Passages

[The Curious Sofa]

I worked with Mark Gustafson in the 90s, when Laika was still Will Vinton Studios. He had just finished his animation short Mr. Resistor. An amazing animator and an absolutely wonderful human being, he was very supportive of me, a stop motion animator just starting out. This is really sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY&t=202s

[beamish14]

I worked with Mark Gustafson in the 90s, when Laika was still Will Vinton Studios. He had just finished his animation short Mr. Resistor. An amazing animator and an absolutely wonderful human being, he was very supportive of me, a stop motion animator just starting out. This is really sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY&t=202s

It’s been years since I’ve seen that wonderful film. It was supposed to a series, no?

[beamish14]

Carl Weathers

He really enhanced every film and television series he appeared in. Action Jackson might be the apotheosis of the 1980’s/90’s Joel Silver touch, with him driving a Ferrari down a flight of stairs in a house being a particularly remarkable moment

[cdnchris]

He really enhanced every film and television series he appeared in.

His cameos in Arrested Development were brilliant.

"Baby, you've got a stew going!"

[knives]

I worked with Mark Gustafson in the 90s, when Laika was still Will Vinton Studios. He had just finished his animation short Mr. Resistor. An amazing animator and an absolutely wonderful human being, he was very supportive of me, a stop motion animator just starting out. This is really sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY&t=202s

This is new to me. I thought Laika was a completely original company.

[beamish14]

I worked with Mark Gustafson in the 90s, when Laika was still Will Vinton Studios. He had just finished his animation short Mr. Resistor. An amazing animator and an absolutely wonderful human being, he was very supportive of me, a stop motion animator just starting out. This is really sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY&t=202s

This is new to me. I thought Laika was a completely original company.

Travis Knight got his daddy to purchase a very well-established studio that already had an Oscar, Emmys, and Clios so that he could pretend to be Walt Disney

[knives]

That’s a bit of a cruel way to phrase things especially since Knight has proven himself a great artist and producer. Also, I know Vinton, how could I not, I just didn’t know the connection.

[Aunt Peg]

Don Murray, 94, actor known for Advise and Consent, Bus Stop & The Hoodlum Priest: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235813848/

[beamish14]

That’s a bit of a cruel way to phrase things especially since Knight has proven himself a great artist and producer. Also, I know Vinton, how could I not, I just didn’t know the connection.

I apologize. Knight is a controversial figure for sure, though. If you haven’t seen it, the Vinton documentary Claydream effectively breaks down how he lost control of his studio

[hearthesilence]

Wayne Kramer of the MC5. He was active to the end, touring not only a new incarnation of the band but appearing with Pere Ubu last year. The MC5's recorded output may have been modest, but IMHO their impact is underrated. Their early singles and three main LP's are excellent and all worth revisiting, and the footage out there of their live performances is priceless.

[The Curious Sofa]

I worked with Mark Gustafson in the 90s, when Laika was still Will Vinton Studios. He had just finished his animation short Mr. Resistor. An amazing animator and an absolutely wonderful human being, he was very supportive of me, a stop motion animator just starting out. This is really sad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHiaLzkyJY&t=202s

This is new to me. I thought Laika was a completely original company.

There were a lot of internal politics while I worked there. Basically Vinton got ousted by his business partner and the studio got rebranded as Laika, while much of the staff remained. Vinton was out of the studio by the mid-90s, quite some time before the rebranding as Laika. I remember nobody in production was very happy with the way Vinton was running the studio and his style had fallen out of favour, the studio was in trouble long before Knight acquired it. I only worked there for three months and I had a wonderful time there and Vinton was nothing but nice to me the few times I met him but I also had a feeling he was not that involved in his studio anymore. They offered me a longer contract but I had commitments back in London and I declined, with some sadness, because it was one of the best places I worked for.

[Gregor Samsa]

He really enhanced every film and television series he appeared in.

His cameos in Arrested Development were brilliant.

"Baby, you've got a stew going!"

He was also wonderful in Happy Gilmore.

"Damn alligator just popped up! Cut me down in my prime. But I tore one of that bastard's eyes out. Look at that."

[GaryC]

Christopher Priest, aged 80. A leading writer in British SF from the 1970s, his novel The Prestige (winner of a World Fantasy Award) was filmed in 2006. The link is to the blog of his wife, Nina Allan (who is a friend of mine).

[Mr Sausage]

Christopher Priest, aged 80. A leading writer in British SF from the 1970s, his novel The Prestige (winner of a World Fantasy Award) was filmed in 2006. The link is to the blog of his wife, Nina Allan (who is a friend of mine).

Oh no. While some of his recent work descended into an unaccountable crankery, he was still producing arresting sci-fi stories of indeterminacy, unreliability, and intersecting realities, many set in his beguiling invention, the Dream Archipelago. In particular, his 2016 novel The Gradual was one of the most original time travel novels ever written, and his 2013 novel The Adjacent is perfect in its refusal to bring its proliferating strands, timelines, and realities into a graspable whole, instead letting them just lie adjacent to each other for the reader to organize how they wish (in this, he's the anti-David Mitchell, who works towards ever larger structures of coherence where Priest seeks decoherence). Even his 2020 The Evidence managed to be an intimate portrait of the effects of the financial crisis within a bizarre, unaccountable cosmic mystery.

Unfortunately, Priest had adopted an interest in conspiracy theories in the last five years, leading him to produce a couple of undercooked novels that seemed only bare skeletons on which to hang these unpersuasive ideas. 2018s An American Story engaged in a 9/11 trutherism weird in a Brit, and 2022s Expect Me Tomorrow advanced the idea that, while climate change is real and will have brutal consequences, there's a chance that the beginning of another ice age will mitigate its worser effects. I dunno. These novels advanced the idea that there were secret truths, but I don't go to Priest to be told what the truth is, I go to him for the limits of what we can know, the difficulties and ambiguities behind things. There were seemingly two Priests these last few years, but following each weak conspiracy book would be a genuine Priest novel. I haven't yet read his latest, and I guess last work, Airside, but it'll be a bittersweet experience now.

If anyone's looking to get into Priest, which I heartily recommend (especially for fans of Christopher Nolan and Cronenberg's eXistenZ), here are some of his best:

-Inverted World: a more conventional sci-fi story about a city that has to keep in perpetual motion. You can see him start to engage in what would become preoccupations, the distortions of perception and the unreliability of narrators, within an idiosyncratic but still recognizably sci-fi story.

-The Affirmation: Someone once described this as two funhouse mirrors looking at each other. It's here that Priest abandoned traditional sci fi for his own strange thing, still sci fi adjacent, but not sharing any of its conventions or typical interests. Here, indeterminacy and unreliability reign, and there is no hope of untangling anything as this odd, unsettling novel pings between its two narratives: a troubled young man in our world writing a strange manuscript, and a young man in a strange world who is about to undergo a procedure that grants immortality, but at the same time wipes out a person's memories, so he must write a manuscript describing his life. Whose manuscript are we reading?

-The Adjacent: his best novel, and one that marked a change in his preoccupations from the indeterminacy of perception to the indeterminacy of possible realities. Set partly in a future Britain that has become an Islamic theocracy at some unstated point, but also in other, seemingly unconnected time lines including WWII (where a magician accompanies H. G. Wells to the front). A terrorist attack that kills a photographer's wife sends him on a strange trip involving a new tech called adjacency technology, and which seems like it might connect adjacent realities to each other. Brilliant in its refusal to make explicit connections between its parts, relying rather on suggestion and the reader's need to find coherence amidst all the destabilization.

-The Dream Archipelago: a series of short stories set in Priest's fictional world of the same name (and which appears in two other novels in this list). All the stories are worthwhile, but a couple of the longer ones are astonishing in their ability to undercut your assumptions about reality. They're also good preparation for Priest's other books set in the Archipelago, of which there are at least 5.

[hearthesilence]

Aston “Familyman” Barrett, the original bassist of (Bob Marley &) The Wailers.

[pistolwink]

Wayne Kramer of the MC5. He was active to the end, touring not only a new incarnation of the band but appearing with Pere Ubu last year. The MC5's recorded output may have been modest, but IMHO their impact is underrated. Their early singles and three main LP's are excellent and all worth revisiting, and the footage out there of their live performances is priceless.

Yup, there's some footage from the early 1970s on YouTube that by itself should firmly establish the MC5 as one of the greatest rock bands ever. And aside from being a versatile and powerful guitarist, Kramer was a great showman.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Ian Lavender, Private Pike in Dad's Army, who was the subject but not speaker of the show's immortal line.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/f ... r-obituary

[GaryC]

Michael Jayston, aged 88.

[CSM126]

Toby Keith

[Toland's Mitchell]

Juan "Spike" Osorio

This happened just 1.5 miles away from me. It hurts when I hear about fellow on-set workers dying on the job. So tragic.

[okcmaxk]

Toby Keith

People I know are sharing anecdotes when they ran into him, mostly teachers in town; the entire university got a letter from the president about his death. Drove by his chain restaurant off the highway last night, the most packed it's been in years.

From Ethan Hawke's Rolling Stone Kristofferson piece:

...out of the corner of [Keith's] mouth came “None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris.”

“Don’t turn your back to me, boy,” Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

[Keith] turned around: “I don’t want any problems, Kris – I just want you to tone it down.”

“You ever worn your country’s uniform?” Kris asked rhetorically.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘What?’ me, boy! You heard the question. You just don’t like the answer.” He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air. “I asked, ‘Have you ever served your country?’ The answer is, no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!” I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about!”

“Whatever,” [Keith] muttered.

"American Soldier" dethroned "God Bless the USA" for a while at Veteran's Day school assemblies, a rare feat--maybe he and Lee Greenwood met up at their inauguration gigs.

[Buttery Jeb]

Mojo Nixon

[beamish14]

Toby Keith

People I know are sharing anecdotes when they ran into him, mostly teachers in town; the entire university got a letter from the president about his death. Drove by his chain restaurant off the highway last night, the most packed it's been in years.

From Ethan Hawke's Rolling Stone Kristofferson piece:

...out of the corner of [Keith's] mouth came “None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris.”

“Don’t turn your back to me, boy,” Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

[Keith] turned around: “I don’t want any problems, Kris – I just want you to tone it down.”

“You ever worn your country’s uniform?” Kris asked rhetorically.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘What?’ me, boy! You heard the question. You just don’t like the answer.” He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air. “I asked, ‘Have you ever served your country?’ The answer is, no, you have not. Have you ever killed another man? Huh? Have you ever taken another man’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it? No, you have not. So shut the fuck up!” I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me. “You don’t know what the hell you are talking about!”

“Whatever,” [Keith] muttered.

"American Soldier" dethroned "God Bless the USA" for a while at Veteran's Day school assemblies, a rare feat--maybe he and Lee Greenwood met up at their inauguration gigs.

Kris Kristofferson is such a mensch. The only person who wasn’t a coward and actually tried to comfort Sinead O’Connor after she was treated like shit by the audience of the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert

[hearthesilence]

Guitarist Donald Kinsey, who played with many of reggae's greatest artists including Bob Marley but perhaps most memorably with Peter Tosh. (Coincidentally, I've been listening to Peter Tosh quite a bit these past two weeks, particularly those two-disc Legacy editions of Legalize It and Equal Rights.)

Also...

The Spinners' Henry Lee Fambrough who had been for the last 11 years the last surviving member of the original group. (He had already retired last spring in good spirits.)

Love this group, this track is one of my favorites with Fambrough trading lead with Philippé Wynne.

[hearthesilence]

Seiji Ozawa, the great Japanese conductor who led the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1973 to 2002, longer than any other conductor in the orchestra’s history. (An obituary from Boston's WGBH can be read here and another from WCVB here.)

Another strange coincidence as just last week (right before I dove into Bob Marley and Peter Tosh) I was playing his legendary RCA recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." For my money, the greatest recording ever made of that landmark outside of Stravinsky's own.