Dr. Morbius (Bill Weber) RIP

RIP Morbius. One of my favorite posters ever here.

thanks km

RIP Dr Morbs

Always true to himself.

It's good to see so many of you got the chance to spend time with him in the real world and have such great memories.

Aw man, this is such sad news. I always loved having an unabashed leftist like Morbs on the politics threads. This place will be diminished without him.

one of the more remarkable things about him hanging out with me at DJ gigs was that I was often playing Ableton techno/house sets to crowds of drunk 20-somethings like myself, and he didn't care much for the music I was playing...but he hung out with me anyway.

lol just remembered when he came to a DJ night i did in brooklyn - i played this house-y edit of "you make loving fun" and he came up to me and said "what are you DOING to fleetwood mac??"

hahah

lol

that's great

finally had a chance to read all of this, very touching

ahaha, excellent.

of all the ILXors to be a dependable supporter of various ILXor DJ nights, he's not the first person I would've thought of.

"what are you DOING to fleetwood mac??"

:D

What a loss.
Rest in peace, Morbs.

Terrible news. RIP Morbs.

I didn't interact all that much with Dr Morbius on ILX, but one of the threads we would both post on was the "fuck cancer" thread, a sentiment that remains as true as ever. RIP Morbs. Fuck this year.

it was only a few nights ago that I found myself looking at ilxor.com for the first time in a looooooong, loooooong time, and thought about dr. morbz; mentioned it to gr80 and he told me he wasn't well. then 36 hours later, this news.

we never really got along and it is clear to me I never really "got" the guy the way so many of you did, and I regret that. I think there was one time, maybe in toronto, where our paths almost crossed and he invited me to join some folks for drinks—all I could think was, I thought this guy hated me! why would I join him?

of course, like so many moments in my life I can think of... I was being an idiot.

loved reading everyone's remembrances. hope you are all reasonably well and healthy in this harrowing time.

Without going into much personal detail, my family and I just spent an agonizing five days awaiting some test results which, thankfully, came back negative. Got to spend the following day elated, and then this news came through. Fuck cancer.

The Salon headline about Pauline Kael has been floating in my head all day -- "A gift for effrontry." Morbs, more than just about anyone else here who wasn't an out-and-out troll, had that.

One of the greats!

I have many photos of Bill, but I ain't in them. But I love this one taken last year:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs36FvBH-nytYV77XjOvAmXqsSTMXR4Q2ZZ0AM0/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs36FvBH-nytYV77XjOvAmXqsSTMXR4Q2ZZ0AM0/

Private Account! (I don't even own an insta!)

I thought I did it right this time. Hold.

It might be easier sharing them via twitter, Alf. There is no sign in requirement like with insta.

Right. Here's my little obit to him, with said photo. It's not so fresh because I used a few lines here.

I wish I had talked to Dr Morbius more about Jack Benny

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Friday, 23 October 2020 3:18 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is reminding me to good look for those threads where he talked about old radio shows. There’s some absolute gold in there.

This has really ambushed me emotionally. I regret never meeting him in person, but Bill was one of the most fun people to argue with. I am going to miss his wit and crankiness. I had to post this here because you all are the ones who are going to understand.

I want to post a heart emoji here but I can feel his disapproval already

haha yeah i've been alternating between feeling mushy and rolling my eyes at myself all day.

I’m not much of a poster but have been lurking for 10+ years. He was among the most distinct and singular posters on this board, his voice was strong (and funny!) and he’s leaving a big void. I will miss him very much.

That's a really beautiful obit, Alfred.

I haven't been to the fuck cancer thread in awhile.

Reading his posts over there and, whew. Definitely not the same guy who once asked me how much I ejaculated whenever Obama gave a speech.

did he ever completely get through The Sopranos to the end? I used to think it very amusing that in the era of the binge-watch, that even years after acknowledging he liked it - he still seemed to be on season 2 or 3, bless him!

this is sad, I'm sorry to see this. I had no idea what his real name was, but I saw Ally post this on Twitter and I just now made the connection. Awful.

I love when I go to log some obscure '30s short subject on Letterboxd and see that Bill was among the single-digit number of people who've done likewise. It happens a lot. And I hope it continues to happen a lot.

― OrificeMax (Old Lunch), Thursday, October 22, 2020 10:16 AM bookmarkflaglink

same.

It was Halloween night, a Saturday, 2015. The Mets were playing Game 4 of the World Series at home against the Kansas City Royals. I didn't have tickets to the game, but I went to Citi Field just to check out the atmosphere. The New York Post was giving out free orange towels with Go Mets! written on them. I picked an extra one up for Bill, who I was meeting later at the Station Bar in Woodside, because he wanted to watch the game in Queens and watch the Mets in their natural habitat. When I met Bill, I proudly presented him the towel. He looked at it witheringly and scoffed, "Baseball fans don't wave rally towels!" He did not accept the gift. The Station Bar, which Bill had traveled over an hour from Brooklyn to get to, was boring and kind of sad that night (as it is most nights--I'm not sure why we picked it), so after a while we went to my local in Sunnyside, where he proceeded to bicker about baseball facts with a friend of mine. The Mets lost the game, 5-3, and the next night they lost the series. The Mets haven't made the World Series since then, though they did make the postseason the next year. I never again attempted to gift Bill a dreaded towel.

I often ran into Bill at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. I live nearby, but he took the messed up weekend trains, when delays and out-of-service lines extended and frustrated his travel time. Neither the journey nor the weather ever dissuaded him. I often saw him at MOMI on his second screening of the day, when he had come from Film Forum or MOMA or Lincoln Center. As others have said, he continued doing the things he loved even after his diagnosis, and I'm sure he saw at least double the movies I saw in theaters over the years. We lost touch in recent years, but I felt like he would always be traversing the city, hitting the revival film circuit, and I would run into him again, ready to be schooled on baseball, film, or any other topic. I lost my mom to cancer in 2013, and while she got longer than Bill, I can't get over the unfairness and sadness of this disease. Thanks to everyone who has shared memories--it's so nice to read about peoples' experiences. But how did I not know about Julius' Bar?

I just saw the news on Twitter and immediately came here. This is terrible. Thank you for these posts; they’re lovely. I was not close to him, on ilx or in life, but he always seemed so fully human in his posts here, so smart and so puzzling. Just want to echo some of you that I got my feelings hurt at his posts in politics threads at times, but he was right about everything, and I was an idiot.

What a good life he seems to have lived.

Nah, some of you are playing like it was loving fun and on your part it very clearly wasn't. There was real nasty, nasty shit aimed at Bill and it's self-serving to pretend there wasn't. I said you consciences should be heavy, but I have no reason to expect it will happen. Just expressing my disgust at some of the self-serving hagiography the way Bill would, I like to think.

― Three Word Username, Friday, October 23, 2020 2:33 AM (five hours ago)

lolol at the idea that Morbs wasn't at least 3x more unwarrantedly nasty to anyone than they were to him

I remember us throwing back G&Ts at Julius', and very shortly after that seeing Julius' major supporting role in "Can You Ever Forgive Me" and realizing CYEFM is as much as a Bill Weber New York Fever Dream of a movie as I've ever watched -- it's utterly within his universe. That stubborn tenacity of being the kind of aging New Yorker who writes Tallulah Bankhead biographies no one reads and chats with the bartender as the afternoon light streams through the window of the battered old gay haunt.

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, October 23, 2020 2:54 AM (five hours ago)

thanks for this comment, JB - not only in its own quiet poetry, but for helping a few more of us to contextualise the bar being cited so often itt.

Reading his posts over there and, whew. Definitely not the same guy who once asked me how much I ejaculated whenever Obama gave a speech.

hahaha

did he ever completely get through The Sopranos to the end? I used to think it very amusing that in the era of the binge-watch, that even years after acknowledging he liked it - he still seemed to be on season 2 or 3, bless him!

aw man, I don't think he ever finished Twin Peaks S3 either

Haha oh man. Such principles! :/

He really reminds me of this passage in Oliver Wendell Holmes' 'Poet at the Breakfast-Table':

He stirs me up, and finds me occupation in various ways, and especially, because he has good solid prejudices, that one can rub against, and so get up and let off a superficial intellectual irritation, just as the cattle rub their backs against a rail (you remember Sydney Smith's contrivance in his pasture) or their sides against an apple-tree (I don't know why they take to these so particularly, but you will often find the trunk of an apple-tree as brown and smooth as an old saddle at the height of a cow's ribs). I think they begin rubbing in cold blood, and then, you know, l'appetit vient en mangeant, the more they rub the more they want to. That is the way to use your friend's prejudices.

I too have been to The Station Bar with Morbius. I'm pretty sure it was before a game, when the Mets were still playing at Shea.

The eulogy and short playlist-for-Bill on WFMU Pseu's Thing with a Hook today (starts around 24:00) was just lovely (and had me feeling intensely nostalgic) ;_;

Alfred, your obit is truly lovely. Thanks. x

re: rrrobyn's post:

https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/97785

The reference to Can You Ever Forgive Me? is soooo otm. I associate Morbs w/the Manhattan 1980-1997 where you grabbed a martini in the middle of the afternoon in a Midtown bar after a Visconti retrospective, reading the NYROB before they piled up.

Alfred, your obit is truly lovely. Thanks. x

― Gerneten-flüken cake (jed_)

Thanks, jed and tangenttangent,

He finished twin peaks, liked it, and said something like “50% shit like most lynch” iirc

Agreed with others, Alfred, and that photo of Bill and J0rdan is lovely.

He finished twin peaks, liked it, and said something like “50% shit like most lynch” iirc

phew!

From Pseu's on-air eulogy: Bill will be buried in his favorite WFMU t-shirt.

and pants!

Listening to that eulogy and literally lold when the DJ said he was always thoughtful and measured online.

Lurked and posted here under various names for fifteen years or so, and this is really very sad to hear. His humour and attitude made him one of the personalities that you really couldn't miss. A piece of ilx is now missing.