Obit watch: December 3, 2021.

December 3rd, 2021

Alvin Lucier, “experimental composer”.

In “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Mr. Lucier began by quietly reading a short statement describing what he is doing. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now,” the text begins. “I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.”
The room’s acoustics, as well as audio distortions that occur when a tape is rerecorded over and over, yields a gradually changing sound in which, after 10 minutes, the spoken text is buried in reverberation and overtones, and unintelligible. During the final section, high-pitched overtones coalesce into eerie, slow-moving melodies.

I used to have a CD of “I Am Sitting in a Room”, back when I was in my “difficult listening” phase. It was not something I spent a lot of time listening to, though I was happy to have it.

(See also.)

NYT obit for Curley Culp.

Eddie Mekka. Most famous as Carmine Ragusa on “Laverne & Shirley”. Other credits include guest shots on “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, and one of the “Rockford Files” TV movies.

Posted in 1970s, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Christmas trivia.

December 3rd, 2021

Not too long ago, I found a used DVD of “The Detective” at Half-Price Books.

“The Detective” is a movie I’m kind of interested in, and I only paid $5 for the DVD. It is based on a novel by Roderick Thorp, and stars Frank Sinatra as a NYPD detective named Joe Leland.

Most of what I’ve read about the movie says that it was well regarded: it was praised for being a more mature approach to movies about police work, as well as dealing with non-mainstream subjects. (And check out that supporting cast.)

I think I’m going to end up watching it by myself, as I suspect it will be a tough sell to the Saturday Night Movie Group. (We’ve already watched one Sinatra detective film, “Tony Rome”, which was…not great.)

What does this have to do with Christmas?

In 1979, 13 years later, Roderick Thorp published a sequel to The Detective called Nothing Lasts Forever, also featuring Joe Leland (affiliate links). By this time, Detective Leland has retired from the NYPD, and decides to go visit his daughter in Los Angeles for Christmas.

While he is waiting for his daughter’s Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton “Little Tony the Red” Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorism conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Aided outside only by Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and armed with only his police-issue pistol, Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, and his daughter and grandchildren.

Yeah, you guessed it. As I understand it, there were initially discussions about having Frank Sinatra play Joe Leland again (he was 64 when the book came out) but he turned the role down, and they eventually wound up with Bruce Willis. Also, the book sounds like it is a lot darker, just based on the Wikipedia summary.

Two of Thorp’s other novels were adapted for film, but none of those is set in the Die Hard Cinematic Universe (DHCU). (“Rainbow Drive” sounds like it could be interesting, but it is hard to find.) Thorp died in 1999.

And now you know…the rest of the story.

Because it’s just not Christmas until we see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Christmas, Movies | 1 Comment »

Firing watch.

December 2nd, 2021

Steve Addazio done at Colorado State.

4-12 in two seasons: 1-3 in 2020, 3-9 in 2021. They lost the final six games this season, including getting beat 52-10 by Nevada last week. And Addazio was ejected from that game in the second quarter.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 1, 2021.

December 1st, 2021

This is a couple of days old, but I was waiting for an obit from a reliable source: Jim Warren, one of the early figures in personal computing.

In the 1970s, Mr. Warren was a leading figure in the community that sprung up in the San Francisco Bay Area around the emerging personal computer industry.
He was a regular at monthly meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyist who gathered to share ideas, design tips and gossip. He was the editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, an irreverent yet influential publication in that nascent field.

…

Computer conferences, where these fledgling companies showed off their wares, were just beginning to emerge when, in 1977, Mr. Warren staged the West Coast Computer Faire (the spelling a playful nod to the medieval spectacles of Elizabethan England). He calculated that the event, a two-day affair at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, might break even if it could attract 60 exhibitors and perhaps 7,000 people.
But to his surprise nearly 13,000 people showed up, and the lines of people waiting to get in circled the building.

…

His interest in the social and political impact of computer technology continued later in his life. In 1991, Mr. Warren founded and chaired the first Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, an annual academic gathering.
In 1993, he worked on a California law — a model for other states — that required most computerized public records to be freely available. He conferred with legislators, rallied public support and even drafted some of the law’s language.

Mark Roth, pro bowler. Noted here because:

Roth’s most famous spare — knocking down the remaining pins with the second bowl thrown in a frame — was during a tournament in 1980 in Alameda, Calif. He became the first bowler to convert the notoriously difficult 7-10 split — knocking down the two pins in the opposite corners of the back row — on national television.

Adolfo, Nancy Reagan’s designer.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 30, 2021.

November 30th, 2021

Arlene Dahl, actress, “author, beauty expert, astrologist, and fashion and cosmetics entrepreneur”.

47 credits in IMDB, but I wanted to call this out because of her resume, and because that’s a nice photo at the top of the NYT obit.

Tommy Lane, actor and stuntman. Acting credits include the original “Shaft” “Live and Let Die”, and “Cotton Comes to Harlem”.

David Gulpilil, Australian actor. (“Crocodile Dundee”, “Walkabout”, “The Right Stuff”, among other credits.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 29, 2021.

November 29th, 2021

Curley Culp.

He was a Hall of Fame player, first with the Kansas City Chiefs (in both the AFL and NFL) then with the Houston Oilers (1974-1980) and finally with Detroit.

Culp made six Pro Bowls, and in 1975, after he’d moved on to the Houston Oilers, he was named the NFL defensive player of the year. He played 14 seasons during stops with the Chiefs, Oilers and Lions, recording 68 1/2 career sacks. He had 37 of those in Kansas City, a integral figure in a dominant defense that included several Hall of Famers — Buck Buchanan, Bobby Bell, Willie Lanier, Johnny Robinson and Emmitt Thomas.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Why, is this not Hell? And are we not already in it?

November 29th, 2021

British fans of an Oasis tribute band spent the weekend confined to a remote Yorkshire pub with the group when a mountain of snow trapped them all in the bar.

…

Local authorities said it was not safe to travel, so 61 stranded pub-goers and employees hunkered down and spent the night, the paper said.
The conditions did not improve, so the shut-ins also slept in the pub on Saturday and were preparing to sleep over again on Sunday amid howling winds and swirling snow, according to the report.
Off-roaders and a mountain rescue group were able to transport several people out of the bar to attend to medical and family situations, but most patrons didn’t look back in anger and made the best of the situation with cold beer, a warm fire and plenty of “Wonderwall” singalongs, the article said.

Posted in Bagatelle, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 27, 2021.

November 27th, 2021

Stephen Sondheim. THR (I love the Meryl Streep “don’t f–k it up” story). Variety.

I am not the person who should be writing this. I am hoping that the person who should be writing this will send me something I can use here.

But what little I know about musical theater, I know because Mike the Musicologist introduced me to it…by playing me lots of Sondheim’s work.

NYT interview conducted last Sunday. It sounds like he was in full possession of his facilities until the end, and didn’t have any more complaints than the average 91 year old would.

MtM sent me this last night. I confess, I haven’t watched all of it yet (it is over two hours). But: this is the complete original production of “Pacific Overtures“, recorded on June 9, 1976 for broadcast in Japan.

“Pacific is, I think, the least appreciated of Sondheim’s shows, and is probably his most brilliant one.”

I often say, when people die, that the world is a smaller, colder, lesser place. I mean that: there are people whose contributions are so great or important or enlightening or just so much damn fun that, when they die, they leave a hole in the world. Richard Feynman. Ricky Jay. Stephen Sondheim.

Posted in Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 26, 2021.

November 26th, 2021

Noah Gordon.

He was an American writer. His first book, The Rabbi, was on the NYT bestseller list for 26 weeks in the 1960s. His other books didn’t do as well, in the United States…

…but he was a huge bestseller overseas.

Mr. Gordon’s “The Physician” (1986) — the first book in a dynastic trilogy that began in 11th-century Persia, continued during the American Civil War with “Shaman” (1992) and ended with a modern woman doctor dealing with the morality of abortion in “Matters of Choice” (1996) — had an initial print run of only 10,000 copies in the United States.
But it eventually sold some 10 million copies, including more than six million in Germany, where, in the 1990s, six of Mr. Gordon’s novels were on best-seller lists simultaneously.
In 2013, “The Physician” was adapted into a German film, in English, starring Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard and Ben Kingsley. An award-winning musical based on the book is about to tour Spain.

…

“While Gordon has been published in 38 countries, Spain and Germany, where he is most popular, are two countries that grapple with a history of anti-Semitism,” Andrew Silverstein wrote in The Forward this year. “While not all of Gordon’s eight books have Jewish themes, most do, and his Jewishness is well known, which may play a role in his popularity in these two countries.”
Mr. Gordon won Spain’s Silver Basque Prize twice for best-selling book, in 1992 and 1995. His novels were also popular in Italy and Brazil.

I read the Kindle sample of The Death Committee before I went to bed last night, and…it was interesting enough that I’m tempted to purchase the book.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 12, 2021.

November 26th, 2021

With all due respect to my friends and readers who are Lions fans, as I always say, “It’s just not Thanksgiving until Detroit loses.”

(Just kidding. I’m fond of all of you.)

(According to the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, Detroit’s Thanksgiving day record is 37-42-2, though that does not include yesterday’s game. That’s better than I would have thunk. For the record, Dallas is 31-21-1, again not including yesterday’s game.)

Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance to go without a win this year:

Detroit

Next week: Minnesota in Detroit on Sunday, December 5th. The Vikings are currently 5-5.

(Dallas and New Orleans, both of whom played yesterday, play on Thursday, December 2nd next week. Nothing wrong with that, I just find the scheduling interesting.)

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 25th, 2021

Last year, some jerk wrote:

I was hoping that Pan Am would have done “Wings to Turkey”, or something similar. But, alas, no.

From those wonderful folks at Pan Am, by way of Periscope Films, “Wings to Turkey”.

This has a date stamp of January 2018 in the ‘Tube, but I swear it was not there when I went looking last year.

Also, please note that the 707 lands in Istanbul, not Constantinople.

Speaking of Turkish delight:

“C.S. Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight“.

And I don’t want to skip the significance of this holiday, so:

(Explained.)

Posted in Food, History, Travel | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: November 24, 2021.

November 24th, 2021

Ian Fishback. He was 42.

Major Fishback was one of three former members of the 82nd Airborne who said soldiers in their battalion had systematically abused prisoners by assaulting them, exposing them to extreme temperatures, stacking them in human pyramids and depriving them of sleep to compel them to reveal intelligence — or, in some cases, simply to amuse the soldiers. He said his complaints were ignored by his superiors for 17 months.

I wanted to note this because the circumstances seem particularly sad to me:

His family said in a statement that the cause had not been determined. He died in an adult foster care facility, the climax to a distinguished but abbreviated career that the family said had begun to unravel as a result of neurological damage or post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was admitted to the facility following court-ordered treatment with anti-psychotic drugs after he had become delusional and created public disturbances, his family said.

I’m reminded of a story I read several years ago about a young Green Beret who had a distinguished service record. Until he started going downhill: showing up late, not showing up at all, other issues which ultimately led to him being dishonorably discharged from the Army. He kept going downhill, was eventually institutionalized, and finally died. After his death, it was determined that he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (possibly picked up from eating sheep brains and eyeballs in the field with indigenous personnel). His family petitioned to have his discharge upgraded to honorable, and I believe they were eventually successful.

Peter Buck, co-founder of Subway.

Margo Guryan. I’d never heard of her, but this is another one of those stories with a hook. She was a talented musician and songwriter who, in 1968, released an album called “Take a Picture”. The album tanked, in large part because she wouldn’t tour…

Yet somehow decades later, with the digital age facilitating both word of mouth and the sharing of music, adventurous listeners discovered it — first in Japan, then in Europe, and finally in the United States, where in 2000 Franklin Castle Recordings rereleased it, followed the next year by “25 Demos,” a collection of other recordings of hers. Ms. Guryan, who by then was in her 60s and had settled into an anonymous career teaching music, had an unexpected burst of something resembling fame.
“It’s still amazing to me to have something resurface after 30 years,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “People say I’ve been rediscovered. It’s not true — I’ve been discovered.”

NYT obit for Malikah Shabazz.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Memo from the legal beat.

November 24th, 2021

I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.

Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:

…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.

What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.

Ms. Sebold used a fictitious name for Mr. Broadwater in her memoir, identifying him as Gregory Madison.

Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:

After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.

…

In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.

Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:

Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.

He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.

Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.

Posted in Books, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 23, 2021.

November 23rd, 2021

Lou Cutell, actor. Other than “Seinfeld” and “Gray’s Anatomy”, he did a few cop shows, including “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “T.J. Hooker”, “Barney Miller”, and the really obscure 1989 “Dragnet”. He also appeared on “Alice” and “The Bob Newhart Show”.

Malikah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter. She was only 56.

Bill Virdon, noted player and manager.

He remained with the Pirates through 1965, managed for the Mets in the minors, then returned to Pittsburgh as a player-coach in 1968, his last playing season. He became the Pirates’ manager in 1972, taking them to the National League East title, but was fired late the following season.

He also managed the Yankees for a time, until he was fired by Steinbrenner (“…though he was not supposed to be involved with running the team”, being under suspension at the time) in favor of…Billy Martin.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

The Giants Have Fallen.

November 23rd, 2021

Well, okay, just one Giant.

Jason Garrett, who you may remember for his time coaching the Dallas Cowboys, out as offensive coordinator of the New York Football Giants.

The Giants offense averaged just 18 points per game with Garrett at the helm and was ranked No. 30 in the NFL ahead of just the Jets and Jaguars during that time.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

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