Rolling Obituary Thread 2024

She outlived her enemy—Perloff—by about a month

Oh damn, I took her class on Modern American Poetry back in the 90s. She was quite the academic celebrity back then.

Frank Field, aged 581. He will rise again though.

RIP vile right-wing dead Labour guy who was never alive in the first place. He did some great work with IDS on how to starve kids and make the poor poorer. So I guess he'll be in some kind of hell. Maybe his version of hell is where poor ppl can afford to eat without recourse to food banks.

Surprised there was anything alive in there to die.

his great uncle Vlad should have strangled him at birth!

Any announcement of cause of death? Stake through heart? Silver bullet? Running water?

secure him in a container under the M53 and slap a sticker on it that reads: "this place is not a place of honor | no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here | nothing valued is here"

Hearing through socials of the passing of Brian Gregg, bassist who was in The Tornados and Johnny Kidd & the Pirates.

(xp) The Guardian puff piece on how people in Birkenhead loved Frank Field so so much and that a great guy he was failed to mention that when he quit the Labour Party and ran as an independent his vote collapsed from 33,000 to 7,000.

Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues!!

xp

they loved him as much as the ppl in Hudds love Barry Sheerman, in that sense of if you replaced them with a Shetland pony in a red rosette you'd get the same results every GE.

That's all of the original line-up of the Moody Blues dead now.

Film director Laurent Cantet (Time Out, The Class)

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/25/laurent-cantet-peter-bradshaw-appreciation-high-minded-progressive-and-literate

Jean-Pierre Ferland, Québécois chansonnier, 89:

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

Will Noel, who directed the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, died after being mowed down by a car driving on the sidewalk while on vacation in London. Da Vinci Code vibes.

https://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archimedes?language=en

RIP Conrad Thompson, aka MC Conrad, MC partner to the GOAT jungle/dnb DJ LTJ Bukem who sadly passed away from natural causes related to diabetes at age 52. Many treasured memories from my late teen years listening to this pairing

Apologies if already mentioned, only saw today that MC Duke passed on 21st April aged 58.

Paul Auster
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/books/paul-auster-dead.html

I'd read he had cancer so no surprise I guess. The Invention of Solitude and the New York Trilogy were stellar - diminishing returns after that though I think.

RIP Paul. I think that assesment is probably fair. I would add that The Music of Chance, both the book and the film, are excellent, and Auster wrote the screenplay for the latter. It was one of those chance viewings late at night in the 90s on Channel 4 or BBC2 that led me, later on, to Auster's books. M Emmett Walsh, also recently of this thread, is a memorable presence in it.

Loved the film of The Music of Chance as well, and it was his early essay The Invention of Solitude that really blew me away.

My sense with Auster's work, because I saw this happen a number of times, is the first book someone read would blow them away, and then the second would continue most of that feeling, and by the third or fourth his repeated devices were familiar. Also, based on myself and other Gen Xers posting today, he was the perfect writer to read ages 20-25. But I kept going back to his work, the recent book of letters between himself and Coetzee and so on. Had a good run, the best of the books will endure.

Also thinking how the author photos that come to mind of Auster and Martin Amis both have them wielding a cigarette; both gone in their 70s.

Amidst police violence at Columbia, CUNY and UCLA, the news that my friend Paul Auster has died. In 1968 he was one of the Columbia student occupiers, fleetingly captured by British filmmaker Peter Whitehead in a documentary called The Fall pic.twitter.com/9G98p0hTM1

— Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) May 1, 2024

Smoke (script by Auster, directed by Wayne Wang) is one of my favourite films.

Duane Eddy

https://variety.com/2024/music/people-news/duane-eddy-dead-peter-gunn-1235988900/

Hearing that the king of twangy guitar, Duane Eddy has passed.

Wow! He was still alive then

rip :(

Wow, I thought he died years ago, RIP Duane.

Thing I always thought about Peter Gunn is it's actually all about the sax? Not to do him down, RIP man of twang

Richard Tandy, from ELO

https://www.remindmagazine.com/article/13886/richard-tandy-elo-keyboardist-dead/

RIP MC Conrad :( xps

A lot of those Bukem mixes were better for having him on them

Gary Floyd of the Dicks and Sister Double Happiness

Oh shit.. that's crazy

Never saw the Dicks (little before my time) but definitely saw SDH many times.. I used to see him hanging near the jack shacks in North Beach all the time, he was one of a kind

mr veg saw them a ton in SF, he was def a fan back in the day

I remember hearing their one major label album, Heart and Mind, in 1991, and wondering why they were being marketed as "alternative" when they were just a (very good) stomping barroom blues-rock band.

RIP Gary

(I only know him as a Butthole Surfers song)

Oh man, the Dicks were so brilliant

I only really know The Dicks Hate The Police - what a banger that was

worth checking out Kill From The Heart, which got reissued this year I think - Rich Daddy (I Never Had One) is an absolute killer

reissue is due out in 2 weeks on Superior Viaduct. I have the Alternative Tentacles reissue from 2012.

oh man, RIP Gary

"Hate the Police" might be my favorite punk song. Definitely the best "POV of the oppressor" punk song. There's a weird empathy in Gary's delivery of the vileness that makes the character all the more pathetic. Most hardcore singers delivered this kind of lyric with a sinister sarcasm.

"if you can't find justice, it'll find you" = one of the best punk lines ever

Frank Stella, 87, of lymphoma. I saw a big retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum in 2015. Amazing stuff.

Sam Ash Music, age 100
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/business/sam-ash-music-closing-stores.html

A fond farewell to Frank Stella, who died today, at age 87. I took this photograph in his studio in Rock Tavern, N.Y., where he kept a narrow cot amid his baroque constructions and was no doubt awakened on countless occasions by a jolt of inspiration. pic.twitter.com/lXxqPIQYs8

— Deborah Solomon (@deborahsolo) May 5, 2024

Another I'd assumed had died years if not decades ago...