Rolling Obituary Thread: 2021

Always liked Holbrook. I expect that most obits will highlight All the President's Men, unless I'm forgetting something major. RIP.

unless I'm forgetting something major

Whichever Dirty Harry movie he was in (the third one, maybe?). Also, more seriously, didn't he get a lot of good writeups for playing Mark Twain on stage for like 40 years?

Holbrook was in a pretty important 1972 tv movie called That Certain Summer, probably the first American film to portray homosexuality in a positive or at least sympathetic light: “I’d robbed banks and kidnapped children and raped women and murdered people, you know, in any number of shows. Now I was going to play a gay guy and that was like considered a career ender. Oh, for Christ’s sake! What kind of culture do we live in?”

Clayton Eshleman, one of the most gifted poetry translators of our times, has died. If you've ever read César Vallejo or Aimé Césaire poems in English, there's a good chance he translated them.

yeah, those Vallejo translations are great. I submitted some writing to Sulfur and Eshleman wrote me a very long and nice rejection letter in which he tried to set me up with another poet in my city (who happened to be my ex)

Mark: I'm not going any deeper than what IMDb offers :) I can tell you that TREASURE ISLAND (1950) followed on BBC1, and then Jim'll Fix It. :/

(like)

Here's Hal as the stage manager in Our Town:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEoXuXRoOdY

Also, more seriously, didn't he get a lot of good writeups for playing Mark Twain on stage for like 40 years?

Longer than that, I think. He started in the 1950s when he was young and carried on doing it into the last decade, so maybe 60 years?

69 years, actually, according to the NYT

1948-2017

Whichever Dirty Harry movie he was in (the third one, maybe?)

The second one: Magnum Force, with one of the all-time ending kills.

My obit: he started posting to ILX as a young man in 2000 and his career there spanned six decades, making an appearance as recently as the late 2060s.

Paul McEnery of Mondo 2000:

Paul McEnery, who held Mondo 2000 together content-wise, during it's later years almost until the end, died on Sunday of a heart attack. He was brilliant and funny and big on calling out bullshit wherever it was launched from. I'm in shock. RIP pic.twitter.com/21kJ2PhDT6

— MONDO 2000 (@2000_mondo) February 2, 2021

Whichever Dirty Harry movie he was in (the third one, maybe?)
The second one: Magnum Force, with one of the all-time ending kills.

Robyn Hitchcock is obsessed with this scene and wrote a pretty good song about it (“A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations (Briggs)”)

Barry La Va

This piece on Ricky Powell is worth yer time

https://phatfriend.com/2021/02/03/the-complicated-death-of-an-iconic-scumbag/

thanks for that, helpful to have awareness of before my inevitable deli conversation

yeah that was good, thx ned

Danny Ray, longtime MC and "Cape Man" for James Brown

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-02-03/danny-ray-james-brown-cape-dies

RIP :(

Naim Attallah, publisher, 89.

Eva Coutaz, former head of Harmonia Mundi, a label that gets a ton of respect, but still not nearly enough.

Amazing label indeed, nice to read about the people behind it, about whom i knew nothing

Matt Harris, bassist with Oranger and The Posies, and a really lovely guy.

Whoa... He was in Spiral Stairs' band as well. Any details?

Oof, looks like an OD. Sad news.

Jim Weatherly https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55943997

Paul Crutzen, who coined the term ‘Anthropocene’ to describe humanity’s impact on our planet, has died https://t.co/HkRSaKYJXl

— The Ice Age ❄️🌞 (@Jamie_Woodward_) February 5, 2021

End of an era

See what you did there

wouldn't epoch be more accurate ? ;)

Reports surfacing that Christopher Plummer has passed. 91 years, what a crazy run.

https://deadline.com/2021/02/christopher-plummer-dies-91-sound-of-music-all-the-money-in-the-world-star-1234688379/

wasn't someone just talking about how all the principals of the sound of music were still alive? or was that Mary Poppins?

had the pleasure of interviewing him years ago and he told me this fun story about the time he and jason robards got a police horse drunk in nyc https://t.co/jI4jZJT884 pic.twitter.com/tnMp7zzJDR

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) February 5, 2021

Can't say I'm familiar with most of his movies, but it's interesting that scanning the list now he seemed to get better roles the older he got.

sorry for linking to my own tweet but the tidbits about how miserable he was making the sound of music always crack me up

RIP Christopher Plummer https://t.co/1B0YYHII9B

— n1ck amm3rman (@somelanguage) February 5, 2021

also i watched the silent partner for the first time this year and he's very fun in that as a total psychopath

Starcrash forever. "IMPERIAL BATTLESHIP!...Halt the flow of TIME!" If he hadn't've done that he should have been in Flash Gordon by default.

or was that Mary Poppins?

But Glynis Johns and Dick van Dyke are still alive at 97 and 95, and Julie Andrews at 85, so pretty good show

Silent Partner is def one of my go-to unknown gems I recommend to ppl. Plummer really rides the film's transition from light comedy bank caper to psycho slasher.

somehow it never occurred to me that amanda plummer was his daughter

This is weird because I honestly never knew that was Plummer in The Sound Of Music! I only knew his older face.

Stefan Cush from The Men They Couldn't Hang.

(no links as yet but the band have announced on Facebook)

Knives Out was a bonafide hit... good to know he was making winners right up to the end.

Loved him in Sound of Music, gah so very much
And i just recently saw Silent Partner (1978) which is a fucking TRIP of a movie, he is great & menacing in it

https://www.theafricareport.com/62955/sibongile-khumalo-voice-of-the-new-south-africa-dies-at-63/

RIP Sibongile Khumalo, South African Zulu township jazz & choral singer

leon spinks

https://www.espn.com/boxing/story/_/id/30848782/leon-spinks-ex-heavyweight-champ-upset-muhammad-ali-dies-67

And i just recently saw Silent Partner (1978) which is a fucking TRIP of a movie, he is great & menacing in it

I spend a not insignificant % of my online life telling people to check out that movie