Category: Memoriam
-
June Smith
Over the weekend, I heard about the passing of June Smith. You’ve heard about her in this space before; she was the wife of Dick Smith, my college choir director, about whose passing I wrote six years ago. And while I spent less time with Mrs. Smith, she was just as important a figure in…
-
The Last Real Liberal
Nat Hentoff passed away over the weekend. He was 91. After getting his start as a jazz critic with the Village Voice, Hentoff swerved into a career as a civil liberties activist. Probably 25 years ago, I read Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee – a book about free speech, but even moreso a…
-
Breslin
Jimmy Breslin died over the weekend. He was 88. We’ll come back to that. The media today – or at least, people of a certain age (i.e. older than me) who are still in the media – remind me of circus performers telling inside jokes about what the ringmaster did after that one show in…
-
Tradition!
There’s an ugly, stupid fringe on the edge of all political movements. Of course, in remembering the deaths of Ronald Reagan, Tony Snow, Gerald Ford, Antonin Scalia and others, it’s seemed like that deranged fringe cuts very close to the center of the Democrat party. But for one of their own? Alan Colmes was always…
-
Bill Cooper
Bill Cooper, former chair of the Minnesota GOP and longtime CEO at TCF Bank, passed away earlier this week at 73. In addition to leading the MNGOP during the Carlson years, Cooper did two things that made him a hero to me. Nick-Slapped: Back in 2005, then-Strib columnist Nick Coleman wrote a deeply dumb column wondering how…
-
The Day The Massed Choral Music Died
Say what you will about Russia and its history: not good for the proverbial little guy, lots of death and misery, in a demographic death spiral… …but if they do something well, it’s massed choral music. And so I pay my regards to the Alexandrow Ensemble – known to generations as the Red Army Choir,…
-
Dr. Blake
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been punched in the stomach. But I remember what it feels like with this news: Dr. Jim Blake, my college advisor, died a few months ago in Oil City, PA. He was 68. That I’m hearing about it a few seasons late shows how life’s sturm und drang will have…
-
The Greatest
RIP Buddy Ryan: The defensive mastermind that was, perhaps even more than Mike Ditka, behind the greatest team in the history of NFL football, Ryan had a long, long career: Beloved by his players and hated by opposing offenses (and sometimes hated even by his own offenses), Ryan masterminded Chicago’s 46 defense that won Super…
-
Cap’n Jim
Word came this past week of the passing of broadcasting legend Jim Rohn – or, if you grew up within 100 miles of Fargo in the sixties and early seventies, “Captain Jim”: Rohn got his start in 1946 on the radio at KSJB-AM in Jamestown following his service in World War II. He was radioman/gunner on…
-
Retirement Age
Today would have been Joey Ramone’s 65th birthday: And it’s hard to believe he’s been dead for 15 years.
-
Madeline LeBeau
The last surviving credited cast member from the movie “Casablanca”, French actress Madeline LeBeau, has died. She was 92. The cause was complications from a broken thigh bone, her stepson, documentary filmmaker and mountaineer Carlo Alberto Pinelli, told the Hollywood Reporter. Ms. LeBeau (sometimes credited as Lebeau) was the last surviving credited cast member of…
-
Roots
When I was a kid, country-western was trying its darnedest to cross over with pop music; the Nashville power-brokers were pushing to try to rake in some of that Top 40 money. From the early seventies to the mid-eighties, C&W was sodden with bloated pop pretenders – the Eddie Rabbits and Ronnie Milsaps and Lee…
-
RIP Alan Rickman
When a great actors dies? Well, that’s Sheila O’Malley’s turf. And she’s got Alan Rickman’s obit over at rogerebert.com. I loved the graf about my favorite Rickman film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, which was his American big-screen follow-up to Die Hard: Rickman could have had a nice career playing villains. But 1990’s “Truly Madly Deeply”, directed byAnthony Minghella,…
-
RIP David Bowie
David Jones – who had to change his surname to “Bowie” after the Monkees debuted in the UK, almost fifty years ago – passed away yesterday, way too early, at age 69. He’s been a longtime candidate for one of my “Things I’m Supposed To Love…” bits. I have always been ambivalent about Bowie’s music –…
-
“That’s The Way I Like It Baby, I Don’t Wanna Live Forever”
Lemmy Kilmister of Mötörhead dead at 70. Lemmy was lead vocalist, bassist, principal songwriter and the founding, and the only constant member of Motörhead since the band’s formation in 1975. To date, Motörhead have released twenty studio albums and achieved 30 million in sales worldwide. Their last record, Bad Magic, was released in August 2015. Over…
-
So – About That Stone Temple Pilots Reunion?
Look for a refund, if you bought tickets. RIP, Scott Weiland, who apparently passed away in Bloomington last night. We’ll always have 1995:
-
I’ve Seen All Good Bassists
Music geeks over the weekend noted the passing of Chris Squire, longtime bassist for prog-rock icons Yes. Now, as I’ve written innumerable times, I really listen to music on two levels; is the music technically adept in some way – singing, instrumental chops, production – and does it grab me in the liver and say…
-
“Today Is God’s Gift; That’s Why We Call It The Present”
Peggy Noonan had an excellent piece last week on the late Joan Rivers – whom Noonan counted as a friend. The whole thing is worth a read. But there was one part I’d never known about: She was a Republican, always a surprising thing in show business, and in a New Yorker, but she was…
-
Memorial Day
As I discussed on the show on Saturday, there are really two sides to Memorial Day, to me. The first part is the obvious part; remembering those who’ve died to keep this country free. There are many of them; well over a million men and women have died in the service of this country, in…
-
An Anniversary
It was ten years ago today that a roadside bomb in Anbar province killed two soldiers from the North Dakota Army National Guard’s 141st Engineer Battalion. One of them, Specialist Brown, was the nephew of two of my high school classmates and of my seventh-grade history teacher. I remember him as a little kid, back…
-
RIP Otis McDonald
In the late sixties, a justifiably obscure SCOTUS’ “decision”, “US v. Miller” (a depression-era case involving a robber who was murdered before his case made it to the court, and for whom no attorney argued before the high court) was dragged out of the legal ether by a series of liberal, activist judges, and installed…
-
RIP Harold Ramis
Via Sheila O’Malley, to whom I often outsource my show-biz obits: Of all of the films that have come out during my lifetime, all the huge important Oscar-winning serious films, all the weighty masterpieces, all the films about important topics, all of the “instant classics”, the beloved movies, the camp classics, the game-changers, the films…
-
Pay Me My Memorial Down
Leni Riefenstahl was the world’s first notable female filmmaker, and the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century. She created innovations in the technique and aesthetics of film still used not only in cinema, but in the filming of crowds and athletic events; some of the techniques you see at the Super Bowl are evolutions…
-
Harmony
Phil Everly died over the weekend. He was 74. Rock and Roll, we are told, started as a blender-mix of rockabilly and R&B. Elvis put a rockabilly delivery onto a rhythm ‘n blues beat. Chuck Berry sped up the blues to rockabilly speed. Johnny Cash did rockabilly over a persona that could have made Howlin’…
-
The Original Wrapper
Lou Reed died over the weekend, proving once and for all that only Keith Richards can ingest absolutely every recreational chemical known to modern science and live to tell the tale forever. It took me a long time to really get into Lou Reed – which may seem really counterintuitive, if you know me and…