KVARESTO8
Walking Projects
Fairfax Cross County Trail, 41 miles: completed 2 July 2010.
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Category Archives: In Memoriam
Warning! Warning!
Dick Tufeld, voice of the Robot in TV’s Lost in Space (the only character who sounded remotely grounded in reality), has passed away.
(News via Leta.)
Gestural
Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few women that thrived in the boys’ club of New York school abstractionism, died earlier this week. The Times has a brief slideshow of some of her most important work.
First
Isabel Wilkerson revisits this year’s obituaries from 750 newspapers across the country. It was a year of “the first African-American to…” O the strides made in humble mundanity.
Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.
Time for a reread
Russell Hoban, ventriloquist extraordinaire/author of Riddley Walker, has passed.
(Link via Bookslut.)
the radio/is off
At Via Negativa, Dave Bonta offers “This poem has nothing to do with 9/11.”
Some links: 55
- I was looking for packing material at my cousin’s place and came across a Saturday edition obit for Jerry Ragovoy; otherwise I would have missed it altogether. Ragovoy co-wrote “Piece of My Heart,” which was recorded in a wrenching live performance by Janis Joplin and later, more regrettably, by a country pop singer.
- Linda Himelstein reports on research that looks at how dyslexics master syllable-based writing systems (and their languages) as opposed to character-based system.
- Alan Feuer filed a fine report on the natural areas of Jamaica Bay, still the only National Wildlife Refuge that you can get to via subway. Mylan Cannon adds a great photograph of conservationist Don Riepe, an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) on a ground-level nest, and a passenger jet in the background.
Jamaica Bay’s conservationists — fishermen and firefighters, limousine drivers and owners of small boats — are not your typical tree-hugging types, not “Upper West Side, Park Slope, brownstone Brooklyn people,” as Mr. Riepe put it. They are people like Mr. Lewandowski from the canoe club, a transit official…
Dream
I don’t usually do video embeds, but I was inspired in part by Via Negativa’s Memorial Day mix. Herewith, Ed McCurdy’s “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” performed by Arlo Guthrie and Shenandoah.
Hard to keep up
When I hear on the radio the voice of an artist that I haven’t heard in a long time, it’s rarely happy news. And so it is with the passing of Phoebe Snow, who died last week after a long illness, as Tom Cole and Neda Ulaby report. “No Regrets,” from the Second Childhood album (1976) is a shimmering three minutes of new swing that will always be with me.
Safe home
How did I miss this? Last week, Lanford Wilson, playwright of terrific ensemble pieces like The Hot l Baltimore and Book of Days, passed away.
No Abzug
Via Parallax Views comes news of the passing of Geraldine Ferraro, vice presidential candidate who “ran rings around George H.W. Bush in their vice-presidential debate.”
Zelig backing up first base
Douglas Martin closes the book on Greg Goossen, C and 1B for the Mets and Seattle Pilots. A bright prospect who never starred, nonetheless Goossen’s name is attached to many incidents of baseball history in the 1960s, and he provided fodder for Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.
Bouton told of the time the two were on opposing International League teams and Goossen was catching. The batter bunted to the pitcher, and Goossen yelled, “First base! First base!” Instead the pitcher threw to second and everybody was safe.
As a disgusted Goossen stalked back to the plate, Bouton shouted from the dugout, “Goose, he had to consider the source.”
Totally serial
Composer of the avant garde Milton Babbitt has died at the age of 94. I dabbled in Babbitt in my salad days but I never quite became a fan. Audio clips of many of his pieces and a video interview from 2001 (in which he favorably compares art music composition to microbrewing) are at NewMusicBox.
The rich have their own photographers
Via wood s lot comes news of the passing last week of Milton Rogovin, social documentary photographer based in Buffalo, N.Y. Claire O’Neill has assembled a slideshow of some of Rogovin’s images of “the forgotten ones,” and links to a 2003 interview with Scott Simon. Once blacklisted as the “top Communist in Buffalo,” Rogovin’s archives are now with the Library of Congress.
Strange liberators
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967:
A few years ago there was a shining moment… a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.
* * *
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Missing the 70s
Winter is now a little quieter: NPR reports that Gerry Rafferty has died. Just the other day, I was just listening to City to City on my walk.
