This isn’t quite an obit, but Mike the Musicologist sent it to me a few days ago, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to use it: a tribute to Phil Schreier. (Previously.)
Rob Hirst, drummer for Midnight Oil.
As I’ve observed before, if our Earth isn’t turning, our ability to dance will be the smallest of our possible problems. And if our beds are burning and we want to sleep…maybe get a hotel room? Or a fire extinguisher?
Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.
(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)
Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.
Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.
When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.
She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.
T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.
Erich von Däniken, crank.
Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.
It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)
…
Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”
(Did you know that “A Flock of Seagulls” (the first album) was a concept album about alien abduction? At least, that’s what Genius says.)
I am not an expert in geopolitics. I am especially not an expert in Iranian politics. Lawrence can probably point you in the right direction on that front.
But, back when I was attending St. Ed’s and studying “Modern Revolutions” with Dr. Sanchez, she had us read Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country by Shirin Ebadi.
(Actually, Dr. Sanchez just asked us to read the first half of the book. I read the whole thing, because I’m an overachiever. Also, I liked Dr. Sanchez – not in that way, she was already married – and wanted to impress her.)
Anyway, one thing vividly stood out to me from that book.
Dr. Ebadi was a judge form 1969 forward, during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi. She describes the elation she, and her friends, felt at the Revolution, and how happy they were to see the Shah deposed and the new regime come in.
A week later, the new bosses called her into the office.
They told her, “Women can’t be judges in Islam. You can either be a janitor or a librarian.”
Point being: be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.
This is a couple of days old, but it got past me because the weekend was busy: May Britt.
She had a career as an actress, including the original “Mission: Impossible” and the 1959 “The Blue Angel”. She married Sammy Davis Jr. in 1960.
There was a lot of backlash at the time, and the marriage pretty much cost Ms. Britt her career.
Chris Rea, musician. I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work, but back in the day when I listened to the radio, KGSR would play “Texas”. I thought that was a pretty swell song.
And it is Christmas, right?
Joe Ely, one of the great Texas musicians. Variety. NYT (wow!).
I’m generally a little cynical about Texas musicians, but even I have to acknowledge that he was one of the greats. And I could just post YouTube videos all day.
This isn’t an Ely original, but I prefer this to Robert Earl Keen. That is a controversial opinion, I know.
Lawrence describes this as the greatest song ever written about a fighting rooster. Can’t argue with that.
Interestingly, he was an early adopter: he had a BBS system, back in the day when BBS systems were a thing.
…
He was 78.
Anthony Geary, actor. Other credits include “UHF”, “Project U.F.O.”, “Shaft” (the TV series)…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. He was “Eddie Decken”.)
Three obits today for people who aren’t as notable as usual, but who I find interesting for one reason or another.
Stephen Downing. He was a police officer with the LAPD. One day he picked up the phone at the precinct.
Jack Webb was on the other end of the line. He was looking for a technical advisor for “Adam-12”.
Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”
He continued to write scripts (under pen names) while still working for the LAPD.
…
IMDB.
Donald McIntyre, opera singer.
The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.
I don’t get to use my “Wagner” tag enough. But anyway:
By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”
There’s something to be said for that.
George Altman, baseball player. He was one of only three people who played in the Negro Leagues, MLB, and in Japan. (Don Newcombe and Larry Doby are the other two.)
At Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University), he played basketball and baseball. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in physical education, he landed a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team managed by Buck O’Neil.
Altman took batting practice with the Monarchs before one of their games.
“Evidently I must have impressed them a little bit because as I was getting comfortable on the bench, sitting back to just enjoy the game, Buck came up to me and said, ‘Boy, you’re in there,’” Altman wrote. “It almost scared me to death.”
…
After three months with the Monarchs, he signed with the Cubs and was assigned to the Burlington Bees, in Iowa, in the minor leagues. He was drafted into the Army in 1956, and then rejoined the Cubs organization in 1958. He was promoted to the major leagues the next year.
“The thing I like about Altman is the fact that he knows where the strike zone is,” [Ernie] Banks told The Sporting News in 1959. “That’s one thing most young ballplayers don’t know about. They swing at anything they can reach with the bat. Altman waits for his pitch.”
In need of pitching, the Cubs traded Altman to the Cardinals in 1962. St. Louis traded him to the Mets the next year, and the Mets traded him back to the Cubs before the 1965 season. By then, he was struggling with injuries, once joking that he played for Blue Cross.
After Altman hit just .111 in 15 games in 1967, his career in the majors was over. Unwilling to quit playing, he joined the Tokyo Orions in Japan. During seven seasons with the team, he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases.
Several people sent me obits for Steve Cropper, of Booker T. and the MG’s, and the Blues Brothers.
…
Mr. Cropper achieved further acclaim in the late 1970s for his work with the Blues Brothers, the musical side project of the “Saturday Night Live” co-stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. By then, Stax had closed, having fallen into insolvency in 1975, and Mr. Cropper had begun immersing himself in freelance session and production work with artists like Art Garfunkel and Ringo Starr.
“Briefcase Full of Blues,” the Blues Brothers’ first album, included a remake of “Soul Man,” complete with a reprise of the shout “Play it, Steve!” from Mr. Belushi on the chorus. The single reached No. 14 on the pop chart in 1979, anticipating the release of the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers,” starring Mr. Belushi and Mr. Aykroyd and featuring Mr. Cropper as Steve “the Colonel” Cropper, who plays in a band called Murph and the Magic Tones. (Born of Mr. Cropper’s tendency to take charge of situations, the Colonel was a childhood nickname that stuck with him even after he established himself as a musician.)
Here’s a blast from the past for you: Eugene Hasenfus.
“Eugene who?”
Yeah, that’s what Ronald Reagan said.
Mr. Hasenfus emerged out of obscurity on Oct. 5, 1986, when a missile fired by troops fighting for Nicaragua’s leftist government downed his plane while it was on a run to drop arms to right-wing rebel forces, known as contras, who were seeking to overthrow the country’s leaders.
The pilot, co-pilot and radio operator of the plane — a twin-engine turboprop of 1950s vintage — died in its fiery crash in a patch of jungle in southern Nicaragua. Mr. Hasenfus, who had been responsible for packing and dropping the arms, was the lone survivor.
An experienced skydiver and the only crewman with a parachute, he had leaped from the cargo compartment, which had been blasted open by the missile, as the aircraft began plummeting to earth.
He was captured and put on trial.
While awaiting his trial, Mr. Hasenfus told the CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace for a segment of “60 Minutes” that when he joined the mission, he believed that he was working for the C.I.A. Asked what an average American would think about the shoot-down, he replied, “He’s going to make that the government is backing this 100 percent, and that’s what I believe, too.”
President Ronald Reagan’s administration initially denied any American involvement in the flight. Those denials began unraveling when it was reported that the cargo plane belonged to Southern Air Transport, a charter carrier based in Miami that was formerly owned by the C.I.A.
Mr. Hasenfus’s capture led to investigations by Congress and by an independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, and ultimately to revelations that the administration, defying Congress, had illegally sold arms to Iran and used some of the proceeds to secretly support the contras. The scandal shadowed the Reagan administration and later the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who was Mr. Reagan’s vice president before succeeding him in 1989.
…
275 credits in IMDB, including “Iron Sky: The Coming Race”, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”, and “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated”.
Lee Tamahori, New Zealand director who went on to a Hollywood career. IMDB.
I never saw any of his Hollywood films. But I did see “Once Were Warriors” in a theater, and it blew me away. I highly recommend that, but be warned: it isn’t a light and happy movie.
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who was also known as H. Rap Brown.
Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.
An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he preached armed resistance and separatism, declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners.
Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.
He had a long history of “involvement”, so to speak, with law enforcement.
Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.
Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.
By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam. By his account, he had become a new man with a new name. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice, and publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions of his youth.
He was convicted of shooting two sheriff’s deputies – killing one – in 2000, and died in a federal medical center.
The archiving service I use has been having issues all day, so I’m going to put this up without some links. If they fix the problems in the next day or two, I’ll go back and add them.
Kanchha Sherpa has passed away at the age of 92. (Paywalled link. Sorry.) He was the last surviving member of the Hillary-Norgay team that climbed Mount Everest.
…
Ace Frehley, of KISS. NYT (share link, should be free).
I don’t have much to say about Mr. Frehley, and I feel a little bad. But I was never a fan of Knights In Satan’s Service.
Susan Stamberg, NPR host famous for her “cranberry relish” recipe. Recipe here. NYT (non-archived, paywalled link. Sorry.)
American Handgunner, the print edition. The brand is going to continue in the form of online “newsletters”, and I think Guns is still going to be around.
But to me, this is awful news. AH is one of the few gun magazines I subscribed to, and I’m not sure if signing up for all the newsletters will get me the content I want. Sure, Dr. Dabbs will still be around, but what about the “Ayoob Files” and Ayoob’s monthly column? Will the “Guncrank Diaries” still exist? If not, who’s going to tell me stories, like the one about Elon Musk’s dad killing three cannibals with two bullets? And what if I want to go back and refer to something? The website is a little skirty about pulling up older articles, even if you are a paid subscriber.
I think I understand the reasons, and I still support the AH staff. But the older I get, the more change stinks.
This is a story that’s mostly local, but it pushes enough of my buttons to document here.
“Razed”.
I can’t tell if the two halls are connected to the Mirage, or if they are stand-alone entities.
Who?
This is the part that got me.
“unsteady, combustible, illegal, and no place to put 6,000 people”. Sounds like somebody messed up badly. Or else they didn’t bribe the right people.
Yes, I would imagine that not being able to open would be “catastrophic”.
…
All of these problems make me think there’s one thing going on…
Jane Goodall has passed away. She was 91.
It goes against my usual policy, but here’s a NYT obit from today that seems pretty comprehensive. I’ll try to post an updated version tomorrow if it is justified.
NYT obit for Thomas Perry. Fun fact I didn’t know: he and his wife worked as TV writers and producers. Credits include “Simon and Simon”, “Snoops”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
Viv Prince, drummer for the Pretty Things. I’d never heard of the Pretty Things (pigpen51?) but the paper of record describes them as a “ruder, cruder version of the Rolling Stones”. And the obit is entertaining, especially if you’re a fan of Spinal Tap.
An appreciation published in The Guardian after his death unearthed a 1965 interview with Mr. Prince from Record Mirror, the British music newspaper, in which he was grilled about his antics with the band during a scorched-earth tour of New Zealand that year.
In the interview, Mr. Prince denied lighting fires onstage but did admit to sabotaging a performance by the teen idol Eden Kane by laying carpet onstage while Mr. Kane was performing. “Everyone was digging it,” Mr. Prince said.
And he addressed news accounts that he had released live crayfish in an airport lounge. “The fish were dead when we bought them,” he said. “They always are. How on earth can dead fish run around?”
Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor and a good Cleveland boy.
…
…
Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra is the youngest of the so-called Big Five — the cohort of high-wattage American ensembles that also includes the Boston and Chicago symphonies, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Dohnanyi was only the sixth music director to serve in Cleveland, succeeding Lorin Maazel, who had in turn succeeded Szell, whose masterful, iron-fisted quarter-century tenure was considered chiefly responsible for the orchestra’s impeccable sheen, precision and transparency.
Mr. Dohnanyi was widely credited with having restored that sheen, which many reviewers described as having coarsened during the Maazel years. He was also lauded for his tightly disciplined yet strikingly democratic control of the orchestra’s musicians, among the most skilled in the world: “this Rolls-Royce of orchestras,” he called the ensemble.
Under his stewardship, the Cleveland Orchestra attracted younger audience members, recorded prolifically and commissioned new works from the German composer Matthias Pintscher, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg and the American Philip Glass, among many others.
Rick Davies, of Supertramp.
Mark Volman, of the Turtles.
Tom Shipley, of Brewer & Shipley.
Ruth Paine, historical footnote. She rented her home in suburban Dallas to Marina Oswald and her husband, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Dr. David Baltimore, Nobel prize winning biologist.
Dr. Baltimore was only 37 when he made his Nobel-winning discovery, upending what was called the central dogma, which stated that information in cells flowed in only one direction — from DNA to RNA to the synthesis of proteins. Dr. Baltimore showed that information can also flow in the reverse direction, from RNA to DNA. The key was finding a viral enzyme, called a transcriptase, that reversed the process.
The discovery led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V., that use this enzyme. Today, gene therapies with disabled retroviruses are used to insert good genes into patients’ DNA to correct genetic diseases.
…
…a decade after his Nobel, Dr. Baltimore found himself ensnared in a scandal and the subject of attacks that tested his resolve and resilience.
It began when a postdoctoral fellow, Margot O’Toole, accused a researcher, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, of misreporting data in a paper that was published in the journal Cell. Dr. Baltimore was an author of that paper, although the work was not done in his lab.
The case escalated, with investigations by the National Institutes of Health and the Secret Service, which conducted a forensic study of Dr. Imanishi-Kari’s notebooks. There were also contentious hearings led by the Michigan Democrat John Dingell Jr., who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As a Nobel laureate, Dr. Baltimore became fodder for the case; he held his ground, standing up to Mr. Dingell in hearings and insisting that there had been no fraud…
Dr. Baltimore and Dr. Imanishi-Kari were finally vindicated in 1996, when an appeals panel found the accusations of fraud unfounded. But, Dr. Baltimore said, the case had taken its toll.
“I will never be able to forget it,” he said in an interview at the time. He said he had kept all the front-page New York Times articles about the accusations in his basement, unread, hoping someday to have the stomach to look at them.
Jacques Charrier. I want to make an argument that he was the luckiest man in the world. He was a huge movie star in France in the late 1950s.
So why was he lucky? He married Brigitte Bardot. Then again, he may not have been that lucky: Ms. Bardot does not come across well in the obituary.
…
“WKRP” was a great show, and she was a big part of what made it great. (“And, as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.” Yes, Jennifer was smart, and I’d even agree deceptively smart. But “smartest person in the room”? Hello, Bailey Quarters. Hello, Venus Flytrap. That’s another one of the things that made “WKRP” great: multiple smart people.)
Edited to add: I probably should have put in an IMDB link. Especially since Lawrence asked:
Who is killing the cast of “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”?
Rahaman Ali. Long time readers know I don’t like covering people just because of their relationship with other famous people. But Mr. Ali has an interesting story.
He was Muhammad Ali’s brother.
Rahaman Ali was a promising amateur boxer who won his first professional fight in an undercard bout the same evening that his brother beat Liston to become the world heavyweight champion. Rahaman went on to earn a middling record of 10 wins, three losses and one draw. He retired after a technical knockout in 1972.
Several figures from the brothers’ youth later said in interviews that Rahaman Ali had been a clever, coachable fighter who just lacked Muhammad’s charisma. When a group of Louisville businessmen got together to sponsor Muhammad, then known as Cassius Clay, they left Rahaman, then Rudy Clay, out of the deal. (The two brothers changed their names and joined the Nation of Islam around the same time in the early 1960s.)
He gave up his career to become part of Muhammad’s entourage, serving as “chauffeur, sparring partner, gofer, chef and cornerman”. Also human wristwatch, because Muhammad wouldn’t wear one: he’d just ask Rahaman for the time.
In 1990, speaking to The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Rahaman Ali expressed regret for not having focused on his own boxing career.
After his own bouts, “Muhammad never said, ‘Good fight, good fight, Rahaman,’” Rahaman said. “I feel he could have come back and congratulated me.”
…
Mr. Eig wrote that though Muhammad Ali had once promised always to provide for his brother, Rahaman had begun to live in poverty after a falling-out with Lonnie, Muhammad’s fourth and final wife.
He was sometimes described showing up to Ali Center events attended by his brother yet hardly speaking to him, instead wandering around to introduce himself as “Muhammad Ali’s brother.” Mr. Eig described one such occasion in 2015. Rahaman was not among the list of eminences who got a private audience with Muhammad. Afterward, he walked from table to table, collecting small decorative photographs of Muhammad and putting them into a shopping bag.
Flaco Jiménez, Tex-Mex accordion player. This isn’t my style of music, but even I’d heard of Flaco Jiménez. He was just that big a deal.
David Rendall, operatic tenor. I find this noteworthy because he had a series of…issues? Accidents?
In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told the British newspaper The Telegraph. He received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.
Before that he nearly killed his singing partner.
Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The New York Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Julian, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.
The remaining performances of the show sold out. Mr. Julian made a full recovery. Mr. Rendall was questioned by the police, but ultimately released.
Robert Wilson, “theater director, playwright and visual artist”, and a good Texas boy.
…
…
…
…
Mr. Wilson’s other notable collaborations include Euripides’s “Alcestis” (1986) with Laurie Anderson; “Cosmopolitan Greetings” (1988) with Allen Ginsberg; a Spirituals recital, “Great Day in the Morning” (1982), and stagings of Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” (1995) and Schubert’s “Winterreise” (2001) for the soprano Jessye Norman; “The Old Woman” (2013) with the choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the actor Willem Dafoe; and “Bach 6 Solo,” a staging of Bach’s unaccompanied violin works, played by Jennifer Koh and choreographed by Ms. Childs.
He also worked several times with Lady Gaga, including one work at the Louvre in Paris in 2013 involving what he called “Video Portraits” of her.
She was 31, and died in a climbing accident in Pakistan.
Tom Lehrer was wrong.
We did not all go together when we go. He went first.
Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.
…
The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”