Rolling Obituary Thread 2022

shocking news, way too young.

Just woke up to this news. Devastated. RIP Jaimie.

Hall of Fame KC Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson, at 87.

I liked how Len Dawson stuck with a 1950s haircut right through to the mid ‘70s. RIP

aw shit, RIP. My father inlaw used to play football for UOP back in the mid 50’s and talked about lining up against Dawson when they played Purdue on occasion.

Always seemed like such a classy dude

Just saw that Dean Young died last week

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/in-memory-of-dean-young-1955-2022/

The actor who played the owner of the Peach Pit on "Beverly Hills, 90210" -- the watering hole for Brandon, Brenda, Dylan, Kelly and the rest of the high schoolers -- has died. https://t.co/OszFUdkR7P

— TMZ (@TMZ) August 25, 2022

Little-known fact: He was actually two years younger than Gabrielle Carteris!

Ernest Bryant Crutchfield (1937-1922), inventor of the Trapper Keeper school binder

I had one or two in high school

-2022)

Joey DeFrancesco.

Mable John, the first female solo artist signed to Motown (then Tamla) Records, a Stax singer and longtime Ray Charles collaborator, has died at the age of 91 https://t.co/5W8Ac6yOaP

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 27, 2022

oh man RIP
“Your Good thing is about to end” is such a stone classic

RIP Able Mable

Activist, Scholar, Historian, Professor Gwendolyn Midlo Hall RIP. Best known for her book Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Last year Hall published her final book, a memoir. Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle

https://64parishes.org/remembering-gwendolyn-midlo-hall

Midlo Hall was 93.

Robert LuPone, Dr. Cusamano on The Sopranos.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/entertainment/robert-lupone-the-sopranos-dead-intl-scli/index.html

WTAF https://variety.com/2022/film/news/charlbi-dean-dead-triangle-of-sadness-black-lightning-1235354577/

I know nobody owes anyone an explanation for dying, but I hate to see these vaguely worded death announcements for young-ish people because they all just fuel the anti-vaxxers.

Mikhail Gorbachev

... beat me to it.

His wife died years ago, I believe

Soviet premiers did not often live super long lives lol

I mean the first four had long runs one way or another but then Andropov and Chernenko skewed the curve.

Lenin was 53 when he croaked

Man I thought he at least made it into his sixties. Younger than I thought!

Live fast, die young and have preserved corpse on public display.

Gorbachev was sworn in the same day my special-ordered USA imported copy of "Zen Arcade" arrived in the local music store :D #80s

Did you...turn on the news?

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/27/16/45/22866264/3/1200x0.jpg

San Francisco photographer Fred Lyon, aged 97

Picked up his recent Vineyards collection a couple years back, really beautiful book
San Francisco Noir is another great one

lol Ned

This evening I watched a documentary available for rent on Amazon about Fred Lyon, Living Through the Lens. It's less than an hour long and worth your time. He was a remarkably creative and engaged guy into his 90s.

BBC Breakfast presenter Bill Turnbull

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-62714293

the Wycombe Wanderers fan

Shame, seemed like a decent bloke.

UK 80s-era synth wizard (and co-writer of Sam Fox's 'Touch Me (I Want Your Body)') Mark Shreeve, 65.

Founding member of Aswad, Angus "Drummie Zeb" Gaye

barbara ehrenreich

Sad news. Barbara Ehrenreich, my one and only mother, died on September 1, a few days after her 81st birthday. She was, she made clear, ready to go. She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.

— Ben Ehrenreich (@BenEhrenreich) September 2, 2022

"UK 80s-era synth wizard (and co-writer of Sam Fox's 'Touch Me (I Want Your Body)') Mark Shreeve, 65."

I looked him up a while back and I can't remember why. It was on 06 August. I must have read something about him on that day. He's one of those homebrew synth wizards who released a bunch of cassettes by himself. The title track from Assassin is basically a long remix of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gPAXgTOXl0

It's a proto-remix stroke cover stroke jam. He strikes me as the kind of man who would have been an awesome chiptune composer. Along the lines of Dave Lowe and the chap who did the music for "Wriggler".

There's probably enough material for a decent magazine article about homebrew synth wizards of the 1980s - the relative cheapness of four-tracks, second-hand synthesisers, early computer sequencers suddenly made it practical to record entire arrangements at home, but because this was the early 1980s acid house didn't exist yet so they tended to produce Jean-Michel Jarre / Jan Hammer-inspired electropop. For all of the Dave Stewarts and Chris Lowes who found a talented songwriting partner who could sing there were dozens who didn't, and there was only a limited market for instrumental synth music in those days. I have the impression most of them were tune-based, so they didn't gel with acid-era dance music. I'm waffling here.

Early SETI astronomer Frank Drake, 92.

On Friday, the family of astronomer Frank Drake announced that he passed away peacefully at 92 in his California home, near the site of his final academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drake made a number of contributions to radio astronomy, including serving as director of the Arecibo radio telescope facility. But Drake is probably best known for an equation that bears his name and his subsequent involvement in SETI efforts. His equation was the first significant attempt to estimate the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Drake did his PhD in radio astronomy, and his academic career continued with astronomy as a focus. That eventually brought him to the Arecibo observatory. Drake was involved in the observatory's conversion from a military research site to a civilian, science-focused facility, and he later became its director.

But Drake always had a side hustle: the attempt to find other intelligent life in the Universe. His most prominent contribution in this area was the formulation of what's now known as the Drake equation. It's purportedly a calculation—plug in the probabilities of a handful of things like the frequency of exoplanets around stars and the probability of life forming spontaneously, and out would pop the overall number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

More realistically, however, the Drake equation is an effective way to organize our thinking about the question. For example, understanding the probability of life emerging spontaneously from chemicals is a hard problem, but it's a problem we can tackle because we understand a lot of chemistry. The probability of life being intelligent is essentially an impossible one to estimate given how poorly we understand the foundations of conscious thought.

Shreeve's "Legion" on Jive Electro was a club jam for a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkx75EzVTFs

This is what I'll mostly remember xpost Barbara E. for (within her range of interests and writing):

Barbara Ehrenreich is gone. I'd say "May her memory be a blessing" to those who were with her; may it be a scourge to those who were against her, as it was during her life. May she rest in power, may her words keep working pic.twitter.com/VDfk24r9pW

— Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) September 2, 2022

♥️ pic.twitter.com/2AX3dWqYCi

— Kenneth B. Haines (@Citoyen_Ken) September 3, 2022

Horror novelist Peter Straub
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/peter-straub-1943-2022/

aw man :(

I've only read two of his books — The Talisman (with King) and Koko. Koko remains one of the more skin-crawling things I've ever read, even though as I recall it wasn't exactly super gory, he was just really good at being creepy.

i read quite a few of his early novels as a teen - julia, shadowlands, ghost story, floating dragon, god i loved that stuff

i started w him as a go-to when all the stephen kings were checked out at the library & became a big fan.

rip

of course talisman & black house were great too

and yeah he was so good at the atmospheric horror, like a modern interpretation of victorian gothic … scary as hell

The cast of the film Ghost Story is just insane

Agreed. I really liked that one actually, maybe because I didn’t read anything about it beforehand, unlike every other movie I saw at the time.