Category Archives: death

RIP Charles H. Schneer 1920-2009

RIP Charles H. Schneer, 88, American film producer

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yYeZMx1Y7U]

skeleton scene in Jason and the Argonauts

Charles H. Schneer (1920 – January 21, 2009) was a film producer most widely known for working with special effects pioneer, Ray Harryhausen, best-known for producing films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.

The sequence in which seven animated skeletons (see above) rise from the earth and attack Jason and his comrades is widely considered to be among the greatest achievements of motion picture special effects.

Jason and the Argonauts is World Cinema Classic #81.

RIP American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009)

RIP Andrew Wyeth, 91, American painter

christina's world by rachelstyle

Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American figurative painter. He was one of the best-known of 20th century American art, referred to as the “Painter of the People” due to his popularity with the public, although he shares that title with Norman Rockwell. One of the best-known images in 20th century American art is Christina’s World (1948).

In the DVD extras to the film Tideland, an adaptation of Mitch Cullin‘s novel Tideland, director Terry Gilliam cites Christina’s World as an inspiration in setting the backdrop and mood for the movie. The same extras claim that Mitch Cullin was also inspired by this same painting.

Nighthawks(1942) by Edward Hopper

Wyeth is similar to Edward Hopper. Sholem Stein described Christina’s World as “Nighthawks for country folk”.

RIP French film director Claude Berri (1934 -2009)

RIP French film director Claude Berri (1934 – 2009)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwGuJnqqYJI]

Claude Berri is internationally perhaps best-known for L’Ours[1], Gérard Brach‘s screen adaptation of The Grizzly King (1916) by American novelist James Oliver Curwood. The project was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud in the 1988 film L’Ours, known in North America as The Bear.

On my curiosa viewing list is the Claude Berri written and directed sex comedy Sex Shop,[2] which offers, outside of the funky grooves of Serge Gainsbourg, a slice of life of the French sexual revolution, or perhaps even an early case study of the ending thereof.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGl9DbuvN2Q&]

I give you the night club sequence from the Claude Berri movie “Sex Shop”

P.S. Berri has a bit part in Michel Gast‘s screen adaptation of Boris Vian‘s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes.

RIP Stooges band member Ron Asheton (1948 – 2009)

RIP Ron Asheton

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OyLRgLMSOM]

A New Order song (not the UK band, an early Asheton project)

Ron Asheton (July 17, 1948 – c. December 31, 2008 or January 1, 2009) was an American guitarist and co-songwriter with Iggy Pop for the rock band The Stooges.
Asheton was found dead in his Ann Arbor, Mi. home of a reported heart attack on January 6th, 2009, having died several days earlier, probably either on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.

God, I would hate to die alone like that.

Deaths in 2008

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXz22-_Io-c]

“Nobody had every done anything like this before” —Bebe Barron (1925 – 2008) on Anais Nin

January 22 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor (b. 1979)
February 13 – Henri Salvador, French singer (b. 1917)
February 18 – Alain Robbe-Grillet, French writer and filmmaker (b. 1922)
February 18 – Teo Macero, American record producer
February 21 – Joe Gibbs, Jamaican record producer
March 15 – Mikey Dread, Jamaican singer
March 19 – Sir Arthur C. Clarke, English science fiction author and inventor (b. 1917)
April 5 – Charlton Heston, 84, American actor
April 20 – Bebe Barron, 82, American composer, pioneer of electronic music.
April 29 – Albert Hofmann, 102, Swiss researcher, chemist and discoverer of LSD.
May 12 – Robert Rauschenberg, 82, American pop artist.
June 1 – Yves Saint-Laurent, 71, French fashion designer
June 2 – Bo Diddley, 79, American rock and roll and blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist.
June 2 – Mel Ferrer, 90, American actor, film director and producer.
June 7 – Dino Risi, 91, Italian film director (Il Sorpasso, Profumo di donna), natural causes.
July 4 – Thomas M. Disch, 68, American science fiction author (Camp Concentration, The Brave Little Toaster), suicide.
July 7 – Bruce Conner, 74, American artist, natural causes.
July 7 – Hugh Mendl, 88, British record producer.
August 10 – Isaac Hayes, 65, American soul and funk musician, actor (South Park), stroke.
August 17 – Manny Farber, 91, American film critic and painter.
September 8 – Hector Zazou, 60, French composer and record producer.
September 12 – David Foster Wallace, 46, American author and essayist, suicide by hanging.
September 12 – Norman Whitfield, 65, American Motown songwriter (“I Heard It Through the Grapevine“), diabetes.
September 18 – Mauricio Kagel, 76, Argentinian composer.
September 26 – Paul Newman, 83, American Academy Award-winning actor, cancer.
September 26 – Marc Moulin, 66, Belgian musician, cancer.
October 11 – Alton Ellis, 68, Jamaican singer, lymphatic cancer.
October 25 – Gerard Damiano, 80, American adult film director (Deep Throat), stroke.
November 1 – Yma Sumac, 86, Peruvian soprano, cancer.
November 4 – Byron Lee, 73, Jamaican musician and record producer, bladder cancer.
November 9 – Miriam Makeba, 76, South African singer, heart attack.
November 17 – Guy Peellaert 74, Belgian painter, illustrator and photographer.
December 2 – Odetta, 77, American folk singer and human rights activist, heart disease.
December 11 – Bettie Page, 85, American pin-up girl, complications from a heart attack.
December 24 – Harold Pinter, 78, British playwright, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2005), liver cancer.
December 25 – Eartha Kitt, 81, American singer and actress, colon cancer.

RIP Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008)

Moanin’ with Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard (1938 – 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter.

He was primarily known as a sideman to Art Blakey in the latter’s Jazz Messengers and many other jazzmen’s bands but achieved his greatest personal success in the 1970s with a series of albums for smooth jazz record label CTI Records. Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were bashed by critics for their commercialism.

Polar AC

A particularly accomplished track is Gibraltar, compiled by Ashley Beedle on the Grass Roots album.

RIP Eartha Kitt (1927 – 2008)

RIP Eartha Kitt

Eartha Mae Kitt (1927 – 2008) was an American actress, singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her 1953 Christmas song “Santa Baby“. Orson Welles once called her the “most exciting woman in the world”. She is internationally known for such songs as “I Want to Be Evil” (1957) and Where Is My Man (1983) (UK #36), the first a prime example of American cabaret, the second a gay anthem. She is an archetypical cat woman.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ5VaBgXzuM&]

“I Want to Be Evil“

As for “I Want to Be Evil,” I just discovered the song today. The version on Youtube depicted was recorded for a Swedish television show called Kaskade or Kaskad, Swedish for waterfall.

The song was written by Lester Judson and Raymond Taylor, first recorded in 1953, taken from the album That Bad Eartha with space-age pop musician Henri René and his Orchestra.

RIP Adrian Mitchell (1932 – 2008)

RIP Adrian Mitchell

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmMCObgu_jc]

To Whom It May Concern

Adrian Mitchell (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright, best-known for his poem To Whom It May Concern[1].

Connecting lemmas for Mitchell include London Oz, Tom Phillips (artist), International Poetry Incarnation, SOMA Research Association, Wholly Communion, To Whom It May Concern (poem), Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain and Penguin Modern Poets.

The poem To Whom It May Concern is known by its iconic phrase: “Tell me lies about Vietnam.” A piece of cult poetry if there ever was one.

I am the Dying Gaul

This is my death scene, I was not given a deathbed. I do not represent the most famous death scene. I am outdeathed by Jesus Christ who died on the cross and Jean-Paul Marat , both after me.

I seem to have been born in a culture of death, yet I was not given any last words. This fascination with death in Western culture. Why? Why so pervasive?

Why did Jane write A Death-Scene?

So I knew that he was dying-

Stooped, and raised his languid head;

Felt no breath, and heard no sighing,

So I knew that he was dead.

Why this fasicnation with crime scenes?

Why did Andy Warhol produce The Death and Disaster paintings?

And why is every sensationalist corner of video-libraries around the world filled with copies of Faces of Death?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GDcs8i2ng&]

Bonnie and Clyde

Why do we enjoy the slow motion death of Bonnie and Clyde and countles other movie death scenes?

Aristotle, had I known him, would have answered me:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. —Aristotle via the Poetics.

RIP Jim Cawthorn (1929 – 2008)

RIP Jim Cawthorn (1929 – 2008) (via John Coulthart [1])

The Metal Monster (1962) by Jim Cawthorn

Jim Cawthorn (1929 – 2008) was a British illustrator, comics artist and fantasy historian. Cawthorn was the first illustrator employed by Savoy Books in the early 1980s. Cawthorn was Michael Moorcock’s illustrator of choice for many years and was involved with the Moorcock-edited run of New Worlds right from the start with his cover illustrating J. G. Ballard’s “Equinox” story. He also provided reviews for New Worlds, and edited Fantasy: The 100 Best Books[1] with Moorcock.

Jahsonic

Aantekeningen uit Dodenstad.