Rolling Obituary Thread: 2021

He's past the statue of limitations

https://image.assets.pressassociation.io/v2/image/production/5c9692d933aaf55b4e99f84da23fdb27Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaCwxNTk0OTc5MTEz/2.54604035.jpg

That was a short knight

oh right, sorry.

HRH Captain Sir Tom "Rodger" Moore, assassin of JFK and MLK, butcher of Nanjing, Lockerbie bomber, chief polluter at BP, Honorary life-president of Al Qaida, founder of NAMBLA, lead-singer of Staind, defiler of the innocents, destroyer of dreams, Donald Trump's real father, garden-walker-arounder, Medal "For the Tapping of the Subsoil and Expansion of the Petrochemical Complex of Western Siberia", Eschator of Munster, Baron Chiswick, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Fidget Spinner, Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Egg-cracker, Grand Master and First and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the Braggadocians, Personal Aide-de-Camp to Piers Morgan, Lord High Field Marshall of the United Kingdom, blessed be his name, RIP 🙏 🙏

He outlived host + panel on that Xmas 1983 episode of Blankety Blank, apart from Ruth Madoc and Sabina Franklyn. (To be fair, Beryl Reid was older than him).

are you guys actively trying to make the bosom manor jokes start up again as part of some kind of masochistic kink

I think the Queen automatically gets his Blankety Blank chequebook and pen. I don't make the rules.

I remember really rooting for Hal Holbrook to win an Oscar for Into the Wild; alas, it wasn't meant to happen. I always liked him, solid dude.

It's hit Hoff hard

pic.twitter.com/GxvrCWqV9P

— David Hasselhoff (@DavidHasselhoff) February 2, 2021

Woah

"Now let's go to Malibu and find out what David Hasselhoff thinks of Sir Moore's passing.. to you, David."

had assumed that the blankety blank clip was not online, but here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4PFNtE5EpA

he looks exactly like a retired army captain in his 60s

MJ, what about the other contestant?

I'm always plugging this movie, but I think Hal Holbrook gives a great performance in Gus Van Sant's Promised Land (almost but not quite his last non-TV role).

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