Tag: Obit

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

Rest in Peace – Demaryius Thomas

I’d like to think he got a small taste of the appreciation on that November afternoon a few months later, when he returned to Denver as a member of the Texans. The Broncos draped a massive banner on the side of the stadium reading, “Thank You D.T.” When he walked to the bus after the game, Manning’s kids ran up to him in little Thomas No. 87 Texans jerseys. I don’t even know how Manning was able to get them made in a matter of days. The children hugged Thomas like a favorite uncle they hadn’t seen in years. Just as he’d been during Manning’s retirement ceremony, Thomas was basically an honorary member of the family.

There wasn’t a person in that stadium who didn’t want a picture with DT. Or just to shake his hand and tell him they missed him. He’d been gone less than a week.

Demaryius Thomas was uniquely talented on the football field — and truly special in life
James Palmer

RIP – Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose startling 1994 memoir, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” won praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression and helped introduce an unsparing style of confessional writing that remains influential, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 52.

NYTIMES

A. Alvarez – RIP

A. Alvarez, a British poet, critic and essayist who played a pivotal role in bringing the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the public, and whose acclaimed book on the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas helped transform high-stakes professional poker from a cult to a televised sport, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 90.

Mr. Alvarez’s enormously influential anthology “The New Poetry,” published in 1962, brought the poetry of Mr. Hughes, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill and the American confessional poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell to a wide audience in Britain. Ms. Plath and Anne Sexton were added to the 1966 edition.

In his polemical preface, Mr. Alvarez railed against the genteel tradition in English poetry and what he called “the cult of rigid impersonality.” The new poetry, he argued, took emotional risks. It embraced “experience sometimes on the edge of disintegration and breakdown.”

William Grimes, Sept. 23, 2019,  nytimes

 

From Alvarez’s book Night:

Apart from the ‘organised and steady system’, something else hasn’t changed since Dickens went out with the police: the ‘individual energy and keenness’. But police take on the character of their territory. In London, the energy and keenness are masked, like the city itself, by a certain reticence; in Manhattan, they come with a New Yorker pace and appetite. When I called Lieutenant Raymond O’Donnell, the head of media liaison at Police Plaza, the NYPD’s downtown redbrick fortress, to arrange a couple of nights as a ‘ride-along’ in the back of a patrol car, I asked to go to precincts where I might see some action.

A gravelly voice at the other end said, ‘Whaddya want, drugs or whores?’
‘How about both?’
‘You got it!’