Did you know you can pay to have the obituary for a non-famous loved one put in the New York Times?
The family of Antonia W. "Toni" Larroux of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi did."Waffle House lost a loyal customer on April 30, 2013. Antonia W. "Toni" Larroux died after a battle with multiple illnesses: lupus, rickets, scurvy, kidney disease and feline leukemia."
The obituary goes on to make fun of four generations of family (from her father to her grandchildren), the Hancock County Library Foundation and the clergyman presiding at her memorial service, closing with the statement that "Anyone wearing black will not be admitted to the memorial."
via Miss Cellania of Neatorama
posted by oneswellfoop
on May 5, 2013 -
62 comments
Comic book legend
Carmine Infantino has died at the age of 87. Beginning his career in the early 1940's, Infantino created or co-created stalwart DC characters such
The Flash,
Batgirl,
Black Canary, and
Deadman. He also served as editorial director at DC, and added artists and writers like Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, Denny O'Neill and Bernie Wrightson to the company's roster.
posted by marxchivist
on Apr 4, 2013 -
37 comments
"Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, acclaimed in part for his groundbreaking 1958 novel "Things Fall Apart," has died, his British publisher, Penguin Books, said Friday." Set in precolonial Nigeria,
Things Fall Apart portrays the story of a farmer, Okonkwo, who struggles to preserve his customs despite pressure from British colonizers. The story resonated in post-independent Africa, and the character became a household name in the continent.
[more inside]
posted by jquinby
on Mar 22, 2013 -
45 comments
"Misadventures was written in a flat, artless style — as The Daily Telegraph’s critic put it, like “a cross between a police officer giving evidence in court and a slightly demented grandmother intent on telling you everything over a cup of tea”.
The curious tale of Sylvia Smith - the author who achieved fame in her fifties on the publication of her memoir of an
ordinary life, one which sometimes
baffled critics.
posted by mippy
on Feb 28, 2013 -
22 comments
On Thursday, February 21st, influential British animator
Bob Godfrey passed away at the age of 91. (
Guardian,
BBC,
Cartoon Brew,
Mirror,
Rueters,
Telegraph, and yes, even the
Daily Mail. [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio
on Feb 23, 2013 -
12 comments
Donald Richie , American author, journalist, critic and expert on Japan, dies at 88.
Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatised, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted . . . how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right – I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.
-- from The Japan Journals, 1947-2004
[more inside]
posted by Ice Cream Socialist
on Feb 19, 2013 -
23 comments
"
One day, in the early 1960's, Mongo Santamaria called up Herbie Hancock and asked him to sit in as a pianist with Mongo's band, which was then performing at Club Cubano InterAmericano on Prospect Avenue, a popular Latin music spot. Herbie was reluctant to do it because he never played Latin before, but accepted the offer and was doing pretty well by the end of the first set. Then during intermission, Donald Byrd, who was there, asked Herbie to play his original composition "
Watermelon Man" for Mongo. When Herbie started doing this, Mongo's band, especially his huge percussion section, started joining in, and before you knew it the whole club was dancing. Mongo was so excited by what happened that he asked if he could record the song.
He did, and it became his greatest hit."
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Feb 11, 2013 -
26 comments
Since March 21, 1994, when the first regular obituary segment was dropped into an Academy Awards show, a spot on the yearly scroll of recently deceased movie luminaries has become one of the evening’s most hotly contested honors. And as in most Oscar races it is the focus of sometimes
ferocious campaigning.
posted by Chrysostom
on Feb 9, 2013 -
16 comments
Sadly, it's time to say farewell to a unique and visionary musician and musical thinker who developed and articulated an extraordinary method of directing large-ensemble improvisation with a method that he dubbed "conduction". Mr.
Butch Morris has
left us, but
his ideas will surely reverberate in the hearts and minds of creative musicians and lovers of creative music everywhere.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jan 29, 2013 -
10 comments
In 1974, Leon Leyson was one of a group of Jews who greeted Oskar Schindler when he visited Los Angeles. It was the first time the two had seen each other since the war. He began to introduce himself, but Schindler interrupted: "I know who you are," Schindler said, grinning at the middle-aged man before him. "You're Little Leyson."
On Sunday, the youngest name on Schindler's List passed away at the age of 83. "The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust," he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. "I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jan 14, 2013 -
35 comments
Aaron Swartz, web technologist, has committed suicide. First mentioned on Metafilter for his
involvement in the standardization of RSS in 2001 as a ninth-grader, most of Swartz's 26 years were devoted to leaving a lasting impact on the web. Swartz
co-founded Infogami, which merged with the internet aggregator
Reddit, and also founded the Internet activist organization
Demand Progress which
fought against the SOPA/PIPA legislation. His framework for web servers,
web.py, was first released in 2006 when Reddit switched from Lisp to Python and continues to be actively
used and updated. In a 2008 attempt to make a public version of the contents of the PACER public court records database, Swartz
angered government officials when they learned he had downloaded 20 million articles, which he subsequently made
freely available. In 2011 he was
indicted for data theft for downloading large amounts from the academic article repository JSTOR. Despite JSTOR's statement indicating "
no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter," the US case
continued with additional charges, to which Aaron pled innocent in September of 2012.
[more inside]
posted by Llama-Lime
on Jan 12, 2013 -
528 comments
The poet Jayne Cortez passed away this past December 28th in New York City (
New York Times obituary). She started publishing her poems in the late 1960s and in the 70s began performing her poetry backed by music,
first in
collaboration with bassist Richard Davis, and then backed by her own band The Firespitters. Some of their tracks have found their way to YouTube:
I See Chano Pozo,
If the Drum Is a Woman,
There It Is,
Maintain Control & Economic Love Song I,
Everybody Wants to Be Somebody,
Takin' the Blues Back Home,
Talk to Me (for Don Cherry),
I've Been Searching,
You Can Be and
Endangered Species List Blues. Just two years ago she performed solo with her son by Ornette Coleman, drummer Denardo Coleman:
Find Your Own Voice,
I'm Gonna Shake and
She Got He Got. In 1997 she was featured on University of California television network in the series
Artists on the Cutting Edge where she read poems and discussed her work. Finally,
here's a brief clip from the 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, where she was interviewed.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 5, 2013 -
4 comments
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
"Edlinger began to climb. As the last competitor, everyone at Snowbird knew how high he must get to beat his rivals and win the event. With apparent ease, he climbed past their high-points, until pausing beneath a huge overhang that had defeated all-comers. At that moment,
a narrow shaft of sunlight pierced the cloud cover and illuminated Edlinger. When he completed the route, the only one from the world's best to do so, the crowd erupted. Until this point, American climbers had been unsure about competition climbing. After Edlinger, they were converted." - Patrick Edlinger, age 52, died on December 10, after years of battling depression following a near-death fall in the nineties that prevented him from climbing at the same level.
[more inside]
posted by Riton
on Dec 23, 2012 -
10 comments
