Cheslie Kryst. She was Miss USA 2019, and worked as a lawyer and a correspondent on “Extra”.
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.
Hargus Robbins, noted session pianist in Nashville.
A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.
Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.
…
Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.
…
Obit watch: January 30, 2022.
Sunday, January 30th, 2022Booger.
I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)
I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.
So here’s a nice golden moment for you.
Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)
Obit watch: January 29, 2022.
Saturday, January 29th, 2022Today is just quick follow ups from the paper of record:
And, astonishingly (to me), the NYT actually ran an obit for Ron Goulart. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but this is the same paper that still (to the best of my knowledge) has never run an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Obit watch: January 28, 2022.
Friday, January 28th, 2022Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.
Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.
Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.
So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.
Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:
…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.
Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.
“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.
He went back and recovered more samples.
Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.
One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.
Obit watch: January 27, 2022.
Thursday, January 27th, 2022Don Wilson, of the Ventures.
In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”
We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?
Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.
Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.
Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a suicide.
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.
Obit watch: January 26, 2022.
Wednesday, January 26th, 2022He voiced Charlie Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. According to reports, he was 65 years old, and died by suicide.
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.
Kathryn Kates, actress. Roles include “Seinfeld”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and “Law and Order: Sport Utility Vehicle”.
This got past me yesterday, though I did intend to mention it: Sheldon Silver, former leader of the New York State Assembly who was serving time in prison on corruption charges.