Rolling Obituary Thread 2023

folding chairs at half-mast

lol

Gene Hackman's character in Hoosiers was supposedly based entirely on Bobby Knight.

i think more accurate to say that the producers based gene hackman's character on what they thought of bobby knight

the real bobby knight would never have brought on board a weirdo like jimmy, or helped out dennis hopper, or made out with barbara hershey

otm on that

Ady Barkan, a well-known activist who campaigned for Medicare for all while struggling with the terminal neurodegenerative disease A.L.S., has died. He was 39.

Kind of annoyed by the fawning about Knight. I don't care how "Winning" of a coach he was, he was an abusive fucking asshole and encouraged all the other budding wannabe coaching tyrants to be the same. Fuck him.

(NB my opinion may be very strongly biased by the absolute psychopathic football coach/gym teacher I had in high school who had multiple photos of Bobby Knight in his office that stood by laughing when senior football players duct taped unclothed freshman to the wall in the locker room and spread IcyHot on their testicles)

^ sports build character create sociopaths

No matter the public persona, there is no successful high-level coach that is not also an absolute dickhead.

what about that woke guy in san antonio? He seems cool (spoken as somebody who knows nothing about sports or sports-figures)

Tempted to give him (Gregg Popovich) and Steve Kerr a pass. Then again, the extra "g", kind of a dickhead thing.

(Later, when it all hit the fan in Bloomington, a covertly taped tirade Knight had directed at this team emerged online. It is a fairly accurate clinical example of a sociopath that makes R. Lee Ermey at the beginning of Full Metal Jacket sound like the Singing Nun. Added historical note: The popularly accepted identity of the surreptitious taper is Lawrence Frank, then a manager at Indiana and later, the coach of the New Jersey Nets. Further added historical note: The tirade came after Indiana had beaten Northwestern by 40 points.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_2ifFbEYRc

Astronaut Ken Mattingly, bumped from Apollo 13, eventually flew to the moon on Apollo 16, stayed around for a couple of shuttle flights. (Gary Sinise played him in Apollo 13), 87.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/02/517140750/nasa-astronaut-ken-mattingly-apollo-16-13-died-moon-shuttle

we have a thread about him in the movie, but i dont think its the right time

A lot of NBA coaches seem cool, some baseball managers are alright, nearly every college coach seems to be an absolute tyrant

No matter the public persona, there is no successful high-level coach that is not also an absolute dickhead.
― henry s

I have A Season on the Brink on my shelf, plan to read it at some point. Have to disagree with this broad characterization, though, if you're referring to all sports. John Wooden was supposedly a great guy. And in baseball, Dusty Baker, Jim Leyland, Bruce Bochy, Gil Hodges, Walter Alston, Dave Roberts, Joe Torre, and countless others all have pretty great reputations as people, and they also won. (Kind of skipping all over the timeline there, I know.)

David Berglas, magician, 97.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12709781/Magician-David-Berglas-holy-grail-magic-tricks-dies-aged-97-secret.html

Hugely important death in terms of Canadian film history: Don Shebib, director of Goin' Down the Road.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/obit-shebib-canadian-film-1.7020573

R.I.P., love that film

Shebib talking with Pierre Berton, 1971
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwBEfhuZiBw

Will watch that for sure, thanks. Looked at a few seconds, and--amazingly from today's perspective--Shebib refers to It's a Wonderful Life as "almost totally unknown." Which, in 1971, it probably was--I guess its status as a Christmas standard on television hadn't yet been established.

I'm reading that obit and I'm all "Oh wait this guy was the father of 40?" as in Drake's regular producer/collaborator. Unexpected!

a father of 40 hasnt much time for music production

"Just go do something, kid."

imagine the ability to farm out production, you could produce 40 albums in a month

RIP at 68 from cancer Mississippi hill country bluesman RL Boyce who started as a drummer in Otha Turner’s blues fife and drum band, but later became known as a guitarist and was once nominated for a Grammy, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship award

RIP Bob Mack who edited the Beastie Boys financed publication Grand Royal where Mack showed love to Lee Scratch Perry and confronted Ted Nugent .

Mack , 60, was riding his bike and got hit by a vehicle in Los Angeles

Oh, RIP! Forgot about him. Can’t remember if I ever met him but I had friends that knew him.

Oh man, that's sad. Grand Royal was such a trip.

grand royal ruled RiP

A few issues are on Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/grand-royal-02-1996-dregs-ia

Forget he worked at Spy back in the day.

Was just looking at some stuff on IMDb, and saw that screenwriter Lew Hunter died of Covid back in January. He was a professor at UCLA for many years who wrote screenwriting textbooks used in schools all over the country.

But most importantly, he wrote the TV Movie Desperate Lives, which gave us the legendary & iconic sight of Helen Hunt sniffing some PCP off her boyfriend's finger and then jumping out of a window and freaking the fuck out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_DqM9iqERg

https://variety.com/2023/film/obituaries-people-news/lew-hunter-dead-screenwriter-ucla-professor-emeritus-1235490189/

His other big credit was a fairly well-regarded TV Movie about child exploitation with Melinda Dillon & Richard Masur called Fallen Angel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5WwLYhoipA

Recently watched Desperate Lives and it is absolutely one of the craziest TV movies I've ever seen. So many jaw-dropping lines in it.

Science Fiction writer Michael Bishop, author of Philip K Dick is Dead, Alas, alas.

Sad to hear -- he also had to bear the burden of a horrible tragedy when his son Christopher, an instructor of German, was one of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Per a post by Greg Jarvis of the band the Flowers of Hell, Peter J. Moore, Canadian producer/engineer -- he's guy who recorded the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session among others for them and is why that cover of "Sweet Jane" still sounds so great.

Lewisham-born pop artist Joe Tilson:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/14/joe-tilson-obituary

Karl Tremblay, lead singer of Les Cowboys Fringants.

For those that don't know, Les Cowboys Fringants is possibly the most popular band in québécois history. This is huge news here.

AS Byatt, 87

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/17/as-byatt-author-and-critic-dies-aged-87

Aw. A very solid 20th century novelist. (Margaret Drabble no slouch either.)

That's strange, I had a half-dream last night about rereading Possession

RIP

Heard on the radio this morning that Dana Carvey's son Dex died of a drug overdose (age 32).

Oh, man.

From the LA Times:

George Brown, a founding member of Kool & the Gang who played drums with the band and co-wrote such enduring standards as “Celebration,” “Jungle Boogie” and “Ladies Night,” died from lung cancer in L.A. on Wednesday. He was 74.

Noodle I lent my copy to a college girlfriend - this was maybe 1992.

A year or two later she said, "Did I give Possession back to you?"

We laughed. To be fair we were probably full of drugs and/or booze at the time, but it sticks in my memory as a clever sentence.

I liked the present-day stuff but utterly couldn't abide the Romantic/Victorian era stuff.

Also they made a movie and the most implausible thing about it was the casting. Sorry, Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart were not believable as English majors.

English majors can totally be hot, but not like that.

i remember the movie coming out and thinking "nope"

Same problem as The English Patient or The Luzhin Defense. You can film some novels. You can film some bits of some novels.

And then there are novels where the only bits that you can film are the least interesting bits.