Latest News

Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban died this week. Both had cool last names. Both were dramatic forces to be reckoned with and both will be missed.

Normally, I don't dwell too much in the past, but there were a few notable celebrities passing this year that mark personal milestones for me. This list is in no particular order:

Allan Melvin: Sam the Butcher is as good a representative as any for blue collar labor.

Issac Hayes: Doctor Soul, Hayes was responsible for a good bit of the musical background of my childhood.

W. Mark Felt: Deep Throat ignited the Watergate scandal that would lead to the kind of paranoia that birthed PseudoCertainty.

Betty Page: Really, is there any need to dig deeply into this one?

Paul Benedict: As the deranged number painter on Sesame Street, Benedict helped infect me with dada-ism.

Paul Newman: Food magnate and actor, Newmie's Own Lemonade is a winner in my house.

Jerry Reed: As a child, I seemed not be able to swing a dead cat without hitting a TV with Reed on it.

Don LaFontaine: LaFontaine is the voice of movie trailers. What will Hollywood do without him?

Estelle Getty: ESTELL GETTY WAS STILL ALIVE THIS YEAR?!

Tony Snow: The Mouth of Sauron and oddly good blues harmonica player

Jesse Helms: Racist, Luddite and general cretin, Helms on his death bed, mostly likely dissolved into a cloud of acrid smoke leaving a greasy residue on the sheets. I believe that's the typical way an incubus leaves this plane of existence.

Kermit Love: He made the Big Bird costume. Can you get more iconic than that?

George Carlin: I'm only now understanding the jokes he told in the 70s. Next up: Bill Hicks. Then I'll be all caught up.

Jim McKay: The Wide World of Sports announcer was a fairly constant voice of my youth. This is the only person on my list even vaguely associated with sports.

Tim Russert: One classy newscaster. While still guilty of giving into popular consensus, he at least made a good show of pressing fat, self-satisfied politicians.

Charlton Heston: As influential to me for his acting as for his crazy defense of gun ownership. Soylent Green, indeed!

Arthur C. Clarke: A consummate nerd who made it big. The movie 2001 is still impressive thirty years later.

Gary E. Gygax: After achieving 36th level in all available professions, Gygax's petition for apotheosis was granted.

William F. Buckley: While I didn't agree with his politics, I did feel he came by his beliefs honestly. A conservative who could change his mind -- go figure.

Roy Scheider: He will always be my idea of an action hero.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: As a student of transcendental meditation, I certainly owe this dude some thanks. But his creepy beard gives me the jibblies.

Barry Morse: While I never understood the premise of Space: 1999, Moorse did a fine Spock-clone impersonation.

Heath Ledger: Best Joker Ever.

Suzanne Pleshette: Through The Bob Newhart Show, Pleshette introduced the meaning of the manifestly important term "MILF" to me.

Bobby Fischer: Chess guru and crazy racist, Fisher didn't record ENOUGH madness to last me the rest of my lifetime. Boo!

Sir Edmund Hillary: EDMUND HILLARY WAS STILL ALIVE THIS YEAR?!

It's winter in the Northeast and yesterday was a snow day in which eight inches of snow accumulated on the ground.

I took the opportunity to re-organize my basement, which had an ad-hoc order created by the movers six months ago. It turns out, there's a lot more room down there than I previously thought.

What's not down there now are frog mummies. The reason there aren't any is because I removed the final one last night and thoughtfully took a picture of it for you, my loyal and lucky readers.

Don't call it a comeback.

Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright has died of cancer. I am a big fan of Pink Floyd and Wright's moody and atmospheric keyboard work on Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals helped make those albums classics.

Thanks for all music, Mr. Wright.

I saw George Carlin on stage three times -- once at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, a prime venue. Mr. Carlin's comedy was formative for me as it was for many people. His Occupation: Foole album was the first comedy album I'd ever heard.

Many comedians benefitted from the doors he open with his racy stuff. Lenny Bruce is rightly credited with being an earlier adopter of blue language into his routine, but Carlin made the rough stuff palatably rather than merely raunchy and angry.

His political stuff was always a decade ahead of the pack. As he drifted into his golden years, he didn't mellow, but became more pointed on his attacks at the establishment. He was the very icon of what stand-up comedy means to me.

The seven famous words on his web site sum up it best: we love you and we'll miss you.

The Boston Globe reports:

«In a YouTube video posted on Mr. Butch's MySpace page, he offered a buoyant view on how to live: "You got to be articulate every day and keep going on strong and straight and use your heart and all your might and all your weight and all your power. Do what you can, make it last for many hour, 'cause once you're dead, you're done, you don't come back," he rapped, pausing before adding, "Yeah."»

As a waiter at the Kenmore Square Uno's, I remember Mr. Butch and the equally memerable "Mixed Nuts" air guitar team that frequented the area. I'm not sure I would count myself as an admirer of his bohemian lifestyle, but to each his own. He certainly appeared mostly harmless (but really, really baked).

What a weird week of deaths. It almost sounds like a grim joke. "OK. So, James Brown, Gerry Ford and Saddam Hussein die and meet on the banks of the River Styx..."

James Brown lived so hard, he was almost a cliché. I enjoyed his music, but I'm amazed the man didn't kill himself with his lifestyle earlier. At first, the bruhaha surrounding the lock-out of his last wife from their home surprised me and then I thought: that's totally rock and roll to the end.

Gerry Ford lived longer then I would have expected. I have only vague memories of the '76 election in which he was defeated. The country was pretty down on Ford, I think, but I don't believe he was particularly stupid or unusually corrupt. Watergate and Vietnam made a lot of folks depressed and paranoid. Sadly, we could have used a lot more of that old thyme-y cynicism in 2003 before invading Iraq. I wish Ford had spoken more publicly about current politics during the last thirty years, but that's not what old soliders seem to do. Colin Powell appears to be similarly afflicted.

Of course, had we not invaded Iraq, we couldn't have hung a 69 year old man. Hussein was a giant prick, to be sure. From the biographies I've seen of him, it appears that Hussein's early life was that of a street thug who happen to bully his way into politics. However, I'm deeply ambivalent about the death penalty. When the state kills one of its citizens, it loses the moral high ground against murderers. On the other hand, sometimes a body just needs a-killin'. Execution is an undeniably effective way to prevent recidivism.

Let's hope the new year dials down the "suck knob." Perhaps this mashup of Benny Hinn will help.

This week I learned of the death of two people influential to my life, though each in different ways. The first was illustrator David Sutherland III, whose work for TSR's Dungeons & Dragons series fueled my early dreamlife. Reading between the lines, it seems that Mr. Sutherland, 56, was hitting the sauce pretty hard. He had many disappoints in life, it seems. He was rumored to be bitter about his divorce.

The other passing of importance to me is that of Peter Cummings (link goes to his former Holiday Clocks bandmate, Gideon Freudmann). Peter and I met on Cape Cod in a desultory period in both our lives in the early 1990s. Peter was turning thirty and I, 20. Through a mutual love of music and dadaism (or perhaps whimsy is a better word), we began to record music together on his four track cassette recorder.

What Peter never knew was that I was after his fetching girlfriend, whom I had met working for a fast food place and wanted to get to know in a Biblic sense. However, that pursuit turned out to be a non-starter (sadly). The collabrative relationship with Peter, in contrast, went swimmingly.

The style of composing was simply to allow one person to lay down a track. Then the other person would lay down a possibly complementary track separately. Often, the other person wouldn't be in the room (or even the house) when the new track was recorded. The idea was to get music that wasn't polished or, frankly, composed. Peter and I were, in a muddled-headed way, protesting the polished excrement peddled to the masses on top-40 radio stations every day. While our complaint wasn't particularly innovative or original, it was what motivated us.

We'd scream, use toys, loop 1/4" tape "samples", bang on pots and pans, scream some more, sing through the cheesy "William Shatner" mic, play Peter's psychadelic telecaster with rust-caked strings, play Peter's stout 1940's New York archtop, record "spoken word" on a dictaphone and generally have quite a rolicking time. While walking through a graveyard, we noticed a tombstone inscribed with the words "Mother Bodfish" and that become the working title of our project. We had talked about releasing our work on some crazy label. The cover would feature a strong, suffragette in sepia tones braving looking into East. On the back would be the hovel that Pete lived in with both of us passed out in the squalor. Alas, we were both a bit too unorganized to take our project beyond the cottage.

When I have more time, I'll digitize Mother Bodfish, but until then, here's a great track of Pete's called Silver Hat, which he recorded on the "Throne of Wax" album. It's dubbed from a cassette, so don't expect too much fidelity. Here's quite an autobiographical one called Any Given Day, 1995, from his last album "Cartoons."

Peter passed away after Christmas 2004 from complications caused by scleroderma at the age of 42. Peter was a gentle soul, but he had a self-destructive side that was painful to witness. Pete and I spoke in 2003, I think. I blew him off, not wanting to get sucked back into the Bad Crazy of my twenties. Part me wishes I'd seen him, but part of me didn't want to deal with his oncoming fatality. I don't do death well.

Peter should be remember for his substantial talent, both musically and as a writer, and for his skewed perspective on life. Oh, and he was a (crazy) chick magnet.

Not a wholy bad life after all, Mr. Cummings. A tad too short, perhaps.