Rolling Obituary Thread 2022

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.

Koko held up better than I expected when I reread it a few years ago ... all the books VG mentions and If You Could See Me Now hit a sweet spot between literary novel and Paperbacks from Hell exploitation that really works for me

he edited a very nice two-volume collection of American Fantastic Tales for Library of America

I've never read any of his stuff. I own that LoA anthology he edited, though, and it's great. Where should I start with his own work?

ghost story imo but you really cant go wrong with any of his early stuff

This is hitting me bad
I happen to be rereading koko right now
Wahhh

Unperson:
Ghost story or koko

lots of straub being mentioned that I'd forgotten i own

The cast of the film Ghost Story is just insane

Fun fact: the scene with the wedding was filmed in the Anglican church my family attended in Saratoga Springs when we lived there from 1982 to 1985 (various other external locations in the town appear throughout) and that's our parish priest Father Parke acting as said priest in the sequence.

!

neat

that's pretty cool, Ned

My uncle's car was in the old Salem's Lot mini series, which was filmed up in Humboldt county.. he was paid $15 to let them remove his California plate and put on a Massachusetts plate

Ghost story or koko

I agree these are the best places to start

it's kind of cool how different they are from one another: Ghost Story is just what it says on the label, thick with old-fashioned supernatural dread and New England atmosphere, while Koko is very much of a particular post-Vietnam moment, generating fear by non-supernatural means in contemporary urban settings

Sweet thread by Straub’s daughter

Ok this is going to be long and rambling but here goes. My father, Peter Straub, died on Sunday night. He was the fucking best, and here's why, with photos: pic.twitter.com/vR3gV1KZP2

— Emma Straub (@emmastraub) September 6, 2022

Good lord. If my children have anything even remotely like that to say about me when I die, I'll have done something right in my life.

ok crying for real now that was beautiful <3

Good lord. If my children have anything even remotely like that to say about me when I die, I'll have done something right in my life.

was thinking the exact same thing (along with, how to be more Peter Straub?)

Bernard Shaw

Murderer of Kitty Dukakis iirc