DADT = DEAD!

Finally! Something to get excited about today as the US Senate voted 65-31 to repeal the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.

The stubborn holdouts continue to include Texas and the drab underbelly of the Deep South. But today, common sense and decency have won. (Screw John McCain!)

Map via the New York Times.

RIP Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards has died. He was 88.

Edwards will be remembered as a comic genius for creating Peter Sellers's "Pink Panther" character and for writing and directing a slew of comedies -- including "10," "Victor/Victoria" and "S.O.B." -- the last two starring his wife of 41 years, Julie Andrews.

So very true. Thanks for all the laughter until I cried.

RIP Senator Robert Byrd

West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd has died at 92. He served in the United States Senate longer than I've been alive. Amazing. And thankfully, at the time of his death, he was not the man he was in the 50s and 60s.

Mr. Byrd’s perspective on the world changed over the years. He filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and supported the Vietnam War only to come to back civil rights measures and criticize the Iraq war. Rating his voting record in 1964, Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal lobbying group, found that his views and the organization’s were aligned only 16 percent of the time. In 2005, he got an A.D.A. rating of 95.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out politically, as I can't imagine a more inopportune time for Democrats to be losing seats.

In the polarized atmosphere of Washington, President Obama’s agenda seemed to hinge on Mr. Byrd’s health.

RIP Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper died on Saturday at age 74.

I was obsessed with his bizarre roles throughout the 1980s. And he had quite a few of them. Obviously Easy Rider is near the top of the drug-induced heap. But for my money, Blue Velvet was the one placing him on the Pedestal of Weirdness.

I can't even remember how many times I saw that film when it was running in theaters. I have a copy on DVD. And to this day, I still quote lines from the film, spoken by Frank Booth, the character played rather convincingly by Hopper.

I can't even see a Heineken without hearing "FUCK that shit. PABST BLUE RIBBON!" playing on a continuous loop in my head.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Thank you, Dennis. Rest in peace. You were a rebel without a pause.

RIP Malcolm McLaren

He was only 64 and died of mesothelioma.

Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change

This is the first I've heard of the French Situationists. That sounds like a movement with konagod written all over it!

I also respect McLaren for his keen business sense.

In 1972 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood took over a store on King’s Road in Chelsea called Let It Rock and began selling hipster Teddy boy fashions. The business was run along unconventional lines.

In a 1997 article for The New Yorker, Mr. McLaren recalled, “We set out to make an environment where we could truthfully run wild.” On most days the shop did not open until the evening and closed within a few hours. The goal, Mr. McLaren wrote, “was to sell nothing at all.”

Brilliant! Recession-proof!

Although I can't quite forgive him for stealing the Antz -- destroying what I considered to be a kick-ass obscure band -- to form the pop-oriented Bow Wow Wow, I still must mourn the passing of Malcolm McLaren. He was an integral player in what is still my favorite music genre of all time.

I was still in high school when the Sex Pistols toured the United States. I knew nothing about them other than what I read in the press, and needless to say, I'd never heard any of their music on the radio. But I was obsessed with the entire aura surrounding the Pistols, and the fact that a British band was coming to the states, behaving absurdly, and playing in a lot of redneck havens, like Tulsa. It was a carefully orchestrated worst tour of all-time! What's not to love?

By 1979 I made my first trip to London and promptly headed into a record store to pick up their album God Save the Queen, which unfortunately I would still not have an opportunity to hear for the first time until I was back in the States.

McLaren was a catalyst who shaped my future for at least seven years, culminating in the 14 months I spent living in London in the 1980s.

Thanks for that!

Adam and the Antz: Before McLaren set his sights on some key musicians.
(By the way, I have this single, same sleeve and everything!)

If you really want to hear them at their best, get your hands on a copy (also on CD) of Dirk Wears White Sox.

There's also a plethora of material on YouTube. I was shocked at the number of demo recordings and b-sides available, many of which I'd never heard until today.

And "this is fucking ridiculous."

Indeed.

RIP Peter Graves

Peter Graves has died of a heart attack at age 83.

This was one of my favorite programs growing up.

Until I read the obit I never realized this little factoid:

He was Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains.

It was only a few years later in 1980 when he really cracked me up in Airplane! with his deadpan delivery of outrageous stuff in the role of Captain Oveur.

Captain Oveur: You ever been in a cockpit before?
Joey: No sir, I've never been up in a plane before.
Captain Oveur: You ever seen a grown man naked?

Thanks for the memories.

RIP Corey Haim

He was 38.

And I thought my problems were bad.

"I was working on Lost Boys when I smoked my first joint," he told the British tabloid.

"I did cocaine for about a year and a half, then it led to crack," he said.

Haim said he went into rehabilitation and was put on prescription drugs. He took both stimulants and sedatives such as Valium.

"I started on the downers which were a hell of a lot better than the uppers because I was a nervous wreck," he said. "But one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it was about 85 a day."

RIP Jon Swift

I'm a little late on paying my homage to the late Jon Swift, that "reasonable conservative" who passed away earlier this week at age 46. His real name was Al Weisel.

I can't even remember how we came in virtual contact, but it certainly had to be via Pam's House Blend or Shakespeare's Sister blogs.

Aside from his very impressive writing about politics and the media, I always felt honored, and humbled, when he would remember to include me on his yearly emails seeking my "best of" konagod post to be included in his round-up of best posts of the year.

And the amount of effort he put into that endeavor was amazing. He was so supportive of small bloggers who otherwise would not have much, if any, exposure to a large group.

To get a feel for his sense of humor, all you had to do was read his blog header.

Although it wasn't uncommon for him to have lengthy lapses between posts, I had been feeling some uneasiness that he hadn't posted since March of last year. Last weekend I clicked the link to his blog in my blogroll, hoping to see some life, and there was none. At that point I had a premonition that something was seriously awry.

It was just a couple of days later when I received an email from BlueGal with the news. I'm not sure if it makes any sense whatsoever to say that I wasn't surprised, and yet, at the same time, was astonished.

Al/Jon, you were a good man. And you left us way too soon. But it's good to know that your positive energy, which can never die, is swirling around us still.

RIP Air America

What a week. Thanks so much for giving us Rachel Maddow though!

Air America, the long-suffering progressive talk radio network, abruptly shut down on Thursday, bowing to what it called a “very difficult economic environment.”

[...]

Although it lacked a substantial audience, the network catapulted a number of progressive media personalities into stardom, most notably Rachel Maddow, who now anchors a prime-time program on the cable news channel MSNBC.

Al Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, hosted an Air America show from 2004 to 2007, before running for office.


[...]

Air America started to play rerun programming rather suddenly Thursday evening. The company said it would sign off completely next Monday night.

Who is up next to bite the big one? The Democratic Party?

RIP Paul Samuelson

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

Photo credit: Robert Spencer for The New York Times

I've always been in awe of his brilliant mind. But it wasn't until I read this entire obituary that I knew just how amazing and influential he had been during the course of his long life.

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.

Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them Mr. Solow as well as others who would go on to become Nobel laureates like George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

[...]

His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”

I actually saw the man briefly while on a family vacation in 1973. We were visiting my aunt and uncle in Belmont and during a drive through the town, we saw him out walking and stopped for a quick chat. Even then I felt like I was seeing a celebrity!

Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons, Robert, John and Paul; and 15 grandchildren. Mr. Samuelson is also survived by a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and father of Lawrence H. Summers, director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and former secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton and former president of Harvard.

I also had no idea his brother is the father of Lawrence Summers! Funny how interconnected things can get.

My cousin is married to one of Mr. Samuelson's surviving sons.

RIP Jim Carroll

Poet Jim Carroll has died at 60 of a heart attack.

As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.

“I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,” the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.”

RIP Edward M. Kennedy

I guess this answers the question regarding whether or not he would be able to drag himself in to cast a vote on health care reform.

RIP John Hughes

This shocked the hell out of me. I still watch his movies occasionally when I stumble across them while channel surfing. However, The Breakfast Club still stands as not only his best work, in my opinion, but it has survived the test of time and remains as one of my top-rated films. If that movie was a Beatles record, it would be the White album.

Hughes was only 59.

Another Icon Has Died

Walter Cronkite at 92. Beats the hell out of 50.

He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.

Yet he was a reluctant star. He was genuinely perplexed when people rushed to see him rather than the politicians he was covering, and even more astonished by the repeated suggestions that he run for office himself. He saw himself as an old-fashioned newsman — his title was managing editor of the “CBS Evening News” — and so did his audience.

Those were the good ole days. Minus the racism and shit. The beginnings of the media fame curse. And Reagan should have had similar "astonishment." Not that Reagan was a "newsman," mind you.

That would have solved many of our current day problems.

In Memoriam

Yesterday was the worst day for American troops in Afghanistan in nearly a year as seven died in fighting.

Of seven United States soldiers killed Monday, said Capt. Jon Stock, an American military spokesman, four died along with two Afghan bystanders in a roadside bomb explosion in the northern Kunduz Province, and two American soldiers were killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan.

One new president, two old wars, and no end in sight. Change we can believe in.

But in an uplifting sign of concern, tens of thousands turned out in Los Angeles today to pay their respects.

How sweet and fitting.

Early Effective Fear Tactics

Now that Karl Malden has died at the ripe old age of 97 (way better than 50!), I ran across this old AMEX ad today. Remember this?

When he says "pick-pockets" I swear it sounds to me like he was saying "fick-fuckits."

I not sure some popcorn in my face would preclude me from feeling something sliding against my butt cheek, but it does happen. In all my months of traveling through Europe, I've never had my wallet pulled from my pants. I did, however, have someone enter my hotel room in Los Angeles while I was sleeping and make off with my wallet which was on my nightstand.

Guess I should have carried American Express Travelers Cheques then. Or better, just hidden the wallet.

At least they used a blonde white guy in the ad as the thief and not some brownish gypsy. Clever of them. I wonder who their ad agency was at the time?

Pitchman for OxiClean Dead at 50

Billy Mays has died.

It's a bit unnerving to have two high-profile 50-year-olds drop dead in a week. What's up?

Family, friends and colleagues mourned Mays, 50, who was found unresponsive in his Tampa home Sunday, and awaited an autopsy to determine the cause of his sudden death.

Police said Mays told his wife he didn't feel well when he went to bed Saturday night. Earlier in the day, he said he was hit on the head when his airliner had a rough landing at Tampa Bay's airport.

RIP: Two Icons Of My Youth

This is a surreal day. I've been so inundated with work since Tuesday that I'd barely been able to digest the death of Farrah Fawcett. I never even knew she had an Austin connection until today.

Ferrah Leni Fawcett (her first name a variation on the Arabic word for joy) was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. Voted Best Looking at her high school, she studied microbiology, then art, at the University of Texas, Austin.

And why would I? I was a high school boy living on a farm in Arkansas during Charlie's Angels, a show I watched almost religiously. I can't think of the 1970s without thinking of her.

Just as I was wrapping up my workday, txrad blurted out something about Michael Jackson dying. I said, "WHAT?"

Rumors were flying back and forth, that he was in the hospital, that he was in a coma, that he had died. And apparently the latter is the fact.

If Farrah Fawcett was a cultural icon of my teenage years, Michael Jackson was certainly the equivalent of my pre-teen and early teen years.

What Melissa wrote about "Rockin' Robin" really resonated with me.

I was never much of a fan. Never owned a Michael Jackson album, not even Thriller. But I must have listened to my 7-inch single of the Jackson 5's "Rockin' Robin" like nine million times on my Scoobie-Doo record player...

[...]

And I found it indescribably cool that it was sung by a kid who grew up just down the street from me.

I remember that song being played on the radio sooooo many times when I was a kid. I knew talent when I heard it, even if it was something I wasn't rushing out to buy. I also never owned a Michael Jackson LP or 45 RPM single, or CD. But I never wrote him off as talentless; it just wasn't my bag. In the 70s I was veering in the direction of heavy metal and in the 80s when Thriller was released, I was into the punk/new wave scene.

And speaking of Thriller, I have a story. In 1983 (while Melissa was a still a "kid" by the way -- yes I'm old I guess) when the Thriller video was released, I was over in London working at the HMV Shop. I will never forget that day when the video was available for the first time.

The HMV was a 3-story record and video store located in central London -- the best record store on the planet in my opinion -- and we were gearing up ahead of time for the release. I worked on the 3rd floor which was the video floor. All the staff were told to report to work that day as it was expected to be one of the busiest in the history of the store.

I will never forget showing up for work at least an hour or so ahead of the official store opening and seeing mobs of people already gathered at the door. I still remember a sense of selfish pride as I was allowed through the door as an employee while the masses were salivating with their noses literally pressed against the glass doors of the store.

And of course I remember the minute the store officially opened for business and throngs raced in. First on the ground level, then to the 2nd level, and finally racing up the circular stairway to the 3rd level where the treasured videos were to be found.

It was a busy day. And needless to say, the video was also being played non-stop on the monitors and sound system. That was the one day out of 14 months when I don't think I got an opportunity to put on the Grace Jones video.

Here's another song I heard a million times from when I was 10 years old. Michael was probably 11. And that, in and of itself, is pretty scary.

And at 2:26 PM PDT, he was no longer among us.

RIP Dom DeLuise

This is absolutely one of my favorite scenes from any film by any comic. I can't watch this and not laugh. Thank you, Dom, for years and years of laughing myself to tears.

He was 75 and will be missed.

RIP Natasha Richardson

Wow. What a shock.

She was 45. .. ONLY 45.

"Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha,” said a statement from the family. “They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."