Obituaries

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Mongrel
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mongrel » Sun Dec 25, 2016 9:56 pm

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Büge
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Büge » Mon Dec 26, 2016 1:27 am

Mongrel wrote:2016 ain't done with us yet.




;__;
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Re: Obituaries

Postby pacobird » Mon Dec 26, 2016 1:39 am



So basically my only surviving influence is Tom Jones.
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Bal
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Bal » Mon Dec 26, 2016 2:52 am

The In Memorium scrawl at the Oscars is going to be 25 god damned minutes long.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Wheels » Mon Dec 26, 2016 9:59 am

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Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem

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Thad
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 26, 2016 2:42 pm

At the risk of stating the obvious, this is only the beginning. Boomers are called Boomers because there are a fuck of a lot of them, and they haven't even started dying of old age yet.

Even granting that somebody dying of old age isn't as sad or as shocking as Bowie having secret cancer or Prince OD'ing, there are still going to be an increasing number of Boomers who die young in the coming years, because getting older increases the likelihood of health crises, accidents, or the indiscretions of youth catching up with you. (Carrie Fisher is currently in stable condition.)

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Re: Obituaries

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Dec 26, 2016 2:50 pm

No, everything will definitely be better 6 days from now.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mongrel » Mon Dec 26, 2016 4:43 pm

Yeah, that's been something I just figured would happen for exactly that reason.

However, it's also worth pointing out that the following generations have produced perhaps proportionally fewer giants of art, music, public life, etc., so I think we notice it even more. The 60's were a special time in that genius fed off genius, exponentially increasing the output of the world's creatives (and a fair few non-creatives) and of the ones who followed in their immediate wake. I mean you posted the relevant F&L clip just the other day.

At some point it will all slow down again, but that's the point when we will have far fewer giants left.
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Re: Obituaries

Postby zaratustra » Mon Dec 26, 2016 5:33 pm

It's still gonna take a pretty big combo to beat Bowie + Prince.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mongrel » Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:22 pm

On the other hand, Mick Jagger's suspended animation corpse just had another fucking kid.
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Re: Obituaries

Postby beatbandito » Mon Dec 26, 2016 7:49 pm

Of course the year Abe Vigoda actually dies so many other people do no one will remember.
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 27, 2016 10:07 am

zaratustra wrote:It's still gonna take a pretty big combo to beat Bowie + Prince.


That it is.

There are a lot of figures who are both singular and beloved, but the very nature of something like this is that it can't be predicted. (A lot of people are going to be very sad when, say, Willie Nelson dies, but there's not going to be that sense that he was taken from us too soon.) Nobody went into 1980 thinking John Lennon was going to be murdered; nobody went into 1990 thinking Jim Henson would die suddenly of bronchitis. And I was surprised by just how much fond reminiscence followed Michael Jackson's death, given that for the last 15 years of his life he wasn't exactly best known for his singing and dancing.

And near misses happen all the time. Stephen King's addictions almost killed him in the 1980's and a distracted driver almost killed him in the 1990's.

Sorry, nothing really cheerful to add to that. Just that we should appreciate the good ones while we've got 'em.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 27, 2016 12:01 pm

And:

Mongrel wrote:However, it's also worth pointing out that the following generations have produced perhaps proportionally fewer giants of art, music, public life, etc., so I think we notice it even more. The 60's were a special time in that genius fed off genius, exponentially increasing the output of the world's creatives (and a fair few non-creatives) and of the ones who followed in their immediate wake. I mean you posted the relevant F&L clip just the other day.

At some point it will all slow down again, but that's the point when we will have far fewer giants left.


I've got an instinct to agree, but I've got another instinct that says I should be skeptical of looking at the past through rose-tinted goggles.

A lot's changed since the 1960's. The music industry, content distribution, technology, even the basic notions of creation, ownership, and credit. Today's acts probably have a lot more in common with the Monkees and the Archies than the Beatles, and the biggest pop stars of the past generation were actual Mouseketeers. We're never going to have another moment like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. (The most significant shared cultural moment of my lifetime, and probably most people's here, is 9/11. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I'm pretty sure it means something.)

There are still towering geniuses out there. Perhaps fewer who meant quite so much to so many people. Douglas Adams's death wrecked me more than anybody else's ever has outside of my own family, but he wasn't a household name.

And of course of the 1960's luminaries who are still around -- they got old. Or, more to the point, past their prime. Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize is for words he wrote half a century ago. Paul McCartney's never written anything else as good as Let It Be. The ones who died young, Janis and Jimi and John, they're fixed that way in our minds forever. (Even if they may have been past their prime too -- Lennon's solo career produced exactly one song that was on par with his Beatles catalog. (But man, what a song it was.) Prince and Bowie were still doing great work but they'll always be remembered best for a certain, decades-old period in their respective careers. And I've already mentioned the nostalgia trip for Michael Jackson.)

I dunno. On some level, trying to ascribe broader cultural perspective seems like pissing in the wind; I don't really know what any of this means, especially when I start talking about what it felt like when musicians died before I was born.

It sucks, though. And it's going to suck some more.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mongrel » Tue Dec 27, 2016 1:29 pm

Well, there are ups and downs is all, that's just the highest and most memorable high point in recent memory. On a universal scale they happen frequently enough, but from an individual perspective they may not come more than once a lifetime, or sometimes even much longer.
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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mazian » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:11 pm

Carrie Fisher.

Mongrel wrote:2016 ain't done with us yet.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mongrel » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:15 pm

To be honest... once they mentioned she'd gone more than 10 minutes without breathing and 15 minutes before resuscitation during the original heart attack, I sort of figured she was gone even if she wasn't dead.

Also, Richard Adams, author of Watership Down.
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patito
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Re: Obituaries

Postby patito » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:22 pm

Personally I blame Thad

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Re: Obituaries

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:58 pm

It was obviously Kylo Ren.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Grath » Tue Dec 27, 2016 3:02 pm

Mazian wrote:Carrie Fisher.

Mongrel wrote:2016 ain't done with us yet.

Drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

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Re: Obituaries

Postby Mazian » Tue Dec 27, 2016 3:09 pm

"Thad" has four letters. "2016" has four numbers. THE CONNECTIONS ARE OBVIOUS, FOLLOWERS

In the sciences, we recently lost astronomer and physicist Vera Rubin, who joins Lise Meitner and Rosalind Franklin in the perpetually disappointing category of "women who fully deserved and did not get Nobel Prizes". Even the AP obit has maddening phrasing about "helped find" vs. "did find".

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