Rolling Obituary Thread 2024

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...

he was making art this year. that's a really long time to make abstract art. he was cool. genius? i think he kinda was. endlessly inventive at least. a huge imagination. though he will probably always be most famous for the black paintings that he made when he was impossibly young. i also love abstract artists who could have been cool and minimal forever who go nuts with color and shapes. and few people went nuts with color and shapes like he did. like a paint store throwing up on an automotive store with some of those sculptures.

Always loved this clip of a young Stella. RIP.

Great docu, by the way.

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

Bernard Hill, Theoden in LOTR & captain Smith in Titanic

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68962192

Ah man

Yosser RIP

... fuck yer Titanics and hobbits.

hes exquisite in lotr, almost certainly the best performance in it

Yeah, was just thinking that. It's a performance that is both consistent and has range, and absolutely plays off with everyone around him just so, especially Miranda Otto's Eowyn. Each of their scenes together are fantastic.

(And Tom D., we never got Blackstuff over here at the time! Wish we had!)

Damn RIP

His character arc is one of the more impressive and complex ones, if not the most. He's performed as flawed, prone to moments of selfishness and anger, occasional poor judgement, absolutely human, and the most astonishingly and thrillingly heroic at the perfect time. I think him and Otto were in the running for the MVPs of that series in terms of how they grounded it.

yep his stuff in LOTR is top grade acting - what comes to mind would be someone like christopher lee; full commitment and seriousness regardless of the possible sillyness of the content

Yeah, it's very Tolkien to not let the interiority of his characters out much aside from the hobbits themselves, and so the translation to a different medium by default allows for more. That plus the screenwriting team decided -- I think rightly -- to foreground his son's death more, adding weight to his reactions and decisions. (That plus, per Hill's own mention of it in the DVD commentary, he was the one who came up with the "No parent should have to bury their child" moment, drawing on an instance some years prior where, IIRC, he'd been talking with a mother who'd lost a child in a bombing in the UK or Ireland and she said that to him. It's not Tolkien's Theoden but it absolutely works in the film.)

I was thinking he'd already passed but was mixing him up with fellow Blackstuff actor Michael Angelis.

rip bernard hill, he nearly steals the third movie from under everyone’s noses

i didn't know who he was and i clicked on the link and went ah yeah! he was awesome! but i was totally thinking of the other dragon show. the jean reno type guy. so now i still don't remember this guy but RIP! great job. you obviously made quite an impression on real fans of the thing.
for the record the other guy was my favorite character on the other dragon show. and i still like jean reno.