Obits

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FBIS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)

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Not a Chicago Boy exactly, but a towering presence in my inner life for many years. The only thing remotely resembling a writing voice I’ve ever had is a pale imitation of him. Requiescat In Pace.

Updates:

  • added “FRSBIS” (thanks, Jim)
  • from Wired, Video: Arthur C. Clarke’s Last Message to Earth
  • from SomethingAwful forum goon “SirRobin”:

    • Tonight, when the sun has gone down, go outside to a place where you can see the stars. Look up. Watch for a point of light that moves fast enough that its motion is obvious … then take the phone out of your pocket and call someone on the other side of the planet.

  • heh

RIP William F. Buckley

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I just heard the sad news.   Growing up I really didn’t know much about him, what he did or who he was, mostly getting my images of him from Saturday Night Live skits and other slapstic routines that made fun of his demeanor.   The last few years I have take a pretty good dive into some of his books and am very glad I did.   Thank you William for a life well lived.

Evel Knievel, 1938-2007

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If you grew up in the ’70s, you probably had a one-speed bike with a banana seat and a sissy bar. It might have been red, or purple, or dark green, maybe even orange. The seat may have had a speckle-pattern. At some point, you or the big kids on the block built a ramp, out of some old panelling or plywood. The high end was jacked up with rocks, or a cinderblock. Maybe more than one cinderblock. You and the other kids on the block took turns riding hard and fast at the ramp, and got airborne. Eventually, pretty quickly in fact, someone got hurt. A trip to the emergency room was not out of the question. Moms insisted the ramp come down — “are you kids crazy?”. But the components of the ramp would be dispersed, only to reemerge. The risk was part of the game. The moment of flight was worth it.

We did these things because of one man: Evel Knievel.

His life was a unique effusion of Jacksonian American culture. He dressed a lot like Elvis. He was saying: I, Evel Knievel, am also the King. Elvis was king of a larger world not of his own making: show biz, Vegas, rock’n’roll, contemporary male vocalists. But Evel Knievel made a kingdom no one else had ever thought of and ruled it by himself.

We all saw the TV documentaries, the bone-crushing bad landing in the Caesar’s Palace parking lot. I watched it on You Tube today, and I found I remembered it in minute detail: The too-hard, off-angle touchdown on the far ramp, the hands jerked off the handlebars, Evel going over the handlebars, the bouncing impact on the ground, apparently getting tangled up with the bike as he bounces and skids … .

But he did not give up. The fractures healed. The metal pins held him together. He got back on the motorcycle.

The Snake River rocket-flight debacle finished him off because it seemed silly, and the sense of grandeur was lost. I remember the rumors: Evel Knievel is going to jump the Grand Canyon! But then it turned out it was something called the Snake River. What is that? Then further strangeness, as the preparations were televised. It was not a motorcycle, but some kind of weird rocket thing … . What was he trying to do?

Gigantic ambition had met the reality that no motorcycle could leap such a chasm. There were limits. Some things are just beyond what you can do with a bike. Sad but true. The actual failure was an anticlimax. We all moved on then.

Rest in peace, sir. You cut your own path. You were one of a kind.

(This tribute is awesome.)

Robert Goulet, RIP

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The speeches from Camelot were riveting, even on a small black and white screen, as Richard Burton recited them, sitting in a quiet spotlight beside Dick Cavett. Julie Andrews seemed made to show us what England and youth and the lusty month of May were all about. But holding his own with them was the darkly handsome Robert Goulet – born in Massachusetts but of French Canadian stock and apparently perfectly cast. Indeed, to many of us who never set foot in a Broadway theater, Robert Goulet remained Lancelot. The mere shadows of what these three must have been in person, they could still ground the stage of Ed Sullivan and the other great variety shows of the fifties and sixties. But if Burton’s quiet reading deepened the shadows on Cavett, Goulet’s voice filled the speakers on our old tv sets that were only capable of hinting at his power.

Forty years later, his voiceovers endear him to our grand children. And older, we laugh with him, as Goulet‘s loose humor enriched commercials for ESPN and Emerald Nuts. The romantic lead matured and he charmed with the quirky humor of his guest spot on Police Squad! and then Naked Gun with fellow Canadian Leslie Neilson. At 73, that great baritone has died, waiting on a lung transplant. But to many of my generation he remains the dashing and seductive knight, his eyes following Burton, betraying the complexity of admiration and the difficulty of restraint.

YouTube houses Goulet’s moving rendition of another of the great classics of the high water decade in musical theater -the “Soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel.

(And perhaps the juxtaposition of Porter Wagoner and Robert Goulet, of T. H. White and Dolly Parton, of Zucker and Hee Haw! might hint at the rich hybrids that grew from Albion’s seed planted on our shore.)

Porter Wagoner, RIP

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The old gospel songs seem right on occasions like this; here is Wagoner with the Willis Brothers doing I’ll Fly Away.

After eighty years, fifty of them on the Grand Ole Opry, Porter Wagoner has died. Tom Spaulding eulogizes: “He lived the life, sang about the life, and he went down swinging.” That life was full of hits; this year’s album, Wagonmaster is reviewed here. CMT notes that: “Porter Wagoner, the Thin Man from the West Plains, is a case of an artist often ahead of his time who has always appeared hopelessly behind the times.” And here’s Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home.”

For this (and so much else) I’m indebted to the husband I found in the days of Dripping Springs. He introduced me to the music of those tough old singers who perform – writing, singing, playing – until they die because they want to – and because they have to. Impelled by whatever lies in that hard stubborn core within, they have to be who they are – in Nudie suits, maybe, but always, really, themselves: authentic sounds and authentic words clothed in sequins and huge belt buckles.