Passages

[beamish14]

Hilary Mantel at 70, the author of the trilogy of historical novels focusing on Thomas Cromwell, with Wolf Hall (later made into a BBC series with Mark Rylance as Cromwell), Bring Up The Bodies and The Mirror & The Light.

One of the best novelists we had in the Anglophone world today. What an immense loss. The stage adaptation of Wolf Hall is phenomenal

[DeprongMori]

Drummer Anton Fier. He's played with a ridiculous number of people: John Zorn, the Lounge Lizards, Bob Mould, Pere Ubu, the Lounge Lizards, Mick Jagger...it's possible he's collaborated with Bill Laswell the most but I'll always remember him as the Feelies' original drummer (see Crazy Rhythms).

I think Fier and Laswell recorded together on every Golden Palominos album. I saw Fier drumming in an incarnation of The Golden Palominos — Fier’s rotating roster of musicians, not unlike Laswell’s “band” Material — in a trio with Fred Frith and Bill Laswell in Boston in 1985 (essentially the band Massacre under another name, and with a different drummer.) I later caught him in his Golden Palomino’s tour of “Visions of Excess”. The Golden Palominos were an incredibly versatile vehicle for Fier’s musical creativity. (I had forgotten he was with the Lounge Lizards, who I unfortunately never got to catch live. I didn’t catch the Feelies until after his departure from the band.) He’ll be missed.

[hearthesilence]

Louise Fletcher

[beamish14]

Louise Fletcher

Wonderful actress who was always a pleasure to watch. I was just thinking of her great turn as a chain-smoking scientist in Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983) the other day

[colinr0380]

Brainstorm is a great film and its really anchored by Fletcher's role as the scientist who remains relevant after they are gone due to what they have created. She also gives the best on screen depiction of a heart attack.

She inevitably seemed a bit typecast for a while as the abrasive baddie after her One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest portrayal of Nurse Ratchet, with perhaps her other best remembered role (or at least moment!) being the unsympathetic teacher with an eating disorder in the 1986 Tobe Hooper remake of Invaders From Mars!

She also appears (to no real effect) as a scientist in the notorious John Boorman film Exorcist II: The Heretic (a scientist is never going to be a main character in an film about religious exorcism! Exorcist II is ridiculous but far more entertaining than the first film, and works far better if approached less as an Exorcist film than as part of Boorman's, always audacious but occasionally tipping over into absurdity, career-long preoccupation with mythological topics and conflicts between parallel worlds and alternative ways of being that awkwardly co-exist alongside a more dominant society) and turns up in the two early 80s "Strange" movies: Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids) and Strange Invaders (which is kind of the antithesis, or antidote, to the later Cocoon films!)

This is also happening just as Fun City are releasing the astonishing sounding Natural Enemies on disc for the first time.

[MichaelB]

Franciszek Pieczka, a hugely prolific Polish actor whose career stretches back to Andrzej Wajda's A Generation in 1954.

Much of his vast output (screen, stage, television) hasn't been seen outside his native country, but he appeared in other Wajda films (The Wedding, The Promised Land) as well as films by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Mother Joan of the Angels, the lead in Austeria, Quo Vadis), Jerzy Skolimowski (Walkover) and, much more recently, several films by Jan Jakub Kolski - although he's probably best known in English-speaking circles as the lead in Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Scar (1976)

[denti alligator]

Pharoah Sanders
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/ ... dead-at-81

[brundlefly]

Pharoah Sanders
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/ ... dead-at-81

After my father passed a few years ago I was tasked with cleaning out and fixing up his cluttered, dilapidated house for sale and wound up driving a couple hours between states a couple times a week for a good year to do so. Each time I would arrive there, the first thing I'd do was put on Journey in Satchidananda and somehow the sound of his sax made measure of my progress. It was the last record I played before I packed the stereo and handed the keys off to the realtor. The way it echoed through the place brought me an unbounded peace.

The album he did with Floating Points just last year was so great.

[Lemmy Caution]

Sanders always seemed older, probably because he had a long grey beard since at least 1990.


I saw him play at Sweet Basil's in NYC circa 1986.
I used to frequently corral a small group of whoever-was-willing to the city to enjoy live Soul, Jazz, R&B acts. Pharoah Sanders live was a bit of a challenge for my friends. They didn't know what to make of those dinosaur scronks he'd let forth. It was a masterful and somewhat uncompromising set.

A real legend. Not too many old school jazz musicians left. Sonny Rollins is in his early 90's; Carla Bley late 80's. I'm sure there are more, but those are the first i could think of...

[hearthesilence]

Sanders's last album was excellent, I wish I caught one of his shows. His tribute to Coltrane, Crescent with Love, is a favorite too. I prefer his playing/soloing from his earlier days, especially with Coltrane, but I actually find some of his latter day albums to be better works overall.

Jack DeJohnette is doing a show with Dave Holland and Jason Moran up in Woodstock next month. (Dave Holland is also appearing at Blue Note at the moment.) Definitely seeing them. I deeply regret missing Jason Moran's show with Archie Shepp given Shepp's age...I hope I get another chance.

[FrauBlucher]

John Hartman Original drummer for the Doobie Brothers

[bdsweeney]

Along with Alice Coltrane, Sanders was an important personal entry point into the enormous musical space called jazz. “Journey in Satchidananda” was one of the first albums where I surrendered to how it made me feel rather than struggling to ‘get’ what was happening in the music. It was also an important learning step towards appreciating other types of art forms which are less intellectual in nature and more expressive and abstract (e.g types of painting, dance, film as well as music). And since, these have become types of art which have meant the most to me. I will always be so appreciative and grateful to the likes of artists such as Pharoah Sanders for providing that entry point.

And that’s not to dismiss the subsequent albums of Sanders I heard and loved (especially those 60s-70s Impulse albums), up to and including 2021’s “Promises”. So sad to read of his death.

[hearthesilence]

One of the great things about Sanders is that he got to see his music become a massive influence in the jazz world - not just on the fringes but through the music of someone like Kamasi Washington. Spiritual or soul jazz really seems to have taken off in the last decade or so, as something that actually reaches a large number of new and younger listeners, and I'm glad Sanders was able to cap off his career with an excellent collaboration with Floating Points.

[Aunt Peg]

Kitten Natividad, 74, best known for her work for Russ Meyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitten_Natividad

[mfunk9786]

Coolio

[colinr0380]

Here is somebody we missed: Anna Gaël back on 17th September who was in a number of films in the 1960s and 1970s before marrying the notorious figure of the Marquess of Bath in 1969 and becoming a member of the British aristocracy. She was mainly in more risque French films, including 1972's The Sexually Obsessed (Brutality In Love) (which was the film debut of Blair Brown); the bizarre film Dracula and Son, which may be the only film to have both Christopher Lee and Catherine Breillat in(!); a number of films by René Gainville; and a 1970 X-rated version of Zola's Nana directed by Mac Ahlberg (Ahlberg was most famous for his breakthrough sexy Scandinavian film I, A Woman (I have a suspicion that it may be the film being referenced in the aspect ratio argument scene with the cinema projectionist in Godard's Masculin Feminin the next year) before becoming a cinematographer in the US in the 1980s and 1990s: he did cinematography on a lot of Stuart Gordon films and worked with John Landis, most notably on Innocent Blood and the music video for Michael Jackson's Black or White).

Her biggest roles are probably in 1968's Therese and Isabelle by Radley Metzger, the 1969 giallo Crimes At The Tennis Club (based on an Alberto Moravia story), the British sci-fi sex film Zeta One (which is going to turn up in 88 Films' "Saucy 70s" boxset in a few months), and an appearance in 1978's The Sweeney 2.

[ShellOilJunior]

Gangsta's Paradise gets most of the attention but Fantastic Voyage put Coolio on the map. The wiki says it came out in March 1994 but it seems like it was the song of the spring/summer.

RIP, Coolio

[Swift]

When I got my first CD player for Christmas, Gangsta's Paradise album was one of the first CDs I asked for (along with East 17's Greatest Hits!), so I ended up replaying the hell out of it. Relistening to it now on Spotify for the first time in 25+ years (god, that's a big number) it doesn't really hold up outside of the singles. However, he was part of maybe my favourite hip hop song when he collaborated with B Real, Method Man, LL Cool J and Busta Rhymes on Hit Em High for the Space Jam soundtrack. I presume due to rights reasons, it's never been officially uploaded to YouTube and is missing from the soundtrack on Spotify.

[hearthesilence]

Never forget his appearance on Irish daytime chatshow Open House, who, legend has it, booked him by mistake. They hadn't arranged backing dancers, so he made the middle-age production crew dress up and do it instead. Best TV ever.

[MichaelB]

Armed robber, prison escapee and former British Public Enemy No. 1 turned journalist John McVicar, inspiration for the rather good 1980 film McVicar, in which he was played by Roger Daltrey.

[CSM126]

Antonio Inoki

[acroyear]

Sacheen Littlefeather

[hearthesilence]

It's really shitty how she was treated, but one of the bizarre myths that has come out of this story is that John Wayne tried to go after her. Farran Smith Nehme actually looked into it and the short version is that it didn't happen. Wayne was upset with the speech and he certainly didn't have an enlightened view of Native Americans, but he didn't try to assault her and there definitely wasn't any security holding him back for any reason (because there was no reason to do so). One of the producers of the telecast who wasn't standing anywhere near Wayne started the rumor years later, mostly after Wayne died (i.e. couldn't respond to it) by exaggerating the claim more and more every time someone like the L.A. Times interviewed him on what happened with Brando's protest, and it was never challenged or fact-checked. Littlefeather didn't make the same claim until decades later, possibly because it got back to her many times over and she had no reason to doubt the story since no one else did. Given how the same thing is being repeated again and again, I guess the legend has become fact.

[FrauBlucher]

Loretta Lynn 90

[hearthesilence]

Ugh. I was hoping to see her at the Grand Ole Party someday, where she used to do regular shows until her stroke. One of the first country artists I ever listened to. Honky Tonk Girl: The Loretta Lynn Collection is a great retrospective - that was my introduction - but the Country Music Hall of Fame compilation from the '80s is a perfect LP-length primer. Van Lear Rose is also excellent, right up there with the best of Johnny Cash's Rick Rubin/American recordings.