Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88 – NYTimes.com. {via}
Ugh, it’s like a punch in the stomach. If you have not read The Great War and Modern Memory, or Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, you should probably give them a look. Amazing stuff.
BBC News – Bee Gees’ singer Robin Gibb dies after cancer battle.
Argh, what the hell?
Donna Summer, RIP – Boing Boing.
Well, shit, this sucks.
The Millions : Maurice Sendak Dies. Yet more sad news.
UPDATE: The A.V. Club has an in-depth remembrance posted. (How do they write these things so fast?)
“Earlier this morning, Pesco posted the awful news that Adam “MCA” Yauch has died of cancer.” {From: Remembering Adam Yauch: Polly Wog Stew – Boing Boing.}
What the fuck? Goddamn it.
“Levon Helm, the drummer, multi-instrumentalist and singer for The Band who kept the band’s heart for more than three decades, died “peacefully” Thursday afternoon, according to his record label, Vanguard Records. He was 71.” {From: Levon Helm, co-founder of The Band, dead at 71 – CNN.com. | Via: Fark}
Damn it.
R.I.P. Davy Jones of the Monkees | The A.V. Club. This is sad. I got into the Monkees back when Nickelodeon was running their show nearly round-the-clock. I was a fan. Still am.
Streaming rights to the Whitney Houston movie The Bodyguard were revoked at Netflix after her death. According to a Netflix rep quoted by Dan McDermott, the production company Warner Bros., per IMDB ‘saw an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies.’ {From: Whitney Houston movie yanked from Netflix streaming – Boing Boing}
Ghoulish? Maybe. Disrespectful? Probably. Capitalism? Definitely!
How Will SNL Handle Whitney Houston’s Death? Man, I don’t know. Obviously, this sort of thing is very, very tricky. Given the fact that Saturday Night Live is pretty much a full-on comedy show, the writers are pretty much going to have to employ humor, no matter what they do–if they decide to address it at all.
It would be much easier for them to acknowledge Whitney Houston’s death if they’d stuck to the program’s original format, which made tons of room for serious moments and sentiment in between all the jokes.
