Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

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Obit watch: January 19, 2024.

Friday, January 19th, 2024

“Sports Illustrated”. They are supposedly laying off all of their staff, and (according to other stories I’ve seen) Authentic Brands Group (ABG) who owns SI, has terminated the license of Arena Group to actually run SI.

“Pitchfork”, at least in current form. Conde Nast says they are folding it into “GQ”.

Some follow up housekeeping:

Michael Swanwick’s obit for Howard Waldrop.

The other day, Mike the Musicologist texted me:

Have I told you I performed in a Schickele world premiere?

This is a story I had not heard before. Below, and with his permission, is his version of the story.

One of my professors at CUNY, Leo Treitler, was a close friend of Schickele’s, and for Leo’s retirement party, Schickele wrote a short, 3-4 minute, choral piece for him.

I think there were twelve of us students of Leo’s (three per part) who briefly rehearsed and performed it for him at the party.

Although he has published scholarship on every historical period, Leo is mostly known as an early music scholar, and Schickele wrote him a mensuration canon. It’s a very difficult and restrictive form composers usually use demonstrate their skill. Mostly associated with Renaissance music, composers still use it up to this day; Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten” is probably the most well-known, contemporary one. Schickele was not at the party, so, being an occasional piece, I doubt he ever heard “Leo, Don’t Slow Down” or that it was ever performed again.

MtM says this is a good version of the Britten Cantus, done by an Estonian orchestra and conducted by a friend of Pärt.

Posted in Media, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 15, 2024.

Monday, January 15th, 2024

Tom Shales, former TV critic of the Washington Post and Pulitzer prize winner. WP (archived).

I was a big fan of his TV criticism when he was with the WP. Especially (as I’ve noted before) his reviews of Kathy Lee Gifford’s Christmas specials. I also thought Live From New York was a pretty spiffy book. (I haven’t read the expanded edition, or the ESPN book.)

Joyce Randolph. IMDB. NYT.

Alec Musser, actor. IMDB.

Peter Crombie. Other credits include “Se7en”, “Spenser: For Hire”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Noted SF writer Howard Waldrop, who was also a personal acquaintance, apparently passed away yesterday. I am putting this at the bottom of the obit watch because, so far, the news is just circulating among the Austin SF community and my circle of friends. I don’t have anything to link to right now. Also, I want to spend some time and write a longer obit for him, possibly tomorrow.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 6, 2024.

Saturday, January 6th, 2024

David Soul. THR.

Shoutout for his work in “Magnum Force”. Other credits include “Jerry Springer: The Opera” (the TV movie: he played Jerry Springer), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Unsub” (an interesting failed series from the late 1980s), “Casablanca” (the short-lived TV series: he played “Rick Blane”), “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” (he played “Michael Lee Platt”, one of the killers), and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Christian Oliver. Other credits include “Alarm für Cobra 11 – Die Autobahnpolizei”, “Ninja Apocalypse”, and “Christmas in Vienna”.

Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the NYT.

Posted in 1970s, Media, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 26, 2023.

Sunday, November 26th, 2023

Betty Rollin, journalist and author.

In “First, You Cry” (1976), Ms. Rollin dealt candidly, and at times irreverently, with her cancer diagnosis, which was delayed a year after she first felt a lump in her left breast. She wrote that her internist had dismissed it as a cyst, and that her mammographer had looked at the images and told her to come back in a year for another look.

…

In the book, Ms. Rollin wrote about her mastectomy, a divorce and the love affair that followed it, and her acceptance that her life did not end with the loss of a breast. Her frank writing in “First, You Cry” was part of a growing openness about discussing breast cancer publicly and the need for early detection, as was highlighted dramatically in 1974 when Betty Ford, the first lady at the time, spoke of her radical mastectomy.

…

Readers’ response to “First You, Cry” was strong. “The letters I loved were from women who had it, sending me their cancer jokes,” Ms. Rollin told The Times in 1993, when the book was rereleased. “That kind of laughter is my favorite thing — it’s such a diffuser.”
She added: “Somebody once said that I was the first person to make cancer funny, which was the best compliment I ever had. I mean, cancer isn’t funny, but if you’ve got it and if you’re able to make jokes about it, I think that keeps you sane.”

Marty Krofft. THR. Thing I did not know: Sid and Marty got their start in the 1950s doing puppet shows…adult puppet shows.

Marty joined his brother full-time in 1958 after Sid’s assistant left, and they opened Les Poupees de Paris, an adults-only burlesque puppet show that played to sold-out crowds at a dinner theater in the San Fernando Valley.
“Les Poupees took us from an act, Sid’s act, to a business,” Marty said. Shirley MacLaine was there on opening night, and Richard Nixon came during his run for president.
Les Poupees went on the road and played world’s fairs in Seattle in 1962, New York in 1964 and San Antonio in 1968. It featured 240 puppets, mostly topless women, and Time magazine called it a “dirty puppet show.”
After that, it was so popular, “we couldn’t even get our own best friends in the theater,” Sid said. It drew an estimated 9.5 million viewers in its first decade of performances.

…

Pufnstuf‘s psychedelic sets and costumes were a big hit with college kids, and The Beatles asked for a full set of episode tapes to be sent to them in England. The look of the show prompted many whispers that the brothers took drugs (pot for sure, maybe LSD as well?), something Marty denied.
“You can’t do a show stoned,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2016.
The Kroffts followed Pufnstuf with The Bugaloos (1970-72), the Claymation series Lidsville (1971-73), Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973-75) and Land of the Lost (1974-76), which spawned an ill-fated Will Ferrell movie adaptation released in 2009. Those shows were wildly popular in syndication as well.

…

In “Lost,” which premiered on NBC in 1974, a family plunges into another dimension populated by dinosaurs, primates called Pakuni and dangerous lizard-men called Sleestaks. Like “Pufnstuf,” the show was about the family’s attempts to get home while navigating their strange new surroundings.
Episodes were written by seasoned science fiction writers like Ben Bova, Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad, and a linguist developed a language of sorts for the Pakuni.

Question: is Land of the Lost the earliest TV show with a constructed language? (No, don’t say it: according to Wikipedia, development of the Klingon language didn’t begin until ST3, so LotL precedes.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Media, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 24, 2023.

Friday, November 24th, 2023

Charles Peters, founder of the Washington Monthly. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the high school library, which had a subscription to the WM under Peters. I remember the magazine’s habit of challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy: for example, an article arguing that abortion should remain legal…but should also be a rare event, and should be strongly discouraged under almost all circumstances.

Bob Contant, co-founder of the St. Mark’s Bookshop in NYC. I’m mostly noting this here because of the insight it provides into NYC bookselling:

After working as the manager of the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, Mr. Contant, along with Mr. McCoy and two other colleagues, Tom Evans and Peter Dargis, opened the St. Mark’s Bookshop in November 1977 in a $345-a-month storefront at 13 St. Mark’s Place. (Today, apartments in the building sell for upward of $1.6 million, and the Thai-inspired dessert emporium on the ground floor offers Soku tangerine soju seltzer for $10 a can.)
As the East Village exploded with punk vibrancy and business boomed, the store moved to more spacious quarters at 12 St. Mark’s Place in 1987. Six years later, the two remaining partners, Mr. Contant and Mr. McCoy, were invited by the Cooper Union to relocate nearby to the institution’s new dormitory development at 31 Third Avenue, a sleek, award-winning space designed by Zivkovic Associates. They were able to do so thanks to a generous loan from Robert Rodale, a publisher of wellness books and magazines.
But the 2008 recession, combined with a proposed doubling of the store’s $20,000-a-month rent, made the space unaffordable, even after support from Salman Rushdie and Patti Smith, a crowdsourcing campaign that raised $24,000 and a concession by Cooper Union in 2011 to reduce the rent temporarily.
In 2014, the store moved to its fourth and final home, at 136 East Third Street, a side street, as a commercial tenant in a city housing project a half-mile southeast of the original location. Mr. Contant bought out Mr. McCoy for $1, and by the time he grudgingly shuttered the bookshop in its last incarnation in 2016, he owed the city something like $70,000 in back rent; he also owed hefty sums to publishers and wholesalers and some $35,000 in unpaid sales tax. Mr. Contant went bankrupt.

To be fair:

The store never invested in potential revenue add-ons like regular book fairs or readings, and it never sold used books, offered deep discounts or opened an in-store cafe.
Instead, it stubbornly stuck to its classic business model. It sold avant-garde literature, books from small independent presses on subjects like queer theory and anarchy, artisanal greeting cards, art monographs, photo albums of Russian prison tattoos and a selection of 2,000 magazines and underground newspapers, as well as booklets that hungry local writers delivered on consignment.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 2, 2023.

Thursday, November 2nd, 2023

Bobby Knight. NYT. ESPN.

Tribute from ESPN by Jay Bilas.

Knight’s acts of kindness were rarely publicized, and if I had publicized those I knew of while he was alive, he would not have liked it. Knight played for the legendary Fred Taylor at Ohio State, and near the end of Taylor’s life, Knight would sneak into Taylor’s hospital room to hold his hand. When a legendary basketball talent evaluator was having financial difficulty late in life, Knight paid his outstanding bills and rent, without telling a soul.

Don Laughlin. You may never have heard of him, but you’ve heard of the town he created: Laughlin, Nevada.

Taking chances seemed to come naturally to Donald. As a teenager, he stockpiled cash from trapping mink and muskrat and used it to buy mail-order slot machines, installing them himself in local pubs.
Demand was high, and before long he was making $500 a week (nearly $7,000 in today’s money).
The principal of the one-room schoolhouse he attended for high school was not amused. “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school,” Mr. Laughlin told The Review-Journal. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door.’”

David Mitchell. Here’s another person who you may not have heard of. I had, because this is a great story.

In 1975, Mr. Mitchell and his then-wife bought a struggling weekly newspaper, the Point Reyes Light.

In 1973, a grand jury raised questions about fiscal improprieties and child abuse by Synanon, which had once been widely respected but had devolved into an authoritarian cult that declared itself a religion — the Church of Synanon — to become tax exempt. Later that year, reporters in San Francisco found that the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in Marshall, Calif., less than 10 miles from Point Reyes Station, was hoarding what turned out to be $60,000 worth of weapons.
Mr. Mitchell began his own investigation that same year, joined by his wife; their one reporter, John Maddeen; and Richard J. Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had studied Synanon. To them, it was a story in their own back yard that they couldn’t ignore.

…

The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.
In 1980, Mr. Dederich pleaded no contest to charges that he and two members of Synanon’s security force had conspired to commit murder by placing a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization. Synanon disbanded in 1991.

The Point Reyes Light won the Pulitzer for public service in 1979 for the Synanon stories.

The lawyer and the rattlesnake.

It was said to have been only the fourth time since the prizes were first presented in 1917 that a weekly or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. Mr. Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe.

One other aspect of the story I remember: most of the Pulitzer prizes come with a cash award. The public service prize does not. Which was sort of unfortunate, as the Light was a constantly struggling newspaper. (The Times blames Mr. Mitchell’s divorce from his second wife on the financial pressures involved in keeping the paper alive.)

Dwight Twilley, musician. As I’ve said before, I’m not much of a music guy and rely on other people for music commentary, but the name rings a faint bell with me…

Posted in Media, Music, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 3, 2023.

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023

Jim Caple, sportswriter.

I sort of remember the name: I was probably reading him back in the good old “Page 2” days. My feelings about lyrical happy horsepucky baseball writers are well known, but it seems like he wasn’t one of those guys:

He was also one of the most popular columnists for ESPN.com’s Page 2, where he took a lighter look at sports and rarely missed a chance to poke fun at the New York Yankees. He turned that into a book, “The Devil Wears Pinstripes.” He also co-wrote the book “Best Boston Sports Arguments” with fellow sportswriter Steve Buckley and penned a novel, “The Navigator,” which was based in part on his father, who was a B-24 navigator in World War II.

…

Former colleague and fellow baseball writer Jerry Crasnick recalled Caple as “one of the most brilliant, creative and thoughtful people I’ve ever met” in a poignant social media post. He also recalled Caple’s offbeat side, including stories of getting a pedicure with figure skater Johnny Weir and participating in the International Wife Carrying championships with Vicki.

Posted in Media, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 2, 2023.

Monday, October 2nd, 2023

Lucy Morgan, Florida journalist. She wasn’t someone I had heard of before, but the obit (which I encourage you to read) makes her sound fascinating.

She specialized in uncovering political corruption. In 1973, she went to jail because she refused to reveal her source for grand jury proceedings.

In 1976, the Florida Supreme Court overturned previous rulings against Ms. Morgan and expanded press privileges in Florida, setting a precedent that local reporters still cite.

She shared a Pulitzer (with Jack Reed) for exposing the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.

Ms. Morgan’s reporting showed, among other things, that one in eight officers in Pasco County had criminal arrest records, and that more than half had lied about their pasts to get certified. One officer had an outstanding grand theft arrest warrant for stealing a police dog in another Florida county. Another had been the wheel man in several armed robberies.

She also exposed the sheriff of Gulf County, who got sent to prison for extorting oral sex from female inmates.

After the sheriff was found guilty of seven counts of violating the civil rights of female prisoners, Ms. Morgan returned to her office and found a dozen roses with a note: “From the women you believed.”

…

When she was about 60, she shattered her right ankle in the Florida House press gallery. But she continued limping around the Capitol building, bringing a fog of Trésor Eau de Parfum with her wherever she went. She greeted the legislators, lobbyists and maintenance people she knew not by asking, “How are you?” but instead calling out, “You doin’ somethin’ bad?”

…

Her investigations exposed widespread misreporting of gifts to state politicians, indicating that many of them should be charged with criminal misdemeanors. They also exposed what Ms. Morgan herself nicknamed the “Taj Mahal” scandal, which involved slipping an appropriation of more than $30 million for a luxurious courthouse into unrelated transportation legislation at the last minute.

Russ Francis, former tight end for the Patriots and 49ers, was killed in a plane crash on Sunday. Also killed was Richard McSpadden, a vice-president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).

It appears they were taking off from Lake Placid Airport and there was some sort of problem. Reports say they tried to make it back to the airport but couldn’t.

Mr. Francis, in additional to a successful NFL career (first round NFL draft pick, three time Pro Bowl player) was also an avid pilot. He’d recently bought an interest in Lake Placid Airways, a local charter and scenic flight service.

Mr. McSpadden, in addition to being an AOPA VP, was a former commander and flight leader for the Thunderbirds.

Tim Wakefield, former Boston Red Sox pitcher (and a past winner of the Roberto Clemente Award). Cancer got him at 57.

Chris Snow, of the Calgary Flames. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, and passed away after a “catastrophic brain injury”.

Posted in Media, NFL, Obits, Planes, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 20, 2023.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2023

I didn’t find out about this until late last night, so I’m a bit behind. Apologies.

Two pilots, Nick Macy and Chris Rushing, were killed in an accident at the Reno Air Races on Sunday.

According to the reports I’ve read, both pilots had been competing in what’s called the “Gold Race” in the T-6 Class. The race had completed, and the pilots were in the post-race recovery period when they collided in mid-air.

Preliminary analysis from the Air Safety Institute. Reno Gazette Journal coverage. As the linked articles note, the remainder of the races was cancelled after the crash: this was the last year for the Reno Air Races in their current form.

Buddy Teevens, football coach at Dartmouth. He was badly injured in a bicycle accident in March, and died of complications from his injuries.

JoAnne Epps, acting president of Temple University. She was attending a memorial service when she collapsed. Ms. Epps was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

James Hoge, noted journalist.

Few editors at major American newspapers have been as young as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the top at The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid aimed at a working-class readership. He became the city editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and publisher at 44.
He shook up the staff, strove for sprightlier writing and, like other newspaper editors in the 1970s, introduced new sections on business, food and fashion. “I am always agitating,” he said.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two each for feature photography and criticism and one each for spot news reporting (concerning violence by young radicals in Chicago) and local news reporting (on new evidence in the 1966 murder, still unsolved, of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).

He was also behind the Mirage Tavern investigation, and went on to become publisher of the New York Daily News and the journal Foreign Affairs.

Aware that some council members fretted over his tabloid background, he had some fun with them, offering a mock magazine cover with the model Cindy Crawford and teasers like “sexiest ethnic rivalries.”

Roger Whittaker, British musician.

Burning in Hell watch: Billy Chemirmir. I’d never heard of him, but he was convicted twice of capital murder, and was suspected of 20 more murders. His MO seems to have been smothering old folks.

Most of Chemirmir’s alleged victims lived in apartments at independent living communities for older people. The women he’s accused of killing in private homes include the widow of a man he had cared for while working as an at-home caregiver.

You could also classify this as part of the “fool around and find out” watch:

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2023.

Friday, August 18th, 2023

I haven’t done any obits for the past few days, for reasons I don’t want to go into here.

But a few people have sent me some, and it would be rude not to acknowledge them.

Sir Michael Parkinson, British talk show host. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Darren Kent, actor. IMDB. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Les Misérables” (the TV series), and “C.O.O.L.I.O Time Travel Gangster”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Paul Brodeur, longtime New Yorker writer.

Mr. Brodeur also reported on the possible dangers of radiation from microwave ovens, computer terminals and electromagnetic power lines. But this reporting was not as widely accepted as his work on asbestos and CFCs.
In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences found little to no evidence of any risk from power-line radiation. Other studies have been far from conclusive. (Mr. Brodeur noted, however, that the World Health Organization classified microwave radiation from cellphones to be a possible carcinogen.)

James L. Buckley, former Senator from New York (and brother of William F. Buckley Jr.).

Posted in Media, Obits, Politics, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: July 25, 2023.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.

Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.

Mr. Callaway and his company were well known in the world of high-performance automobiles custom-made for deep-pocketed clients. He began by modifying cars out of his garage, then established his company in Old Lyme, Conn., with the goal of challenging European manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari, which were then making the world’s fastest vehicles.

…

“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”

…

In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.

The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ampersand Publishing LLC, the entity that owns the paper, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, on Friday, with estimated assets of up to $50,000 and liabilities between $1,000,001 and $10 million, according to court records. The bankruptcy was approved by the LLC on May 1, with Wendy McCaw, who has owned the paper since 2000, as the authorized agent.

…

The News-Press has published for more than 150 years, but it has undergone years of turbulence since McCaw bought it from The New York Times Co. In 2006, six editors and a columnist resigned in protest of interference from McCaw in the editorial process. The was followed by an exodus of dozens of additional staffers, as well as a vote by remaining newsroom employees to unionize with the Teamsters.

Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.

Posted in Cars, Media, Obits, Radio, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 18, 2023.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2023

Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.

Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.

Bold and daring in his ideas, Professor Frankfurt was somewhat aloof in style, with a dry wit and a strenuous aversion to pomposity. When asked what had inspired his interest in Descartes, the subject of his first book, “Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen” (1970), he admitted that he had liked that Descartes’s books were short.

For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.

Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.

Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.

Posted in Books, Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | 1 Comment »

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