Game: eulogy

Showing posts with label eulogy. Show all posts

Monday, January 17, 2011

Rest In Peace, Trish Keenan

Broadcast frontwoman Trish Keenan passed away on Friday due to pneumonia-related complications. She was 42.

I had been a fan of Broadcast from the first time I saw the video for Papercuts, and it was mainly due to the haunting quality that Trish Keenan's voice had.

I own all the group's albums, but I never got to see them perform live, and from what I've heard, I really did miss something special, because it was in that sort of environment that Trish Keenan shone the brightest.

I am listening to the Work and Non-Work album as I write this, and it is as beautiful now as it was when I first heard it. That collection, along with The Noise Made By People got me through a lot of things in my life and to know that the force behind them is no longer with us affects me more than I thought possible.

The news that she had died hasn't fully sunk in yet. I was writing another post when I just happened to click on a link to an article on The Guardian about her passing, and that is how I found out. It took me a second when I read the summarizing paragraph to realize she had died because my brain caught up to the fact that the words being used were in the past tense.

I have the some of the same sadness in my heart that I did when I learned of Mary Hansen's accident in December 2002. I also feel guilty for some strange reason, and I don't know why.

Her friends and family have my deepest sympathies and condolences.

Monday, June 23, 2008

George Carlin: A Eulogy

I had another post on tap for this afternoon, but after hearing about George Carlin's death from heart failure, well, I felt I had to eulogize him.

In writing this post, I could easily post a lot of video clips, because if George Carlin was anything, he was a prodigious producer of material, but I thought better of it.

Yes, he wrote and performed some of the most iconic and recognizable routines in modern comedy, from his early standup on The Ed Sullivan Show to the Seven Words you Can Never Say on Television to litany of HBO specials he filmed at roughly 2 year intervals since the late 1970's. He was also the first host of Saturday Night Live, so there is quite a lot of footage out there.

George Carlin had one of the longest comedic careers of relevance in the modern history of that discipline. Now, I am not talking about just having career longevity, because clearly men like George Burns and Bob Hope had him beat in that regard. No, rather I mean that even up to the time of his death, he was continuing to poke and prod at sensitive issues. He didn't rest on his laurels. He was a fearless comic who inspired multiple generations of comedians, and for that alone, he should be cherished.

But his continuing excellence as a standup after so many years, that was beyond admirable, it was astonishing. Usually the renegades burnout or fade from view, but Carlin was nearly ever-present through the past 40 years. He was one of those iconic people that seemed like they would always be around, commenting on our social foibles, our consumerist culture, the oddities of our language and the collective car wreck of the modern political system and the men and women who inhabited that sphere. He was a pioneer, and I am sure there will be a lot of tributes from his peers in the coming days and weeks.

Now, I know that there was some general disappointment about certain episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno which featured George Carlin and Ann Coulter where he did not engage her in any meaningful way, but he later explained that he was showing her some professional courtesy on an entertainment program, and it was neither the time nor the place for such a discussion. Plus, in his words, she was a zealot that doesn't respond to nuanced arguments. So even in explaining that situation, he still got in a good zinger at her expense. Bravo.

Of course, I am fully expecting a eulogy from Fox News like this, because he certainly poked at the interests and values they represent with vigor and wit, and if they choose to attack him in death, well, it certainly shows a lot of class on their part, doesn't it?

Now when I was looking into that appearance on the Tonight Show with Coulter, I came across another quote which seemed to sum things up nicely:

"Look, comedy is very much what it always was for stand-ups like me: a person with some jokes and ideas to share. I do this to show off and to satisfy my left brain, because I am a show off. But I don't think of comedy as ``going" anywhere, except maybe to the beach on a hot day."

I couldn't have summed it up better myself.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Heath Ledger Dead at 28

I was sitting here writing a different entry when I happened to check my mail at Yahoo and discovered actor Heath Ledger had died. He was 28.

I had just been watching A Knight's Tale over the weekend, and I kept thinking he had so much more ahead of him in his career. After all, he was playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, and he did seem to choose some interesting projects and had worked with some really good directors, from Nolan and Ang Lee to Lasse Hallstrom and Terry Gilliam.

And I remember the first movie I saw him in, this little piece of Australian action noir called Two Hands, which he faced off against a crime boss played by Bryan Brown. And I saw him develop as an actor over the years, and I had hoped that he was going to become one of the great actors of his generation, especially after the last new movie I saw him in Candy, in which he played ironically enough, a heroin-addicted poet alongside Abbie Cornish, as the police are saying that drugs seem to have play a part in his death.

I know that with his death, The Dark Knight is going to become one of those iconic movies, like The Crow was for the posthumous Brandon Lee. There are some people whose deaths shock you, and this is one of those for me.

I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

Sad days indeed.

Monday, November 26, 2007

Journeyman: It was nice knowing you

While it isn't official, numerous sources are speculating that the NBC series Journeyman is 1-3 episodes away from being cancelled.

But I for one think that NBC has some rather unreasonable expectations. I mean, they put the series on in the Monday 10PM slot, which puts it into some murderous ratings crossfire between CSI Miami and The Bachelor. And despite that opposition, the show was still fetching ratings which were comparable to the ratings that the network's Thursday night "hits" are receiving.

But the network has apparently given the show an ultimatum: if the two part episode that concludes tonight doesn't receive improved ratings, the show is on the fast track to cancellation. Of course, considering the first part was against the finale of a reality show, it does seem like NBC is setting up a no win situation.

Kevin Falls, the series creator, also believes that the show doesn't really have a chance to get an additional order for episodes after the first 12, and really, I think he is in the right place to make such a determination.

If the writers strike continues, I would have thought that the wisest course of action for the network would have been to revive their old summer slogan about if you haven't seen it, it is new to you and I am sure they could lure at least a few hundred thousand viewers over from CSI Miami reruns every week and start to build a following for a show they've already paid to produce. But I do remember that I mentioned that with the writers' strike going on, it seemed unlikely that a show would be cancelled with remaining episodes, and with the writers going back to the table to try to hammer out a deal, perhaps this whole Journeyman mess is like the canary in the coalmine when it comes to the length of this strike, because a cancellation threat seems to me to indicate that the network is confident that a deal may be reached soon.

But the network should also remember that when Cheers premiered, it finished number 77 out of 77 shows and yet by sticking with it, the series ended up becoming a huge hit and Seinfeld had similar early fortunes, and I think that allowing the show to find an audience may be in their best interests. Then again, I like the show, so my opinion isn't exactly unbiased.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Towel Day 2007

It is Towel Day 2007, and I couldn't let the day go by without describing the sadness Douglas Adams' passing still brings to my heart... it depresses me more than Marvin the Paranoid Android reciting Vogon Poetry.

That's all I really have to say about that.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

"My last words? Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse"

"I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I’m dead."

I've bookended this post with two quotes from the Kurt Vonnegut collection God Bless you Dr. Kevorkian, as they seemed strangely relevant, as did the title of this post, which came from I Love You, Madame Librarian.

How do you eulogize a man that was one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century, a literary giant whose ideas changed more than one generation for the better?

I remember reading Harrison Bergeron when I was in high school, and quite a few of his other novels throughout college, and I was especially drawn to The Sirens of Titan, and it makes sense as I was to later learn that it was one of the novels that was influential on Douglas Adams. His work exposed me to a greater depth and range of satirical writing that I may never have known, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.

His hometown, Indianapolis had decreed that 2007 was the Year of Vonnegut, and Kurt Vonnegut was scheduled to give the 2007 McFadden Memorial Lecture on April 28th, and receive the first annual Kurt Vonnegut award that same day. It is odd timing, no matter how you look at it.

Eulogies from my fellow bloggers: Indexed and Electronic Cerebrectomy

"Ta ta and adios. Or, as Saint Peter said to me with a sly wink, when I told him I was on my last-round trip to Paradise: “See you later, Alligator.”