Jaylon Ferguson, linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. He was 26.
Maureen Arthur. Beyond “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, she was also in “The Love God?” as “Evelyn Tremaine” (the wife/cover girl of pornographer “Osborn Tremaine”). Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Night Gallery”, “Mork & Mindy”, “CPO Sharkey”, and “Get Smart”.
Gleycy Correia, former Miss Brazil. She was 27: reports state that she died from complications of a “routine operation to have her tonsils removed”.
Caleb Swanigan, former Purdue and NBA basketball player. He was 25 and apparently died of “natural causes”.
Catching up on a few I missed while I was on the road, just for the historical record:
Mark Shields, TV pundit.
Tim Sale, comics artist.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, French film star. 146 acting credits in IMDB.
Heading home. Lack of content ahead. Will be getting in kind of late. Updates to follow.
I am still on the road, reuniting with one of my tribes and having more fun than I am legally allowed to have.
But I didn’t want to let today’s anniversary pass, even if I don’t have time to do a full detailed post.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in.
Lawrence, we should add that to the list.
As a shiftless and lazy blogger who is on the road, I’m going to point to this Reason essay by Glenn Garvin, which I rather liked. Garvin’s one of the better crop of their current writers.
Light blogging ahead.
Updates will be catch as catch can through next Monday.
I was constantly hearing “Get to the Austin airport three hours early! It’s a cluster! Three hours ahead of your scheduled flight!”
So I got to the airport at 0330 for my flight at 0640.
My bags were checked and I was through security by 0400. And the TSA people were actually pleasant.
(“Why are you taking a flight at 0640?” Wasn’t my choice: I originally booked it for 0830, which I thought was more reasonable. But Southwest changed it.)
Baxter Black, former “large-animal veterinarian” and NPR guy.
Black was keenly aware that he didn’t sound like anyone else on public radio, with former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards recalling that “he knew our audience and he knew how he fit in.”
“He would gear some of his commentary in that way, like the people who were against …. fur coats, use of fur, and Bax thought you should recycle roadkill and use the fur as clothing for dolls,” Edwards said. “So Barbie would have a fur coat from a dead possum or something. That was one of his tweaks at public radio right there.”
Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Quincy M.E.”, “The Man with Bogart’s Face”, “Ghostbusters II”, “The John Larroquette Show”, and “Cradle Will Rock”.
NYT obit for Julee Cruise, which makes explicit something that the other obits only implied:
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Here’s a name to conjure with, for those of us who were fans of High Weirdness By Mail and related stuff in the 1990s: Peter Lamborn Wilson.
Mr. Wilson’s book “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,” was a slim volume first published by Autonomedia, Mr. Fleming’s company, in 1991. Mr. Wilson wrote it under a pseudonym, Hakim Bey. (He liked to pretend that his made-up alter ego was a real person.)
The book’s central premise was that one could create one’s own stateless society — the goal of anarchy — with simple and poetic acts like creating public art and communal exercises like dinner parties. It quickly acquired a cult following, particularly among those who frequented the aisles of alternative bookstores looking for inspiration on how to sidestep or disrupt the capitalist mainstream.
…
“T.A.Z.” seems to take its cues from the Situationist Manifesto and its prose style from Allen Ginsberg. A sample: “Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earthworks as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects.”
Additional bullet points include exhortations to boycott products marked as Lite; hex the Muzak company; go on strike; dance all night; start a pirate radio station; put up posters; home-school your kids or teach them a craft; don’t vote; be a hobo.
…
He worked out his disillusionment with the failed promise of the 1960s — the revolution that never came — in provocative writing that appeared in avant-garde journals like Semiotext(e), where French intellectuals like Michel Foucault mingled with American Beats like Ginsberg and William Burroughs and radical feminists like Kate Millett and Kathy Acker, the postpunk novelist and performance artist.
By all accounts, Mr. Wilson was erudite about the recondite, a prolific author of some 60 books on topics ranging from angels to pirate utopias and all manner of renegade religions. He was for years an East Village fixture and the host of “The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade,” a late-night program on WBAI, Manhattan’s countercultural radio station. On his show, he might declaim on higher mathematics, play a selection of esoteric music like Sufi chants or Greek rembetika, and review zines, the D.I.Y. journals that flourished in the late 1980s and ‘90s.
But because his writing often included erotic imagery of young teenage boys, he was controversial.
“I always had a fairly conflicted position about how to handle the issue,” Mr. Fleming said. “Whether to downplay it or try to defend it in some way. He identified as gay, but I never knew him to have a sexual partner, or an actual sex life. His sexual practices were what I call Whitmanesque, imaginal only.”
…
“He was a fascinating character,” said Lucy Sante, the cultural historian and author of books, like “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” that tell stories of urban fringe dwellers. Ms. Sante often took Mr. Wilson to lunch — as many did; it was understood that you would pick up the tab — in Woodstock, N.Y., where Mr. Wilson was living for a time.
“He knew a lot about everything,” Ms. Sante said. “The thing we had in common was an interest in dropout culture, in all the ways of not participating in the charade of modern life. And he was encyclopedic in his knowledge of all that material. He was an eccentric, but also I think what he was doing was scattering bread crumbs for others to pick up.”
Julee Cruise, musician. You probably recognize the name from “Twin Peaks”:
She also toured with the B-52s (“from 1992-1999 as a fill-in for member Cindy Wilson“).
Two interesting obits from the NYT for somewhat obscure people:
Jim Murphy. He specialized in history books for kids.
I’m a little old to be his target audience, but the books on yellow fever and the “blue baby” operation sound right up my alley.
Oris Buckner. He was a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department in the 1980s – the only black homicide detective at the time.
Then things went to hell. Briefly (the obit goes into more details) other homicide detectives beat witnesses to the killing of a police officer until they implicated two men, then killed both men, along with the girlfriend of one.
Mr. Buckner testified against the other officers. The local grand jury refused to indict them, but seven officers were eventually charged with federal civil rights violations. Three were convicted and sentenced to five years.
Jim Seals, of Seals and Crofts.
Paul Vance, most famous for “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”.