Rolling Obituary Thread 2025

Wayne Osmond, 73, of the Osmonds

also

Russ North, 59, former singer of Clover Hoof, and runner-up to replace Bruce Dickinson in Iron Maiden.

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

Jocelyn Wildenstein has sadly used up the last of the 9 lives

Pippa Garner, whose work i only encountered for the first time at the most recent hammer museum biennial

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pippa-garner-dead-1234729124/

David Lodge

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2025/01/david-lodge-obituary

Someone who felt everywhere when I was an Eng Lit teenager, & I read and enjoyed the campus trilogy, but then never anything else.

Britt Allcroft, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine.

RIP, David Lodge. Read most of what he wrote through the campus trilogy and then a few things after that. Seem him give a reading from Paradise News at Books, Inc. on the Upper East Side when it came out.

I gave up on him after his terrible book ‘Thinks…’. He was good when he was at his peak, but he couldn’t seem to shake off his rather tiresome obsessions in his later work.

Yeah, he became a bit of an old bore, sorry to say.

Adam Roberts said it better in his review of his H.G. Wells book.

Mick Hobbs of the Work, Officer! And other This Heat type adjacent arty stuff.

Soulman Brenton Wood

https://variety.com/2025/music/news/brenton-wood-dead-the-oogum-boogum-song-soul-singer-1236265160/

"CheckOutTheBootsEh CheckOutTheBootsEh CheckOutTheBootsEh"

Heh, Adam Roberts wrote something nice about David Lodge in his new(ish) substack and now says his H.G. Wells book is “better than its reputation.”

Jeff Baena, 47, filmmaker and Aubrey Plaza’s husband

Absolutely tragic. Reports suggest it was suicide

Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman who was the world's oldest person according to Guinness World Records, has died, an Ashiya city official said Saturday. She was 116.

https://abc7news.com/post/is-oldest-person-alive-tomiko-itooka-japanese-woman-was-worlds-116-has-died/15751689/

I wish I could have the extra years now, not when I'm 112

The Jeff Baena thing is mind wrecking

The Vivienne, winner of Rupaul's Drag Race UK Season One, 32.

this is just awful

Experimental playwright and one of the real heroes of the Downtown scene, Richard Foreman.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/theater/richard-foreman-dead.html

Per a post from Steven Krakow just now on FB, ESP-Disk veteran/painter Ed Askew, who had a good second run these past twenty five years with a full series of albums following the debut back in 1968.

xp wow i was just talking about Richard Foreman with someone the other day. learned about his work from my favorite college professor who had us read pages from some of his scripts. RF more or less retired from theater while i was living in nyc; sad i never got to see any of his productions, they seemed like quite the trip.

Think I only ever got over to see one production of his, which I enjoyed, but always found him interesting and intriguing. RIP.

Per a post from Steven Krakow just now on FB, ESP-Disk veteran/painter Ed Askew, who had a good second run these past twenty five years with a full series of albums following the debut back in 1968.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, January 5, 2025 4:00 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I shared a bill with him at a Greenpoint loft party about ten years ago now— Ka Baird introduced him. Tons of people came out despite what was essentially a hurricane going on outside. He was a lovely person, chatted with him for a while. RIP.

"Goin' Down" Dude Don Nix

https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/entertainment/music/2025/01/01/don-nix-obituary-stax-artist-songwriter-producer/77388086007/

Alfa Anderson, the lead singer of Chic from 1978-1983, aged 78

https://ra.co/news/81880

Alfa Anderson passed in 2024 and already posted on the old thread.

oops i missed that!

Mike Rinder, 69, ex-Scientologist and Leah Remini’s co-host on several shows.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, French fascist, 96

good

Good riddance.

God that fucker was still hanging around, huh

Gunvor Nelson, one of the greatest experimental filmmakers. would encourage everyone to seek out red shift

Reuters describing him as an unabashed nationalist (not like those many meek, humble ones) and a 'pugnacious mix of populism, eloquence and charisma'.

🤮🤮🤮

Fascist ghouls tend to live forever unfortunately, or what seems like it. Unless they're shot and hung upside down from a lamppost first of course.

"oh I'm angin from a lamppost at the corner of the street .."

© Alexei Sayle

Peter Yarrow, 86

Wow!

Aww, the Italian 'Robinson Crusoe' Mauro Morandi has died... they killed him when they forced him off his island

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/07/hermit-guardian-budelli-island-off-sardinia-dies

Beej Chaney from Minneapolis greats the Suburbs:

https://www.startribune.com/beej-chaney-suburbs-death-guitarist/601203171

I just bumped the Suburbs thread to post this. I’m really sad.

RIP Pete Yarrow bc Peter Paul & Mary were a childhood cornerstone … but it’s hard to square that with the fact that Carter pardoned him for his ~admitted~ sexual assault of a 14yo girl and not scream into the void

Just read this now. So weird--I was in a theatre yesterday rewatching A Complete Unknown (Yarrow's in there two or three times, including the guy who reintroduces Dylan for his crowd-calming acoustic number at Newport '65). Fan from childhood too; didn't know about the assault at all.

apparently there may have been other incidents

https://web.archive.org/web/20210517122113/https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/17/peter-yarrow-carter-pardon-assault/

wow just read some of that, he was puff the magic scumbag

That's fair but it's still true that the fash style themselves as animal lovers here, I have no expectations for this to translate to actual policies because that's not how fascism works, but there's an element of "animals are simple and loyal and don't give you any of that woke intellectual bollocks" as well as an obsession with animal power dynamics pseudoscience, alpha beta and gamma dogs, etc. It doesn't need to make logical sense, it's all vibes.

i think that the majority of british people would say they were animal lovers tbh. mind you a large minority of them are definitely a bit fash-adjacent too so hey you could be on to something.

According to Le Pen in The Le Monde obit (below) he met Bardot in the 50s, but you can also see animal rights as a justification for Islamophobia (as if white ppl don't consume meat inhumanely)

https://archive.ph/MRanb

Morrissey uses animal rights as an excuse for not just Islamophobia but for other xenophobia, anti-Chinese racism for example.

I'm not sure I see much connection between her animal rights activism and her islamophobia. She came from a wealthy, hyper-conservative background - after the Algerian war a lot of those people turned to the extreme right and have continued to do so. Le Pen was from much the same background.

I think what Alphie is indicating is that the Le Monde article he provided draws the connection directly:

In the late 1990s, she publicly supported the first FN mayors of major cities, Toulon and Vitrolles. Her advocacy for animals went hand in hand with her Islamophobia. In a letter published by the far-right magazine Présent, Bardot raised alarm over Eid al-Kebir, a major Muslim holiday marked by ritual animal slaughter. It remained a lasting obsession, warning the holiday would "drench the soil of France with the blood of slaughtered sheep." She continued: "They slaughter women and children, our monks, our civil servants, our tourists and our sheep, one day they'll slaughter us, and we'll have deserved it. Muslim France, a Maghrebi Marianne? Why not, given where we are?" She received her first sentence despite her lawyer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, a senior FN official, arguing against it. In court, Bardot made this curious statement: "I am not racist at heart."

OK, fair enough!

What in fuck is she referring to with the supposed slaughter of French monks?

let’s not pretend ecofascism isn’t a thing

ah c'mon who makes it to 91 without a lil racism smh

er, no. most of the animal rights people i have known have been far-left/anarchist. who are you thinking of exactly?

Apart from the Nazis you mean?

My mum is deep into the animal rights activist scene in Portugal and was alarmed to find out that a young guy who was helpful when the cops were giving difficulties actually belongs to a far right group that spends its time "liberating" dogs from Romani communities they claim are abusing them. Unsurprisingly they seem to be exempt from the police intervention that every other activist group faces. So yeah it's a common tactic to raise hatred against the Other - "look how they treat these poor defenseless animals", whether it's Asian communities, the Romani or Halal butchers.

I understand the term "pipeline" getting defenses up tho, obviously it is very very easy to care about animal rights and not become a nazi, my mum does fine.

Preferring animals and the natural life and order to the degeneracy of human beings and human society also seems to be behind far right support for animals rights - historically at least.

im not seeing the jump there from where im nodding to where im going wait hang on

but still a lot of English landed gentry fascists (and Bryan Ferry's son) love to prance about the countryside in jodhpurs watching foxes getting torn to shreds by packs of hounds. Hitler and BB are probably tutting at them. There is some division amongst Eurofascists on bloodsports.

The fox hunting people also pose as animal lovers, it's just they love horses and dogs and let's not talk about the foxes

http://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did%3Aplc%3Ar5qqbgz6n5huvcsvzzm6fsit/bafkreiai7kxcwy3ue4ym7rfrgrlsuc3f5ufdf3v6cswvp5pyplzgu2pyse@jpeg

http://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did%3Aplc%3Ar5qqbgz6n5huvcsvzzm6fsit/bafkreifjrwlqjlthnfymzmmrao6tasnmrwlyfcgunr24qxp4547fl74vcm@jpeg

is it animal cruelty to milkshake a duck

Rise and Fall of a Milkshake Princess

Preferring animals and the natural life and order to the degeneracy of human beings and human society also seems to be behind far right support for animals rights - historically at least.

To be fair that's not just on the right. There are definitely misanthropic animal rights activists on the left. (e.g. my mom, who gets great satisfaction out of imagining a human-less future where other animals have the run of the planet. She talks about this a lot. "Who's going to miss us when we're gone?" she says. I sometimes feel obliged to speak up for my own species.)

MSN calls it a "fun fact" but here we go: now Bardot is dead, only 3 people mentioned in Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire are still alive

https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/brigitte-bardots-death-creates-new-fun-fact-involving-beloved-billy-joel-song/ar-AA1TfcXu

Ain't it fun

Lol

To be fair that's not just on the right. There are definitely misanthropic animal rights activists on the left. (e.g. my mom, who gets great satisfaction out of imagining a human-less future where other animals have the run of the planet. She talks about this a lot. "Who's going to miss us when we're gone?" she says. I sometimes feel obliged to speak up for my own species.)

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, 30 December 2025 bookmarkflaglink

A cover for misanthropy is different from using this issue to offer support for the far right and its policies.

Cecilia Giménez, arguably the most famous artist of this century. I guarantee you've heard of her work even if her name isn't immediately familiar.

lol but also rip

(xxposts) What's the death-watch on "It's the End of the World as We Know It"?

A cover for misanthropy is different from using this issue to offer support for the far right and its policies.

Bien sur, I don't mean they're equal. Just saying that misanthropy and animal rights go together easily regardless of political orientation.

(xpost) There are only four people mentioned! I've heard it a million times, but in my mind it was a barrage of names...anyway, to answer my question, 4/4 dead (three already when the song appeared).

Five on Sgt Pepper I think; Bob Dylan, Dion, Larry Bell, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

And six if you count Sophia Loren who’s obscured by Lennon.

Many, many xposts but for better or worse I assume the monks thing was referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_the_monks_of_Tibhirine

Thank you, had never heard of that!

beatified since which youd imagine takes the sting out of it

Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, 35.

John Antrobus, who co-wrote The Bed Sitting Room with Spike Milligan, also the author of many plays, sitcoms, children's books and more

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/dec/24/john-antrobus-obituary

Carmen de Lavallade

xxpost Tatiana Schlossberg reporting (not paywalled):
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

yeah that's a really depressing story

Seems like she and her family and doctors dealt with it as well as anyone could (though she points out impact of cousin Bobby's cuts, already starting)

the luck of the kennedys

Thank you, had never heard of that!

the film about it, of gods and men, is absolutely amazing, or was when i watched it 15 years ago or so anyway.

Yup, really loved that film

Isaiah Whitlock, character actor, 71, you know the catch phrase

The line of his from The Wire that's become a personal life motto is "I'll take any motherfucker's money if he givin' it away!"

Man tough week for the wire.
Always loved it when Whitlock popped up in other stuff - but absolutely killed it as one of the funnest characters to watch in the wire.

Rip DC -raised gospel songwriter extraordinaire Richard Smallwood who studied under Roberta Flack in 8th grade and alongside Donny Hathaway at Howard U. His “Total Praise” has been translated into multiple languages and become part of many faiths repertoire. Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child and others covered him. His songwriting was a meld of traditional gospel, classical piano, soul, and theatrical American songbook . He died at 77 after having kidney issues among other causes. Earlier in his life he struggled with depression.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2025/12/30/richard-smallwood-dies-gospel-singer/87960193007/

the NYC MetroCard, 31

Stewart Cheifet, creator/host of the long-running shows Computer Chronicles and NetCafe:

https://computerchronicles.blog/post/stewart-cheifet-1938-2025/

Rolling Obituary Thread 2026