Irm Hermann was a German actress best known for her films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), she is the girlfriend of racist Eugen (Fassbinder).
Things come to a crisis when her mother (Brigitte Mira) falls in love with a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (migrant worker).
Researching this death, I came across an interview with a very lovable Brigitte Mira and her relationship to director Fassbinder.
Hamilton Bohannon was an American musician best known for the disco hit “Let’s Start the Dance” (1978).
Other compositions of note include “I Remember” (1981, the basis for “From: Disco To: Disco”, 1996), “Me and the Gang” (1978, the basis for “Get Get Down”, 1999), “Truck Stop” (1974), “South African Man” (1975) and “The Beat (Part 2)” (1979).
His instrumentals have a mesmerizing repetitiveness and a lack of violins which went down well with the people who liked to dance but were not into the kitsch of disco.
Terry Jones will be best-remembered for playing Maria in Life of Brian (1979) in which she proclaims indignantly that her son is “not the messiah, but a very naughty boy.”
Every death being an encounter, I was surprised to learn that Jones was also a popular historian.
In ‘The Knight’ episode of Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (2004) Jones explains how the English word knight stems from the Germanic word knecht, two words which have since then have become to denote opposite things. In Dutch, the ‘knecht’ (also the name for a farmhand now) is the one who helps the knight, a page boy really.
Vladimir Bukovsky was a Russian human rights activist and Soviet dissident.
I am a child of the Cold War and I can still remember where I was when the Berlin wall fell.
I used to be much more sympathetic to the left, growing older has made me lean more to the right. You know what they say:
“If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.” […]
One of the greatest cognitive dissonances of the 20th century is the continuous attraction of communism, this dream of justice and equality (embodied by Sartre (Dirty Hands) , Che Guevara and the hippies) and the paradoxical contrast with the actual gruesome fiasco of the first communist system (and all subsequent communist systems). And yet, it’s not hard to see why communism, this Opium of the Intellectuals, holds such a powerful attraction at a time when the earth, a finite cake, is being greedily devoured which results in polluted air, polluted water and polluted nature, essential resources that should be common and free to everyone. That’s why I call myself a ‘commonist’ sometimes.
Back to the topic. The dissident Bukovsky, the man who wrote a pamphlet with the title Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents (1974) at a time when thousands of dissidents were locked up in psychiatric hospitals all over the Soviet Union. This manual instructed potential victims of political psychiatry how to behave during interrogation to avoid being diagnosed as mentally ill
Bukovsky is interviewed prominently in the documentary film The Soviet Story (2008), featured on YouTube without subtitles for the parts in Russian language. The film has its flaws I’m sure, and it was financed by a right-leaning grouping of European political parties but it is nevertheless of interest.
There is for example the analysis by George Watson of the Völkerabfälle-episode and there is Françoise Thom‘s dictum that “nazism [is] an ideology based on false biology and communism is based on false sociology“.
Larry Taylor was an American bassist.
He is best known for his contribution to “On the Road Again” (1968).
He also played bass on 15 Tom Waits albums.
I love the dark cabaret feel of Swordfishtrombones.