Culture Icons... R.I.P

TheVat said:
Alexandra Petri's love note to Tom Stoppard. I concur.

www.theatlantic.com

Tom Stoppard Achieved the Impossible

His plays hold us in the moment outside of time.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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I loved his polymath plays. I thought "Arcadia" was brilliant - and refreshing to see science brought to the stage so intelligently. Also "The Real Thing" and "The Invention of Love". But Stoppard was going for donkey's years. I remember attending a production of "The Real Inspector Hound" at my brother's school, in the early 70s, in which said brother played Hound, making great play of enunciating "swamp boots" very slowly and clearly, in a London mock-police voice, to general hilarity.
 
Wonderful! That's one I haven't seen on stage, would love to. I have an mp3 of a London production, downloaded from the Internet Archive. And your brother's opportunity to enunciate swamp boots is another reminder that an American high school generally doesn't offer what a British secondary school does. My wife lived in England for one year (Coopersale Common, NE of London, near Epping) around age 10, attending 5th grade (sixth year, I think you call it, of primary school). She found herself somewhat ahead of the curriculum when she then attended an American 6th grade next year.
 
TheVat said:
Wonderful! That's one I haven't seen on stage, would love to. I have an mp3 of a London production, downloaded from the Internet Archive. And your brother's opportunity to enunciate swamp boots is another reminder that an American high school generally doesn't offer what a British secondary school does. My wife lived in England for one year (Coopersale Common, NE of London, near Epping) around age 10, attending 5th grade (sixth year, I think you call it, of primary school). She found herself somewhat ahead of the curriculum when she then attended an American 6th grade next year.
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OK I admit it wasn’t a regular state secondary school, but St. Paul’s, an excellent independent London day school, to which he had managed to get a sort of scholarship that my father had found out about and applied for.

Stoppard was always fun to see.
 
RIP Rob Reiner............so tragic, so talented.......such a good human being and his wife.
 
babe said:
RIP Rob Reiner............so tragic, so talented.......such a good human being and his wife.
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Really shocking murder. Who on Earth would want to kill him?? Good Lord I hope this wasn't some MAGA zealot exacting retribution for Rob's disparagement of 47. And he was a very visible political activist, on several issues. And he was still working AFAIK on a television project, The Spy and the Asset, about the relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin.

If he had done nothing but Spinal Tap, Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, I would still count him among the greatest directors. Very sad, premature truncation of an active creative life. I'm sorry I don't know as much about Michelle - was she collateral damage, a witness who couldn't be allowed to live?

Horrible.
 
TheVat said:
Really shocking murder. Who on Earth would want to kill him?? [...]
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His son has been taken into custody. History of substance abuse, though that doesn't necessarily equate to being a current contributor to such [potential] patricide and matricide.
- - - - - - -

What we know about Nick Reiner
https://www.latimes.com/california/...-with-addiction-share-his-recovery-with-world

EXCERPT: During the interview, Rob said he regretted valuing the advice of counselors over the voice of his son.

“When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen,” he said. “We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”

Michele added: “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”

Nick talked about the many different rehab centers and programs he tried without success. In 2016, he told People magazine that he lived on the streets because he refused to go to the rehab facilities his parents recommended.
_
 
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The great Joseph Byrd died early last month (took a while for the news to spread, I guess). The genius behind The United States of America and Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, Byrd also worked with/studied under Morton Feldman, John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Virgil Thomson, among others. He also scored some films for Agnes Varda and Robert Altman and provided the electronics on Phil Och's "Crucifixion" (from PLeasures of the Harbor).

Pictured here with the equally great Dorothy Moskowitz:

GettyImages-452988936.jpg

pitchfork.com

Joseph Byrd, United States of America Bandleader, Dies at 87

The experimental composer brought electronic sound and radical ideas into the psych-rock genre
pitchfork.com pitchfork.com

 
C C said:
His son has been taken into custody. History of substance abuse, though that doesn't necessarily equate to being a current contributor to such [potential] patricide and matricide.
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Thanks - I hadn't checked my feed earlier, and just did a post-and-run. Well, this should derail some of the tinfoil brigade. Of course, no doubt the War on Drugs militarists will frame this as all about Nick's drug problems and more grounds to dump the Constitution and sink lots of ships.
 
parmalee said:
The great Joseph Byrd died early last month (took a while for the news to spread, I guess). The genius behind The United States of America and Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, Byrd also worked with/studied under Morton Feldman, John Cage, LaMonte Young, and Virgil Thomson, among others
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As a pal of mine usta say, why do artists have to die for me to notice their work?
(Thank god I noticed Terry Riley well before that...he just keeps on keeping on, age 90)

I have to ask...when John Cage died, did musicians gather and observe 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence?
 
TheVat said:
As a pal of mine usta say, why do artists have to die for me to notice their work?
(Thank god I noticed Terry Riley well before that...he just keeps on keeping on, age 90)

I have to ask...when John Cage died, did musicians gather and observe 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence?
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LaMonte is still kicking, but at 90 I don't think he's terribly active anymore. That said, Marshall Allen is still leading The Sun Ra Arkestra at 101--here he is, just last night! (He still performs abroad too.)

On the bright side, I think there's always roughly the same amount of good stuff out there, at any period in time. I'm always perplexed by people who lament that there was so much better music or whatever in the 60s/70s/80s/90s/whenever. The quality of whatever is actually popular seems to wax and wane over time, but when you look beyond what does well commercially there's an abundance of solid "content" out there. And for those who really hang on to whatever whoever was doing back in whenever, there's someone out there doing pretty much exactly the same thing today.

A reviewer once described my style as "a sort of backwoods Terry Riley" (in a review that also referenced Deleuze completely irrespective of any direct, maybe even indirect, indicators within my notes and titles). Arguably, Henry Flynt would be more directly a backwoods Terry Riley, but I wasn't gonna complain.
 
parmalee said:
LaMonte is still kicking, but at 90 I don't think he's terribly active anymore. That said, Marshall Allen is still leading The Sun Ra Arkestra at 101--here he is, just last night! (He still performs abroad too.)

On the bright side, I think there's always roughly the same amount of good stuff out there, at any period in time. I'm always perplexed by people who lament that there was so much better music or whatever in the 60s/70s/80s/90s/whenever. The quality of whatever is actually popular seems to wax and wane over time, but when you look beyond what does well commercially there's an abundance of solid "content" out there. And for those who really hang on to whatever whoever was doing back in whenever, there's someone out there doing pretty much exactly the same thing today.

A reviewer once described my style as "a sort of backwoods Terry Riley" (in a review that also referenced Deleuze completely irrespective of any direct, maybe even indirect, indicators within my notes and titles). Arguably, Henry Flynt would be more directly a backwoods Terry Riley, but I wasn't gonna complain.
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Saw Sun Ra about 50yrs ago in France.
Are they just getting warmed up or are they much more subdued and less theatrical now?Surprised they are still going .Was the main main called Sun Ra?Is he dead?

Interesting that Reiner said that he did Spinal Tap 2 on sccount of there being so many very old fellas still in the music game (Fela Kuti comes to mind now -died I think)
 
geordief said:
Saw Sun Ra about 50yrs ago in France.
Are they just getting warmed up or are they much more subdued and less theatrical now?Surprised they are still going .Was the main main called Sun Ra?Is he dead?
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Sun Ra returned to Saturn back in 1993 and Marshall Allen has led the band since. Do you remember what year you saw them? For me, mid '60 to early '80s was peak Ra. But, yeah, they're a lot let theatrical than they used to be.
 
parmalee said:
Sun Ra returned to Saturn back in 1993 and Marshall Allen has led the band since. Do you remember what year you saw them? For me, mid '60 to early '80s was peak Ra. But, yeah, they're a lot let theatrical than they used to be.
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I'll guess 72/73/74.
It was great .Out of doors and loads of venom/crazy.

Kind of Jim Morissonesque.(they liked him a lot in France,too)
 
parmalee said:
Nonsense. Plink plonk pianos are the best!
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I recall putting thumbtacks on the felt hammers of an old beat up upright I used to have. Great old timey saloon sound. I learned Magnetic Rag on it, and a couple others. It was perfect for Kitten on the Keys, but that piece was technically beyond me, so it sounded like the saloon pianist had a few too many. Or the kitten, whichever.
 
TheVat said:
I recall putting thumbtacks on the felt hammers of an old beat up upright I used to have. Great old timey saloon sound. I learned Magnetic Rag on it, and a couple others. It was perfect for Kitten on the Keys, but that piece was technically beyond me, so it sounded like the saloon pianist had a few too many. Or the kitten, whichever.
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Well now I have a couple of tunes to look up...
 
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