Writer John Leonard has died, according to Vulture. He was 69. Leonard, an out-and-proud liberal, was the longtime TV critic for New York magazine and wrote a book column for Harper's. He has also been the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a book critic for The Nation, wrote for the New York Review of Books, and was a commenter on CBS's Sunday Morning. His most recent book is titled When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. He was also the father of Salon's tech editor, Andrew.
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John Leonard [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: November 6th, 2008, 12:47pm CST by Sheila
Tags: and now hes dead
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Michael Crichton, 1942-2008 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: November 5th, 2008, 12:05pm CST by Alex Carnevale
Tags: and now hes dead
After a long battle with cancer, science fiction's biggest crossover novelist Michael Crichton died today. Though the lanky Harvard graduate was most well known for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park, he leaves behind a sometimes controversial legacy of investigation into the most prominent scientific issues of our time. We review the highlights of his storied career:The Chicago-born author made his stunning debut under his own name with The Andromeda Strain, which would inspire the first film taken from his oeuvre. Books like Disclosure and Rising Sun veered from his science fiction interests into cultural criticism and formed the template for his NBC series, ER.
In his 2004 novel State of Fear he aroused indignation from the scientific community. Crichton's right-wing politics didn't usually endear him to other writers, resulting in memorable clashes with Susan Faludi, Al Gore and Michael Crowley, who he memorably portrayed as a child molestor in his novel Next.
Crichton's public notoriety was balanced by his closeness with his family during his illness. "He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget," his daughter said today.
At his best, Crichton was able to anticipate emerging cultural and technological trends, and surround them with a compelling narrative that never failed to address issues of the moment in a non-contrived fashion like no other. He'll be missed.
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Studs Terkel, 1912-2008 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: October 31st, 2008, 4:29pm CDT by Pareene
Tags: and now hes dead
Studs Terkel, Chicago's beloved author, interviewer, activist, radio host, and historian, died today at 96. Terkel's books Hard Times, Working, and The Good War are essential reading for students of American history in the first half of the 20th Century. He was a legendary storyteller and interviewer, and it's amazing to remember that not only did he publish his first book when he was already 55, but he then lived on to publish a dozen more, including one, P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening, set to be released next month. "Take it easy, but take it." [Chicago Tribune, Related]
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Fred Baron [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: October 31st, 2008, 11:59am CDT by Pareene
Tags: and now hes dead
Fred Baron, the attorney who rebuilt the Texas Democratic party and became famous, late in life, for his unfortunate help in covering up the extramarital affair of former Senator John Edwards, died Thursday of cancer. He was 61. Baron made a fortune in asbestos litigation, and used the funds to found the Texas Democratic Trust in 2005, among countless other philanthropic causes. In the Edwards affair, Baron was revealed as the source of the supposed "hush money" keeping mistress Rielle Hunter living in relative luxury. Baron fought corporations to the end, demanding that a pharmaceutical company allow him to use an experimental drug in his treatment. He won, but it didn't work. He won, but it didn't work. He is survived by his son Andrew, founder of the dumb internet video program Rocketboom. Andrew organized a movement to get his father the drug, enlisting Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, and John Kerry to help. [DallasNews]
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Primedia Founder Bill Reilly Dead At 70 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: October 21st, 2008, 6:27am CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
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Guillaume Depardieu, Son of Gérard, Dead at 37 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: October 13th, 2008, 3:43pm CDT by Richard
Tags: and now hes dead
Guillaume Depardieu, the estranged son of renowned actor Gérard, died today from complications relating to pneumonia at a hospital outside Paris. He was 37. An actor himself, Depardieu received acclaim early in his career for the 1995 film The Apprentices. He costarred with his father in several films, most notably Aime ton père (A Loving Father) in 2002. Though, dark clouds seemed to often occlude his successes. Depardieu had problems with heroin in his early 20's, serving a year-long prison sentence for smuggling. Also, a year after he won the César Award for Promising Newcomer for Apprentices, he badly injured his leg in a motorbike accident. In 2003, suffering from years of pain due to a bacterial infection, he decided to have the leg amputated. It was the same year that he had a public falling out with his father, writing a tell-all book in which he called Gérard a drunken miser, essentially. He also revealed that he'd once acted as a prostitute in his teenage years, partly to rebel against his father. There's no evidence yet to suggest that his death was related to either his injury or his drug use. Either way, a difficult, scrutinized life ended too soon. [AP]
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Joerg Haider, Fascist [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: October 11th, 2008, 8:55am CDT by ian spiegelman
Tags: and now hes dead
Joerg Haider, the extreme right wing Austrian politician who once said the Nazis had "an orderly employment policy" and referred to the concentration camps as "the punishment camps of National Socialism," died in a car crash last night. He was 58. "Haider was pronounced dead in a hospital shortly after his Volkswagen Phaeton veered off the road outside Klagenfurt in southern Austria and overturned several times after he successfully passed another car, police said. Authorities said an initial investigation showed no signs of foul play. At the time of his death, Haider was governor of the province of Carinthia and leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria—a party he formed after breaking away from the far right Freedom Party in 2005."Haider always denied having a soft spot for the Third Reich and its Neo-Nazi spawn, but when he got into national government with 27 percent of the vote on an anti-immigration platform in 1999, the rest of Europe rewarded Austria with months of EU sanctions over Haider's statements—seen by less Alpine nations as anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler. Strangely, Israel's relations with Austria suffered after Haider's election, and the Israeli ambassador was pulled from Vienna.
Though Haider and his gang left the Freedom Party for the gentler Alliance for the Future of Australia in 2005, Haider met with the Freedom Party's leader last month when they realized their combined votes in the last national election were nearly equal to that of the winning Social Democrats.
Said Freedom Party boss Heinz-Christian Strache, "Joerg Haider achieved great things ... he was a great figure." [AP]
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Evan Tanner, The Fighting Champion Who Reminded You Of Your Friends [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: September 9th, 2008, 8:39am CDT by Hamilton Nolan
Tags: and now hes dead
Longtime ultimate fighter and former UFC middleweight champion Evan Tanner was found dead in the California desert yesterday. He had apparently become stranded without water and succumbed to the heat. Tanner, 37, always looked more like a mountain man or a brooding surfer than a brutal fighter. But he kicked ass with the best of them. He rose to fame along with his sport itself, and his crossover appeal—which was immense—will probably only increase as the full story of his death becomes known. Rest in peace, dude.
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Ford Models Founder Jerry Ford, The Last Decent Guy In A Creepy Industry [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 12:37pm CDT by Moe
Tags: and now hes dead
Jerry Ford,* the (dapper!) fellow pictured here, is dead at 83.** Ford founded Ford Models, one of the leading agencies in the seventies and eighties that legitimized the industry and gained renown for discovering Lauren Hutton, Christie Brinkley, Rachel Hunter, Vendela and sundry other blonde ubermodeltypes and OMG I totally forgot about Xuxa. Ford is slightly less famed for its canny picking of future Mouseketeer Gone Wild types: the agency represented Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton, Ashley Tisdale, Courteney Cox, Ali Larter and ha ha ha we will forgive him for this but Paris Hilton. Because Jerry Ford was the first genuinely decent boss in a business characterized by predatory "robber barons." A lot has changed since Ford's heyday, and not for the better!The robber barons, for one thing, are back. As our anonymous industry friend and Jezebel contributor Tatiana tells us, most modeling agencies these days are glorified human traffickers that occupy a place on the "usury" spectrum somewhere between Payday Loan shops and actual armed robbers. Agencies stick them in overcrowded model apartments and gouge them on rent. When they are not in "demand," they're forced to work for either clothes or nothing at all; when they are in demand, they're forced to walk 28 shows in a week and that sort of nonsense.
Ford was different. He instituted a five-day workweek, paid models every Friday even when clients didn't pay up, and ran a practically Victorian institution wherein models weren't allowed to host gentleman callers. I don't even think he knew how to get coke! Obviously all that shit is gone today. In any case, Ford sold out to a private equity firm in December and his son who is still involved in the company is apparently (duh) a modelizer.
We welcome any and all old Ford Model cards, hot Courteney Cox pix, links to that cute Lindsay Lohan-Mischa Barton catalog picture that surfaced sometime last year and/or clips of that retarded Xuxa show.
Jerry Ford, Man Behind The Models
*The nice ex-president with the homophonic name died in 2006, remember? Hah.
**On another note, Ford died of endocarditis, a deadly heart valve infection that generally results when a sick patient contracts a virulent strain of the sort of antibiotic resistant staph you may know as MRSA. More people die from MRSA every year than AIDS these days, but as the New Yorker recently pointed out, few pharmaceutical companies invest much money in developing drugs to fight infectious disease anymore because there is so much more money in developing drugs that might make us less fat or something.
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Reminder: Have You Started On Those Things You Want to Do Before You Die? [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: August 26th, 2008, 10:00am CDT by Sheila
Tags: and now hes dead
Someday, everyone reading this is going to die! And we should all get started on whatever we really want to do now, because the Grim Reaper could come to collect us at any minute. He's already come for Dave Freeman, co-author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die: Travel Events You Just Can't Miss. Mr. Freeman died at his home last week after falling and hitting his head—he was 47.Events that we just "can't miss" before we die, according to his book's table of contents, include the Iditarod, New Year's Eve in Times Square, the Navajo Nation Fair, something called the "Testicle Festival," and Burning Man.
With that in mind, I guess I really want to go to France! Haven't been there yet. Also Thailand. But there is no way in hell I'm going to work myself into a hell-demon acid trip with a bunch of hippies in the desert at Burning Man—dead or not dead.
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Magazine Fiction Editor L. Rust Hills Dead At 83 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: August 14th, 2008, 5:28am CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
"In the 1960s Esquire was perhaps the nation’s most vibrant magazine — sexy, mischievous, irreverent and hip — and Mr. Hills’s idea of fiction, as well as of the literary life, fit into the ethos of the magazine perfectly." [Times]
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Rocky Aoki, 1938-2008 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: July 11th, 2008, 1:13pm CDT by Pareene
Tags: and now hes dead
Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki, the wrestler and restaurateur who essentially introduced America to Japanese food with his Benihaha chain, died today in New York. He was 69. Aoki raised the money to start his first Benihana by driving an ice cream truck in Harlem, which is awesome. More recently, he's been known to New Yorkers through his children, model Devon and annoying scenester DJ Steve. He faced deportation in 2006, and you could do worse for an introduction to his colorful life than this New York story on that incident. It begins, ominously: "'My daughter Grace is telling me, Daddy, your wife is going to poison you to death. Be careful what you eat,' says Rocky Aoki with an odd, amused grin." [AP]
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Jesse Helms [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: July 4th, 2008, 11:54am CDT by Nick Denton
Tags: and now hes dead
One is told not to speak ill of the dead, and even the obit writers of this ill-mannered site usually find some praiseworthy note—Hitler was kind to animals!—in even the shabbiest of lives. But it would be dishonest to pretend that Jesse Helms was anything other than a caricature of a Southern bigot.
The long-time Republican senator from North Carolina—who died today at the age of 86—disliked using the term "gay" to describe homosexuals because "there's nothing gay about them." The Hands ad (featured here) during Helms' 1990 re-election campaign played into the most basic of white fears of black political power and racial quotas. And the cranky politico took seeming pleasure in opposing every cause dear to the liberal heart, such as foreign aid or support for the arts.
Helms—who never secured more the 55% of the vote even in conservative North Carolina—foreshadowed the Republican political strategy of the last four cycles, ever mindful of the base and content to govern with the narrowest of coalitions. The only thing that can be said of the former senator is that he recognized race-baiting became less effective over time as older conservative voters died off, and the wedge-driving politics that he so symbolized has run its course.
The latest polls put Barack Obama—amazingly—only 5 points behind in North Carolina. An ad as crude and divisive as Hands—"You needed that job," the narrator tells a white man who's just received a rejection letter—won't play so well this time.
- Helms' courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art. [New York Times]
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Clay Felker, Who Taught A City To Talk About Itself [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: July 1st, 2008, 10:23am CDT by Hamilton Nolan
Tags: and now hes dead
Clay Felker, the founding editor of New York magazine, died today at the age of 80 after an extended illness. The Missouri native got his start in journalism as a magazine writer for titles like LIFE, Time, and Esquire, but he will go down in history as the man who codified a method for chronicling the elite of New York, while providing a platform for the city's best writers. He's responsible for creating the only real glossy city magazine that is also a good magazine on its own merits—unapologetically elitist, but not blinkered. And slick enough to justify it all.Felker started New York in 1968 as a "new journalism" window into the workings of the city's power structure—but one that defined the power structure broadly, and explored how the city's different spheres collided with each other:
Thirty years ago, not long before his fellow owners and Rupert Murdoch squeezed him out of the magazine he had founded, Felker defined New York very simply as a guide to "how the power game is played, and who are the winners." And Wolfe, his early superstar, has said that "Clay's real interest, although I'm not sure he ever thought it out conceptually, was status and how it operates in New York. ... In New York Magazine, Clay really wrote an enormous novel about the city. ... It was his vision, his plot—a huge novel called The City of Ambition."
Designed as a sort of urban-centric antidote to the New Yorker's more eclectic musings, the magazine fostered a ton of talent, including Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, and Gail Sheehy, Felker's future wife. He lost the magazine to Rupert Murdoch in a hostile takeover in 1976. He would go on to hold a series of editorial jobs at a kaleidoscope of titles, including Esquire, the Daily News, the Village Voice, and US News & World Report. But none would approach the legacy that he left with New York.
Kurt Andersen says that Felker, the middle American emigre to the big city, simply took his mental playbook of how New York worked "literally, and published it in weekly serial form." And look around: that's what everyone—including us—is doing today. For that, we must all acknowledge that Felker's mark will never disappear, as long as this city stays full of smart people with a burning ambition to talk.
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Things We Like But Probably Shouldn't [He's 21!]
Posted: June 24th, 2008, 1:27pm CDT by Richard
Tags: hes 21
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Comedian George Carlin Dead [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 12:43am CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
Stand-up comedian George Carlin, whose routine about forbidden words on the airwaves led to a key Supreme Court decision on government broadcast oversight, died of heart failure near Los Angeles. He was 71. Carlin had been admitted to the hospital earlier in the day with chest pains. He launched to fame in the 1960s as a straightlaced, suit-and-tie comedian appearing on programs like the Ed Sullivan Show as characters like the "hippie-dippie weatherman." By the 1970s, he was doing more risque material in long hair and jeans, and his performance of the routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" prompted an obscenity trial in Milwaukee, plus the Supreme Court fight, which arose from the airing of a similar routine on the radio in New York and an FCC fine. In the 1980s and 1990s, Carlin's comedy became both sharper as social commentary and emotionally darker, sounding even, at times, bitter. The comedian was treated for alcohol addiction after a fight with an audience at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 2004.
Below, Carlin's 1990 routine (NSFW) on how euphemisms undermine discourse in America. Post your own favorite routines in the comments.
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Political Adman Tony Schwartz Dead At 84 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: June 17th, 2008, 5:27am CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
Media consultant Tony Schwartz, a creator of famed political ad "Daisy" (left), died Saturday of a heart condition. He was 84. From his home in Manhattan, Schwartz created not only infamous "Daisy" for Lyndon Johnson but also ads for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, among other mostly Democratic politicians. According to the Times, "detractors and admirers alike praised Mr. Schwartz as a pioneer in putting sound to more effective use in television advertising. He was credited, for instance, with being the first to use real children’s voices in television commercials, beginning in the late 1950s." Daisy is considered not only the most famous political ad of all time, but also one of the first and most influential negative ads. [Times]
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Fashion Giant Yves Saint Laurent Dead At 71 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: June 1st, 2008, 6:26pm CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
Pioneering fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who famously wove everything from pants to peasant clothes to leopard prints into the everyday wardrobes of women, and who adroitly evolved his designs over several decades, died in Paris of unknown causes. He was 71. Laurent "had been ill for some time," according to Agence France-Presse. The hugely influential designer retired in 2002. The cause of death has not been released, but according to the BBC, "Yves St Laurent suffered mental and physical ill health for much of his life and he appeared in public only rarely." The Times obit concludes with this quote: "I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober." [AFP, Times]
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Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008 [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: May 13th, 2008, 10:01am CDT by Pareene
Tags: and now hes dead
Artist Robert Rauschenberg, the man who saved us from abstract expressionism, died Monday at the age of 82. The Times describes him as a "brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner." People used to care way more about art when it was made by people like that instead of twee New School students. Rauschenberg started out making art out of junk he found on the streets of lower Manhattan, announcing that if you didn't find "soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles" beautiful than you must be a miserable bastard. So go to the Moma this week and see First Landing Jump, which is made of "a rusted license plate, an enamel light reflector, a tire impaled by a street barrier, a man's shirt, a blue lightbulb in a can, and a black tarpaulin." And some paint and canvas, sure. [NYT]
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Baskin-Robbins Founder Dead [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:37am CDT by Ryan Tate
Tags: and now hes dead
"Irvine Robbins, who with his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, started the Baskin-Robbins chain of ice cream stores — together concocting quirky flavor combinations with names like Daiquiri Ice, Pink Bubblegum and Here Comes the Fudge — died on Monday near his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 90... One day in 1964... he received a phone call from a reporter for The New York Post, asking what flavor Baskin-Robbins was planning to introduce to celebrate the Beatles’ arrival for their appearance on Ed Sullivan’s television show. Caught unaware, he came up with Beatlenut, and then scrambled to find an unnamed flavor with nuts in it to match. Two days later, it was in all the company’s stores." [Times]
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And Now He's Dead: Semicolon; Punctuation Mark [Grammar]
Posted: April 7th, 2008, 3:40pm CDT by Noelle Hancock
Tags: and now hes dead
The Semicolon died this week at the age of 417 from complications of irrelevancy and misuse. Semicolon was born in England in 1591 to Ben Jonson, the first notable writer to use them "systematically." The mark of punctuation dedicated its career to connecting independent clauses and indicating a closer relationship between the clauses than a period does. But mostly it just confused the shit out of English students everywhere. Well, the semi isn't technically dead yet but there's a healthy debate going on speculating that its days are numbered. And as any B-list celebrity can attest, when people start asking whether your career is dead, it already is. So that's the angle we're going with.
The Guardian offers a rather startlingly in-depth analysis of the viability of the semicolon, including "for" and "against" arguments from notable writers. It should come as no surprise that Jonathan Franzen takes an unabashedly pro-semicolon stance.
"I love a good semicolon, but this sounds like one of those Literature is Dead! Stories that The New York Times likes to run," he says. "I've never heard from a reader confused by one of my semicolons, and I don't remember ever throwing a book aside for being semicolon-free."
The late Kurt Vonnegut, meanwhile, takes the subtle approach and compares semicolons to cross-dressing she-males: "If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons," he has cautioned. "They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
Semicolon is survived by colon, parenthesis and em dash. In lieu of flowers, please send anecdotes of times you have been confused by a semicolon to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, care of Jonathan Franzen.
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Batman Probably Dying This Summer [Comics]
Posted: March 25th, 2008, 11:00pm CDT by Nick Douglas
Tags: and now hes dead
But not, erm, not the way the Joker died this winter. Industry rumor says that DC Comics will kill off Batman this summer, and not even in his own comic book but in the series Robin. According to the rumor (possibly confirmed by this cover of an upcoming Robin), the sidekick will become the new Batman, which isn't even how that works. Since the new Batman movie The Dark Knight comes out in July, Batman's death in another medium would make front-page news, especially since Captain America's death made the New York Times front page last spring.Incidentally, this sort of stunt may feel like a cheap grab for readership in a dying industry, and it is, but it's also part of a long tradition in superhero comics of violating all traditional rules of literature. Superheroes have always died, resurrected, and revealed their identities without consequence. Why doesn't this ruin the brand? Well, when's the last time you bought a comic book? Modern film audiences don't need to actually read the comic to get the Batman brand, so DC can do what they like with comic-book Batman while film Batman keeps raking in money.
But still, they're killing Batman, dude, the real honest-to-god comic-book Batman, and the Times will write about the character's importance to America, making a sort of cultural obituary, and either Chuck Klosterman or the Freakonomics guys will explain how this is a zeitgeist, and DC might sell a few extra copies before its comics again fade into obscurity.
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William F. Buckley, Crypto-Fascist, Is Correcting Usage In Heaven [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: February 27th, 2008, 11:29am CST by Pareene
Tags: and now hes dead
Conservative author, essayist, columnist, pundit, smug asshole, gadabout, secret spook, and blue-blooded creep William F. Buckley is dead. Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, though his cause of death is not yet known. And with him died respectable, intelligent, genteel-but-cut-throat New York Conservatism.
Buckley was born in New York City, to a wealthy Irish Catholic and a Southerner. The family moved to Connecticut, he was schooled in Paris and London, and he attended Yale—the perfect resume for a man who'd become a caricature of condescending East Coast snobbishness before that was turned into a Liberal trait. It was a caricature Buckley happily lived up to, dropping ten-dollar words into his prose with obvious obnoxious glee, tempting lesser writers to imitate his parody-of-erudition style at their peril. It's a perilous task because few can match his skill with a biting quip:Ten years ago [Gore Vidal] wrote in The Nation an essay denouncing pro-Israeli activity in the United States as divided loyalty. The article and its implications were denounced by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, as "the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II." Mr. Vidal retorted by questioning the patriotism of Mr. Podhoretz and his wife, the author Midge Decter, and reacted to another critic of his article, a rabbi, with the sigh, "Luckily, I am used to being lied about." I commented at the time that anyone who lies about Mr. Vidal is doing him a kindness.
ZING, Gore!
Buckley zinged liberal-leaning author/essayist/blue-blooded creep Gore Vidal many times in his lengthy career, though not always with such class. In what is still arguably the greatest live TV moment ever, Buckley and Vidal got into a heated exchange on ABC news in 1968 that quickly turned personal (and AWESOME):
Listen to that dueling received pronunciation! In case you missed the meat of the debate in the crosstalk, Vidal called Buckley a "cypto-Nazi" (which Vidal later, accurately, corrected to "crypto-fascist"), and Buckley responded with, "listen you queer ['quee-ah'], stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll pop you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
Buckley and Vidal later repeatedly sued and counter-sued each other for libel and such, which was the style at the time.
Buckley founded The National Review in 1955, when the New Deal and World War II had basically made "true" conservativism temporarily obsolete in American letters and thought. He championed the candidacy of MAVERICK ARIZONA SENATOR Barry Goldwater, a dangerous nut who lost in a landslide, but whose followers and ideas would eventually come to dominate the nation's political scene.
The National Review still exists, Goldwater Republicans are still enjoying the fruits of their eventual success, and the conservative movement as a whole has seized upon the culture wars with such fervor that a high-falutin' fancy-talkin' New York college boy like Buckley would never, ever achieve such prominence in the movement he nurtured, should he come around today. Because he'd obviously be a big stupid quee-ah.
So fuck him for foisting upon us this anti-intellectual bullshit mess of a nation we've become, but we're glad that his followers helped destroy the intellectual heart of his ideology.
Buckley is survived by his hip satirical novelist son Christopher, his pale imitation of its former self magazine, and George Will's wardrobe and middle initial.
William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead At 82 [NYT]
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Jew-Hating Chess-Playing Bobby Fischer Dead! [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: January 18th, 2008, 7:19am CST by Joshua Stein
Tags: and now hes dead
Call off the search for Bobby Fischer. The man who totally schooled Commie chess player Boris Spassky in 1972 and later went on to mildly dislike America, the tribe of Moses and pretty much everything else in the world died in Iceland on yesterday. The nature of the illness that killed him is unknown. [BBC]
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Steve Florio Goes To The Big Conde Nast Cafeteria In the Sky [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: December 27th, 2007, 8:01pm CST
Tags: and now hes dead
Steve Florio, the mustachioed colorful extravagant "pirate captain" ex-CEO and president of Conde Nast, died today from a heart attack. He was 58. Florio's tenure at Conde Nast spanned from the early 80's to 2004, when he stepped down (perhaps under duress!) as chief executive due to "heart problems." Over 25 years, Florio ran the New Yorker for a time and also GQ and saw circ numbers skyrocket (though he has been accused of fuzzy math). He also sometimes did the bidding of James Truman, including overseeing the offloading of Details to Fairchild. After he left he wrote the best memoir that was never written called Managing the Gods. It included a bit about the state of GQ when he arrived there as publisher, "One guy in ad sales was a cocaine freak; another was a notorious sex fanatic. An out-of-town sales rep was a cross-dressing nut - hose, bra, hats and the works."
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BORAT, ALI G BOTH DEAD [Not At Christmas!]
Posted: December 21st, 2007, 8:35am CST
Tags: and now hes dead
Borat Sagdiyev, the mild-mannered Kazakhstani journalist known for his investigations of America and a documentary film of the same name, as well as for the great offense that he gave the Jews, has died. Similarly, so has talk show host Ali G, an English journalist best known for his willingness to ask questions that probably should have been asked but everyone felt too stupid to do so.
Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing off Borat [Telegraph]
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Bobby Van, 64, Dies In A Cab [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: November 29th, 2007, 9:55am CST
Tags: and now hes dead
Bobby Van, the Juilliard School dropout and owner of Bobby Van's Steakhouse in Bridgehampton, died on Tuesday. He was 64 and working as a cab driver in Huntington, Long Island. For a while, in the 70s and 80s, Bobby Van was the Hamptons' Elaine Kaufman. According to Steven Gaines' great book on the Hamptons, Philistines at the Hedgerow, his restaurant-saloon was "an oasis of warmth and country bonhomie in the bleakness of the gray Hamptons winter." It was also where Truman Capote, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut and Willie Morris used to get shitfaced. And where shady and deposed real estate kingAllan Schneider did most of his business. According to Page Six, "Van's ex-wife, Marina, had him cremated with no service and no announcement."
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Norman Mailer Predicted His Own Death And Life [Owning It]
Posted: November 14th, 2007, 1:20pm CST
Tags: and now hes still dead
A lot of people have been trying to write encomiums about Norman Mailer, but it turns out that the lovable, hateable old coot actually saved everyone the trouble by writing his own, in 1979. "At the author's bedside were eleven of his fifteen ex-wives, twenty-two of his twenty-four children, and five of his seven grandchildren, of whom four are older than six of their uncles and aunts," he kidded. Well, sort of! Because, well, here's the Times obit:
In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and proponents of women's liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an 'enemy of birth control.' He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had eight children, all of whom survive him: Susan, by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Jeanne; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms. Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church. Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Church's, and 10 grandchildren.
Related: "We live in an era in which we've convinced ourselves that nearly any behavior is okay, as long as we're up front about it," the Observer's Doree Shafrir recently wrote, about the trend of journalistic self-branding.
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Norman Mailer Is Dead [And Now He's Dead]
Posted: November 10th, 2007, 2:46pm CST
Tags: and now hes dead
Norman Mailer—Jewish pugilist, a writer equally at home with fiction and fact, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a lover and a hater of women and one of three founders of the Village Voice—died today. He was married repeatedly, and although he did stab his second wife, four more yet followed.Mailer was for many decades the most argumentative novelist of our time. In 1998, Mailer trashed Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full." Mailer said that reading the book was like "making love to a 300-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over." (Wolfe, trying and failing to be as stylishly scrappy, called Mailer and John Updike "two piles of bones." Idiot.)
When New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said his memoir "The Spooky Art" was like "going on a very long bus rider over a very bumpy road, sitting next to a garrulous raconteur who never takes a nap and never pauses for breath," he retaliated by calling her a "kamikaze" and a "twofer" in the Times quest for equal opportunity.
He once sat on Truman Capote (and also praised him, though not without dismissal: "He is tart as a grand aunt," Mailer wrote of Capote, "but in his way he is a ballsy little guy"); he invited William Styron to fisticuffs; he did punch Gore Vidal and accused Vidal, quite accurately, of unmanning Jack Kerouac. (It was not Vidal's fault that both Kerouac's work and masculinity were of such flimsy construction.)
In the 60s, he was both a short-lived mayoral candidate and a proponent of the idea that New York City should secede to become a 51st State. Neither idea caught fire and New York City has since been overrun by America.
Over the years, Mailer came to odd theological beliefs. In 2003, he told Ron Rosenbaum that: "I just feel we live in a triangular relation with God and the Devil, that we're a separate force. It's not that we're little puppets pushed around by an anode pole and a cathode pole. We push back on each of them. So it makes for a very complex universe, a complex moral universe, because you never know at a given moment whether you're doing it as a human or whether you're being tricked by one or the other of two opposed deities."
He regularly scrapped about women and feminism, and in a way that, in the end, made it seem that he was afraid of them. He said that "Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain," but also, speaking at the 92nd Street Y in 1998, he told this story:
"I once was at a party with my then-wife, it was at Frank Conroy's house in Brooklyn Heights. We were sitting around, at a given moment there were eight or 10 or 12 people there. Lillian [Hellman] had the most annoying habit of calling me Normie. She said, 'Normie, why didn't you ever fuck me?' This is in front of all those people. So I took a deep breath and I said, 'Well, Lillian, I guess I didn't because I was afraid I wouldn't be the best you'd ever had.' And she smiled very benignly and said, 'It's all right then.'"
And when confronted by feminist Jill Johnson making out with another woman in 1971, he implored her to "be a lady."But something like awareness about his insecurities about manhood came to him in recent years. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2003, he said that he saw the Iraq War as an inappropriate response to the idea of modern emasculation:
And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.
In the same publication in 1975, Mailer wrote about Vietnam:The resistance of the left in America broke the will of the establishment to wage a serious war. One by one, influential members of the military-industrial complex and the higher enclaves of finance came to decide that the war would wreck America morally, economically, and finally technologically. They did not decide this because secretly they admired the militancy or ideology or principles of the left. They detested all that. But about the time students began to destroy valuable equipment and burn university buildings--even a minority of students in a minority of universities--the perspective was clear. Those students were America's future technological experts. (I obviously include the soft technologies of communications, sociology, et al., which center around social planning.) So members of the establishment came to recognize each by himself--will a novelist ever capture their long dark night?--that America could never run its industrial and media complex if even a fraction of its brightest people were determined at sabotage.
And so in recent years, Mailer both stopped drinking while writing and set aside much of his battling—despite minor incidents with the likes of Wolfe—in the service of politics, because what he had written about Vietnam and its protests was not going to be true for this war. More and more, he and his former enemies, particularly Vidal, found common ground in their believe that the United States was beginning to exhibit nearly all the hallmarks of fascism in its operations both internationally and at home. Less fun than literary dust-ups, to be sure, and yet.
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Bloomberg In Secret Pope Bid Shocker [He's Very Very Rich]
Posted: November 6th, 2007, 11:23am CST
Tags: hes very rich
Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, reportedly outraged at new Pope Ratzi's refusal to guarantee the eternal salvation of Jews, atheists, homosexuals and vegans, is secretly plotting with a top aide to assume control of the Vatican sometime in 2010, Gawker has learned. Top Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheeky met in secret with a number of disgruntled Holy See officials earlier this month, and is reportedly in talks with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York about just how pricey an extended "antipope" campaign would be.Through a spokesman, Bloomberg denied any interest in becoming pope, saying he has 790-odd days left as Mayor of New York and that's all he's focused on at the moment. But insider sources insist Mike is eying the popemobile and attempting to woo His Eminence Edward Michael Cardinal Egan to the cause with promises of an appointment to Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Among the many changes Mayor Mike has in store for the church are a world-wide ban on the indoor burning of incense and a progressive reform policy offering priests free cell phones for each young boy they successfully don't molest. Bloomberg reportedly has no plans in place to change church policy forbidding women from reaching positions of authority.
Should the Pope thing fall through, Sheeky has already begun development of plans to make his boss Emperor of France, Chancellor of the Intergalactic Republic, and owner of the Wall Street Journal.
Mike's Secret Bid to Run Vs. Spitzer [NYP]
The Revolutionary [Newsweek] -
Mr. President, I've Got a Nutty Idea... [And How He's Dead]
Posted: November 1st, 2007, 2:10pm CDT
Tags: and how hes dead
"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did." [USA Today: Pilot of plane that dropped Hiroshima bomb dies]
Celebrity-Gossip.net
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Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson Hit The Set
Posted: October 7th, 2007, 2:59pm CDT
Tags: Scarlett Johansson Bradley Cooper hes
After a well-liked role in Wedding Crashers, Bradley Cooper has recently found himself thrust into the world of celebrity A-listers.
Cooper was spotted on Friday filming scenes for the star-studded “He’s Just Not That Into You” with Scarlett Johansson in Los Angeles.
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Jennifer Aniston’s On Set Marriage
Posted: September 21st, 2007, 2:42pm CDT
Tags: Jennifer aniston Ben Affleck hes
One of the coolest things about being an actress is getting to play out all kinds of scenarios that you wouldn’t normally encounter. And for Jennifer Aniston, she got to pretend to be a bride (again) on the set of her new movie.
The film “He’s Just Not That Into You” has the former Friends star looking radiant in a wedding gown walking down the aisle, and looking genuinely thrilled. Could it be that she’s ready to tie the knot again someday?
Gawker
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And Now He's Dead: "He knew his colors and shapes, he learned ...
Posted: September 11th, 2007, 11:10am CDT
Tags: and now hes dead
"He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world's most famous talking bird. But last week Alex, an African gray parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of his life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31." [NYT]
Celebrity-Gossip.net
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Jennifer Aniston Gets Her Game Face On
Posted: August 17th, 2007, 2:47pm CDT
Tags: Jennifer aniston hes Just Not
Despite a high-profile relationship with British model Paul Sculfor, Jennifer Aniston has been pretty quiet lately. But that’s all about to change. The Friends star says that she’s ready to get back in the game.
The Break-Up actress is set to sign on to a major film project soon. Rumor has it that she’ll star in He’s Just Not That Into You.
Gawker
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Nicknames: We thought "PEKEEP" might be some mysterious ...
Posted: August 16th, 2007, 2:47pm CDT
Tags: and now hes dead
We thought "PEKEEP" might be some mysterious new free jazz expert that the Times was employing to write about the death of Max Roach, but it seems to just be some placeholder thing they forgot to take off. Anyway, we'll be referring to actual regular jazz expert Peter Keepnews as "PEKEEP" from now on. Oh: And now he's dead, by the way. Drum on. -
And Now He's Dead: Bruce Wolmer, 59, the editor of Art & Auction, ...
Posted: August 14th, 2007, 11:40am CDT
Tags: and now hes dead
Bruce Wolmer, 59, the editor emeritus of Art & Auction, died on Friday. The New York Sun remembers him as "a defender of Israel." Artnet.com remembers him as a man who "could not help genuflecting to the specialized brand of the rich and powerful who inhabit the art world."
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And Now He's Dead: Phil Rizzuto, whose dulcet tones were put ...
Posted: August 14th, 2007, 10:02am CDT
Tags: and now hes dead
Phil Rizzuto, whose dulcet tones were put to use in countless commercials for "The Money Store," has passed away. Scooter was also well known for his part in Meat Loaf's 1977 hit "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Oh, yeah, he was also a Hall of Fame shortstop and beloved broadcaster for the New York Yankees. [1010 Wins]