Tag: Obit

RIP Martin Amis

Martin Amis, British author of era-defining novels, dies at 73

Influential British author Martin Amis has died at his home in Lake Worth, Fla., of esophageal cancer. He was 73.

His agent, Andrew Wiley, and his publisher, Vintage Books, confirmed his death on Saturday.

This is from Ron Rosenbaum, in his book The Secret Parts of Fortune:

As more and more bodies crammed themselves into the sweaty mosh pit of the Benetton basement, and the wait for the now overdue author went on, I began revolving around in my mind a theory about Mr. Amis’s work, why exactly I find his vision so powerful. Why it represents to me something more than addictively entertaining, acidly sophisticated dark comedy. The way it seems to me to embody as well a perversely spiritual vision, a brilliant heretical counterstatement to the Grand, Overinflated secular religion of our culture: the Religion of Self-Esteem. What Mr. Amis does is counterpose to the doctrine of self-esteem as the be-all and cure-all of the human condition what might be called the Virtue of Self-Loathing, the spiritual Discipline of Self-Disgust.

Here are a couple of his books that I am a fan of:
Money

Money is the hilarious story of John Self, one of London’s top commercial directors, who is given the opportunity to make his first feature film—alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. He is also living money, talking money, and spending money in his relentless pursuit of pleasure and success. As he attempts to navigate his hedonistic world of drinking, sex, drugs, and excessive quantities of fast food, Self is sucked into a wretched spiral of degeneracy that is increasingly difficult to surface from.

Experience

The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley’s life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis’ portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov’s Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.

Lance Reddick – Memorable TV Shows and Movies – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/arts/television/lance-reddick-tv-shows-movies.html

The Wire
Reddick’s breakthrough role came in 2002 with the role of Cedric Daniels, who began the critically acclaimed HBO series as a principled but ambitious lieutenant in the narcotics unit of the Baltimore Police Department.

Fringe
Most stars of the fascinatingly loopy Fox sci-fi drama “Fringe” played multiple parts in multiple universes, creating several versions of primary and alternate characters. Reddick starred as Special Agent Phillip Broyles in one universe and Colonel Broyles in the other. (In the third season, the actor had the surreal task of playing Agent Broyles meeting the dead body of Colonel Broyles.)

Corporate
Reddick spoofed his own stoic severity in several comedic roles — highlights include an inappropriate toy store manager in a Funny or Die sketch; a guest spot in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in which he struggles to control his temper; and an appearance on Eric André’s Adult Swim talk show that started strange and just got stranger. André seemed just as befuddled as the audience when Reddick punched the desk and left, before returning later to dramatically declare that he wished he were LeVar Burton.

Bosch
After doing “The Wire” and “Fringe” back to back, Reddick was hesitant to play another top cop role. But Irvin Irving in the Amazon crime drama “Bosch” is not just another cop — the Los Angeles chief of police is more of a political animal who loves power games.

John Wick
Reddick’s most popular film role came late in his career: Charon, the sleek concierge at the Continental Hotel in the “John Wick” movie franchise. As an employee of a Manhattan establishment that catered to traveling assassins, Charon — named after the ferryman of Hades in Greek mythology — was the soul of discretion. But he was especially sympathetic to the needs of one guest in particular: the very dangerous John Wick (Keanu Reeves).

RIP – Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone, a pioneer in improvisation who trained a generation of actors and comedians in impromptu performance and creativity, on and off stage, has died. He was 90.

Johnstone passed away at Rockyview Hospital in Calgary on Saturday, according to his personal website, with no cause of death specified. The creator of Theatresports and co-founder of The Loose Moose Theatre Company was born in Devon, England on Feb. 21, 1933.

Johnstone trained at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was a teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The Royal Court Theatre commissioned a stage play from Johnstone in 1956 and he remained a part of that prestigious live stage troupe over the next decade.

Summing up his philosophy, the key to improvisation is not to be prepared, Johnstone told a TEDx event in Calgary in 2016. “Improvisation is high risk. People think it’s like show business. It’s much more like sport,” he said, before adding the best performance calls for reaching for the obvious, not the clever. “The clever is an imitation of somebody else, really,” Johnstone added.

Keith Johnstone, Improv Trailblazer, Dies at 90
The creator of Theatresports trained and inspired a generation of actors, screenwriters and comics in improvisation and in-the-moment creativity, including ‘Better Call Saul’ star Bob Odenkirk.

Highly recommend Johnstone’s book – Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

RIP Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck anecdote from Duff McKagan’s book:

I arranged for a friend of mine, drummer Slam Thunderhide of the band Zodiac Mindwarp, to have my mom over to his flat for a proper English tea and then to bring her down to the studio where Jeff and I were recording. Jeff had already been playing for a little while when my mom arrived. He’s a virtuoso, and watching him play is like seeing musical butter melt.

After Jeff had played some blistering passes at one song, my mom said, “Jeff, you play really nice guitar.”

My mom was not aware of Jeff Beck’s iconic status—she didn’t know about the Yardbirds or his influential albums like Wired and Blow by Blow.

Unfazed, Jeff answered, “Oh, well, thank you so much, Marie. I thought I messed up that last pass pretty good. Did you like it, then?”

That guy will forever be my hero.

It’s So Easy: and other lies
Duff McKagan

RIP – Russell Banks

Russell Banks, Novelist Steeped in the Working Class, Dies at 82
He brought his own sometimes painful blue-collar experiences to bear in acclaimed stories exploring issues of race, class and power in American life.
NYTIMES

A couple books of his I’d recommend:
Rule of the Bone
When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name “Bone.”

The Sweet Hereafter
In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life’s most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

The Sweet Hereafter was made into a movie, which I also thought was great, check out it’s IMDB page.

RIP – Terry Hall

Here’s a rembrance at BBC:
Terry Hall of The Specials dies aged 63

From Wikipedia:

“Ghost Town” is a song by the British two-tone band the Specials, released on 12 June 1981. The song spent three weeks at number one and 10 weeks in total in the top 40 of the UK Singles Chart.

Evoking themes of urban decay, deindustrialisation, unemployment and violence in inner cities, the song is remembered for being a hit at the same time as riots were occurring in British cities. Internal tensions within the band were also coming to a head when the single was being recorded, resulting in the song being the last single recorded by the original seven members of the group before splitting up. However, the song was hailed by the contemporary UK music press as a major piece of popular social commentary, and all three of the major UK music magazines of the time awarded “Ghost Town” the accolade of “Single of the Year” for 1981. It was the 12th-best-selling single in the UK in 1981.

Last Child of an Enslaved Person Dies

Daniel Smith, who was believed to be the last surviving child of an enslaved person, and who over a long and eventful life witnessed firsthand many of the central moments of the African American experience, died on Oct. 19 in Washington. He was 90.

His wife, Loretta Neumann, said the cause was congestive heart failure and bladder cancer.

Mr. Smith’s father, Abram Smith, was born into slavery during the Civil War in Virginia and was 70 when his much younger wife, Clara, gave birth to Daniel in 1932. While it is impossible to know for certain whether Daniel Smith was the last living child of an enslaved person, historians who have studied his generation say they do not know of any others.

Mr. Smith, a Connecticut-born retired federal employee, liked to say that he led a quiet, unexciting life. Yet he also joked that he was a bit like a “Black Forrest Gump”: He attended the March on Washington in 1963; crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965; and stood in the audience to watch Barack Obama take his first oath of office as president in 2009.

Daniel Smith, 90, Dies; Thought to Be the Last Child of an Enslaved Person
He led a life marked by encounters with touchstone moments in Black history, from the March on Washington to Barack Obama’s first inauguration.

RIP – Anne Heche

I liked this movie and it’s not a bad one to remember Anne Heche with. Recall her character, a therapist, saying, “I think I’m fucking my patients up worse.” (Paraphrased from memory.)


IMDB

Just as Amelia thinks she’s over her anxiety and insecurity, her best friend announces her engagement, bringing her anxiety and insecurity right back

RIP – Peter Brook

By then Mr. Brook, who took delight in “shaking up terrible, stultifying old conventions,” as he put it, had become a thoroughgoing iconoclast. Some mark that change at his 1960 Paris production of Jean Genet’s “The Balcony,” a work considered boldly subversive at the time. For Genet’s scenes of exotic life in a Paris brothel, Mr. Brook used striking-looking amateurs, found in Paris bars, as well as professional actors and dancers. But a radical revival of “King Lear,” staged for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London in 1962, was more significant.

Not only did Mr. Brook encourage Scofield to play the titanic hero of tradition as a painfully flawed human being, but just before the production’s opening, he threw out the set that he himself had designed, ensuring that the plot unfolded on a bare stage under plain lighting. The resulting epic unforgettably exposed the cruel absurdities of humanity.

Peter Brook, Celebrated Stage Director of Scale and Humanity, Dies at 97
He was called “the greatest innovator of his generation,” leaving an indelible mark with plays, musicals, opera and a relentless curiosity.

“There are three kinds of audiences [for Shakespeare]: a normal audience, an audience with Peter Brook in it, and you lot.”
— Patrick Stewart (former Royal Shakespeare Company member) speaking to the 18th International Conference of Shakespeare Scholars at Stratford-on-Avon

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
Ron Rosenbaum