Rolling Obituary Thread 2024

RIP to the Stanton-Walsh Rule

Had no idea he was still alive. Does that make Bruce McGill the last great American character actor standing? (I feel like Ed Harris is just one rung higher on the ladder, having had actual lead roles — Walker, Pollock.)

More people should see Straight Time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RzaZC6DchU

RIP

I always thought Straight Time is one of Hoffman's best, if not THE best

at the baggage claim in the burlington vermont airport I found myself standing next to m. emmet walsh and said to him, “I love your movies.” he looked at me, slightly annoyed, and without missing a beat, replied “you should try reading books.” https://t.co/zCzilBZpWH

— alex blagg (@alexblagg) September 23, 2023

No version of BLADE RUNNER would work without him. As written, a key character for noir stakes-setting and exposition. As performed, Walsh delivers the rancid affability of a mid grade authority impressed with himself for deciding who's human. Acting that creates the world. RIP pic.twitter.com/f1Fp57jMQI

— Candygram for Mongo (@spencer_parsons) March 20, 2024

Does that make Bruce McGill the last great American character actor standing?

james hong is still with us at 95

In that vein I was gonna mention Charles Dierkop - missed the fact that he died last month at 87. RIP

As great a character actor as probably anybody from the studio system. Glad Straight Time has been noted; Blood Simple will lead his obituaries (and Blade Runner, evidently--have to admit, I don't remember him in that like I remember him in Blood Simple), but I'd put Straight Time at the top. He's positively evil in that.

Blade Runner was considered confusing upon release, and as mentioned in the tweet above, his character was the only one that made any attempt to let the viewer know just what the hell was going on

(xpost) I’d almost go so far as to say he steals the film.

“Straight Time”, that is.

Normally I'd agree for a performance that good, but I also think it's Hoffman's greatest performance--and Stanton, Russell, and Busey are great too.

Emmet came to set with 2 things: a copy of his credits, which was a small-type single spaced double column list of modern classics that filled a whole page, & two-dollar bills which he passed out to the entire crew. “Don’t spend it and you’ll never be broke.” Absolute legend. ♥️ pic.twitter.com/hP8Ml1fBGi

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) March 20, 2024

He's the guy who hated those cans!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwz8-EfFYE

Lol! RIP 🪦

As performed, Walsh delivers the rancid affability of a mid grade authority impressed with himself for deciding who's human.

He'd have played a MAGA state senator with aplomb.

I forgot about The Music of Chance (Joel Grey was also great in it):

“There was something so deeply imperturbable about the man, so fundamentally oblique and humorless, that Nashe could never decide if he was inwardly laughing at them or just plain dumb.”

M. Emmet Walsh embodied this character in “The Music of Chance”/1993. What an all-timer.

— Janet Maslin (@JanetMaslin) March 21, 2024

I'm seeing reports of Jimmy Hastings, of Caravan, Hatfield and the North, etc, has passed at 85.

https://www.organissimo.org/forum/topic/91209-jimmy-hastings/

SF writer Vernor Vinge, 79

https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

xxp I was going to mention The Music of Chance, it's one of those films I saw late night on Channel 4 here in the UK as a teenager and it has stayed with me ever since, Walsh was incredibly creepy in that

I'm seeing reports of Jimmy Hastings, of Caravan, Hatfield and the North, etc, has passed at 85.

https://www.organissimo.org/forum/topic/91209-jimmy-hastings🕸/🕸

Cola boyy, only 34 :(

Darren Ellis aka Splash RIP

all time classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y99JZugos9w

Maurizio Pollini, piano titan, 82

Still for my money the meanest rendition of this monster, especially the last handful of bars which he renders with total precision and clarity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rfle8wSwJM

Lol that was the piece I was gonna mention

Greg Lee of Hepcat, a couple of days ago. RIP

That's too bad. those first two albums (at least) go overlookedm

Holy cow he was still with us:
https://x.com/GuardianBooks/status/1771744033284759560?s=20

His dad Jean died in 1937!

When I was very young Babar books were printed in cursive. Is that still the case?

Composer Peter Eotvos, 80, in January but just reported now., I guess. Link in French…https://www.diapasonmag.fr/a-la-une/disparition-de-peter-eotvos-46311.html?utm_campaign=NL_DIAPASON_26032024&utm_content=26032024&utm_medium=email&utm_source=EMAIL&rwid=2B6B3FD43B5A708BE909BB9251B1FBAA18D96ED8DFC573B477B26B7CEFFFEE8D

Sorry about the tracking, mea culpa.

Ah, RIP Peter.

Marjorie Perloff, perhaps the most well-known poetry critic of the past 50 years after Bloom and Vendler, has passed away at 92. Some would say that was 92 years too long, and I would tend to agree, except: she went to my alma mater and donated thousands of rare poetry books to the library, for which I am forever grateful. Otherwise, good riddance.

when all the mid-2010s poetry scandals were happening a friend of ours wrote a pretty damning piece about her

wait, what did she do to piss people off?

Classy as usual, table

She was an apologist for racism in the academy, implied during a panel discussion that I attended that Mexican people were more apt to molest their children, was a virulent Zionist, etc. She was, by many accounts, one of the most poisonous elements haunting American poetry of the last 50 years. Spare me your handwringing and snide commentary around a subject you know little to nothing about, it seems

You are a ghoul

I know as much or more than you about poetry anyway, so take your subject specialist elitism out to the garbage disposal and let it rot

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2015/12/at-entropy-jen-hofer-comments-on-marjorie-perloffs-recent-public-remarks

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-program-era-and-the-mainly-white-room

Marjorie Perloff, preeminent critic and academic gatekeeper of avant-garde poetry, has on numerous occasions shared her distaste for identity politics literature. Here is an excerpt she wrote for the MLA newsletter:

“Under the rubrics of African American, other minorities, and post-colonial a lot of important and exciting novels and poems are surely studied. But what about what is not studied? Suppose a student wants to study James Joyce or Gertrude Stein? Virginia Woolf or T.E. Lawrence or George Orwell? William Faulkner or Frank O’Hara? The literature of World Wars I and II? The Great Depression? The impact of technology on poetry and fiction? Modernism? Existentialism? What of the student who has a passionate interest in her or his literary world—a world that encompasses the digital as well as print culture but does not necessarily differentiate between the writings of one subculture or one theoretical orientation and another? Where do such prospective students turn?”

I found this excerpt in the scholar Dorothy Wang’s excellent book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry. Wang notices that in this excerpt, Perloff immediately sets up a kind of “us vs. them” opposition, which is of course a favored rhetorical tool used by avant-garde schools in the past from Futurists and Dadaists to Language School poets. Avant-garde manifestos have always assumed a tone of masculine and expansionist militancy, enforcing an aggressive divide-and-conquer framework to grab the reader’s attention. Of course, this “us vs. them” rhetoric can be used to an exhilarating effect when there is a revolutionary legitimacy to that opposition, when “we” are the rabble-rousing outliers and “they” are the hegemonic majority. But Perloff sets up an opposition that’s far more disconcerting: oddly, the hegemony has become the nameless hordes of “African Americans, other minorities, and post-colonials” while “us,” those victimized students who are searching for endangered “true” literature (read as "white") are the outliers (since when has Ulysses taken a nose-dive from the canon’s summit down to the rare-and-hard-to-find-books list?).

From her Boston Review essay "Poetry on the Brink" where she lambasts Rita Dove, to countless other instances, Perloff has persistently set up these racially encoded oppositions and the sentiment is always the same: these indistinguishable minority writers with their soft, mediocre poetry and fiction are taking over our literature. How is this advocate of experimental poetry any different from the icon of literary conservatism, Harold Bloom, who once declared that writers like Sherman Alexie are "enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us?" Although Perloff has made these misguided observations for years, no one has taken her to task for it until recently, as if poets in the experimental community, afraid to fall from her good graces, look away as one looks away during Thanksgiving dinner when an aunt might complain how "those people" are driving down the property value of "our neighborhood."

https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde

uh

Call me whatever names you like, Keyes. Perloff was still a racist and negative force in American letters. Good riddance.

yeah, there are some racist and/or embarrassing sentiments from a lot of aging experimental writers about the rise of identity politics in literature. I read Perloff's writing in the 90s, before a lot of these quotes came along.

I disagree she was a negative force in American letters. And I will call you names when you stink up the obituary thread with your uncontrollable spite.

I own the 1998 Best of American Poetry where Harold Bloom denounces the Adrienne Rich-edited 1996 volume for containing poetry "of a badness not to be believed" because Rich included poems by female innmates and other non-professionals.