Franco Zeffirelli.
Did everybody born after…1964? see “Romeo and Juliet” in high school? Or was that a limited local phenomenon?
Obit watch: June 15, 2019.
June 15th, 2019Obit watch: June 14, 2019.
June 14th, 2019Pat Bowlen, Denver Broncos owner. Not much to say about this, other than it will be interesting to watch the ownership situation play out. NYT. ESPN.
Anthony Price, British author of espionage novels. I had not heard of him before last week, but John le Carré praises his work highly in The Pigeon Tunnel.
Obit watch: June 13, 2019.
June 13th, 2019Sylvia Miles, noted actress. She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely”.
Gabriele Grunewald, competitive runner. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009, and continued her running career despite multiple recurrences.
She was 32.
NYT obit for Bill Wittliff.
Mary Max, wife of artist Peter Max.
Mr. Max, while still alive, apparently isn’t painting much these days. (I get the impression from the obit that he may have issues.) This led to an ugly legal dispute between Ms. Max (who was substantially younger than her husband) and Mr. Max’s son, who was trying to assert more control over his work.
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 surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Travel day.
June 12th, 2019This time, the trip is relatively short. (I’m actually driving.) I expect to be at my destination late morning or early afternoon, and may possibly have some time after I get there, unpack, and unwind.
Blogging will be catch as catch can through Sunday.
The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…
June 11th, 2019I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:
“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.
…
This is the kind of telling detail I look for:
(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)
Obit watch: June 11, 2019.
June 11th, 2019Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.
Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…
Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.
You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.
Noted:
Obit watch: June 10, 2019.
June 10th, 2019Nicky Barnes, the other (after Frank Lucas) legendary NYC heroin dealer of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I would use the “bad week for dope dealers” joke, but Mr. Barnes actually died in 2012: his death was not reported until late last week.
Mr. Barnes estimated that he had earned at least $5 million selling heroin in the several years before his 1977 conviction — income he had augmented by investing in travel agencies, gas stations, a chain of automated carwashes and housing projects in Cleveland and Pontiac, Mich. He also marketed something called a flake-burger, made from remnants of butchered beef.
By the time he audaciously agreed to be photographed for the cover of The Times Magazine and an article inside, he had a record of 13 arrests as an adult and no convictions.
Unfortunately, being profiled in the Times Magazine and called “Mister Untouchable” caused a certain amount of tsuris on the part of Jimmy Carter, who ordered the Justice Department to go all out after Mr. Barnes. In 1977, he was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
While he was imprisoned, though, his wife and former business parters took over his herion empire and began running it into the ground. Mr. Barnes ended up agreeing to testify against all of them, and was released from prison because of his cooperation in 1998.
After his release, Mr. Barnes entered the Witness Protection Program.
Because he was in witness protection, his death was not reported at the time. Apparently, it only came to light now because various people got to wondering what had happened to Mr. Barnes after Mr. Lucas died: Mr. Barnes’s daughters and anonymous sources confirmed his death.
David Bergland, 1984 Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
Firings watch.
June 8th, 2019The Houston Texans have fired general manager Brian Gaine.
Lawrence tipped me off to this and forwarded a link to Battle Red Blog, which uses the word “bonkers” to describe this. It does seem odd to me: the season hasn’t started, after all. But it makes more sense to fire him after the draft – especially if the draft was a bust – than to fire him before and leave a new GM scrambling.
But was the draft that bad for the Texans? Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t follow it closely.
Obit watch: June 7, 2019.
June 7th, 2019Malcolm John (Mac) Rebennack Jr.
You know him better as Dr. John.
Mr. Rebennack belonged to the pantheon of New Orleans keyboard wizards that includes Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey (Piano) Smith and Fats Domino. What distinguished him from his peers was the showmanship of his public persona.
Onstage as Dr. John, he adorned himself with snakeskin, beads and colorful feathers, and his shows blended Mardi Gras bonhomie with voodoo mystery.
He recorded more than 30 albums, including jazz projects (“Bluesiana Triangle,” 1990, with the drummer Art Blakey and the saxophonist David Newman), solo piano records (“Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack,” 1981) and his version of Afropop (“Locked Down,” 2012). His 1989 album of standards, “In a Sentimental Mood,” earned him the first of six Grammy Awards, for his duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee!”
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Not a historical note.
June 6th, 2019I really don’t have anything to say about the 75th anniversary of D-Day that I haven’t already said.
Borepatch has a couple of good posts up. Also worth noting: “D-Day + 75: Arms of the Airborne“. (Edited to add: Also, Lawrence.)
(When I win the $520 million in the MegaMillions drawing this coming Friday, I think the second full-auto gun I’m going to buy (after the Thompson) will be a vintage BAR. Or a Colt Monitor.)
Historical note.
June 4th, 2019I’ve written about this before, but I couldn’t let today pass without noting:
It is the 45th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.
Semi-oddly (I guess because it isn’t a big anniversary) there’s nothing about it on Cleveland.com today. Not seeing anything on MLB.com either, and DuckDuckGo doesn’t turn up a whole lot.
I did find this amusing (but old) article from ESPN.
Let us pause to remember. Cheap nasty beer is optional.
Obit watch: June 3, 2019.
June 3rd, 2019Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.
I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:
…
Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”
…
I love this, too:
During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
…
Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”
My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.
Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.
And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…
(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)
Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.
(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)
Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.
Obit watch: May 31, 2019.
May 31st, 2019Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.
Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.
The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…
Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.
And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.
Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.
Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.
I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)
Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.
Obit watch: May 30, 2019.
May 30th, 2019I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.
Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.
The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.
…
“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”
Obit watch: May 29, 2019.
May 29th, 2019Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)
He was only 60.
“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”