The Economist has an excellent remembrance of Charles Keating, anti-obscenity advocate in all its forms--pornography and federal regulation of the financial industry. Crusader and snake-oil salesman were hard to reconcile. Perhaps it all sprang from having an invalid father, too weak to steer him. Perhaps...
deaths
While I'm pretty skeptical of UAW president Bob King's love affair with employee-management cooperation as the keystone of his union's approach, at least one point in his favor is Ford.
Night and Fog has a claim as the best documentary of all time.
The thing about being a historian is that you think you know a lot about the past and then you read the obituary of a truly amazing fighter for social justice that you've never heard of.
Harold Ramis has passed. My favorite scene from his greatest film. Incidentally, I visited Punxsutawney in August. It is not a nice place.
The great jazz trumpeter has passed, way too young. I saw him play with Other Dimensions in Music (also featuring William Parker, Rashid Bakr, and Daniel Carter) in Atlanta in.
Two huge losses of civil rights movement legends this week. First Amiri Baraka died. Then Franklin McCain, one of the Greensboro 4 that sparked the student wing of the civil rights movement. There's been a lot of remembrances of Baraka, so I'll focus on McCain...
I'm not too big on the idea of hero, but there is something about the person persecuted for making others' lives better that gets to me. One of the greats.
Another of the great country legends has traveled to the great honky tonk in the sky. Today, Ray Price doesn't have the cache of Cash, Nelson, Haggard, or Williams. But.
One of the great women of film noir has passed. She's perhaps best known for her work in Lady in the Lake, which is famous primarily for being shot entirely from the perspective of Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. It's a gimmick and it doesn't...
One of human history's greatest fighters for justice has passed. Rest in peace.
The great free jazz drummer has passed. Here's a clip of him in possibly my favorite jazz band of all-time, Last Exit, with Peter Brotzmann, Bill Laswell, and Sonny Sharrock..