Passages

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Librarians everywhere are freaking out.

[colinr0380]

I saw him as Frank-n-Furter in a stage revival of The Rocky Horror Show, where quite a bit of the heckling was coffee-related.

Head did have quite a surprisingly musical career as presumably the musical episode of Buffy, Once More WIth Feeling, proved that the cast could sing and he went on to play the "Repo Man" in Repo! The Genetic Opera, which Darren Lynn Bousman parlayed his clout after his run of Saw films to make (I have often wondered if Repo! The Genetic Opera was influenced by the Battle Angel: Alita manga at all. At very least they would play as an interesting double bill together!)

Plus he is in that interesting Jazz Age set Stephen Poliakoff mini-series Dancing on the Edge, with Chiwetel Ejiofor.

One of his more notable recent roles was the even worse than the recording studio invaders sleazy boss in Feedback. Which I had some issues with but Head is probably the best thing about it in his brief bookending appearances.

[hearthesilence]

Actor James Handy, murdered by his girlfriend's son who appears to be severely mentally ill.

A veteran character actor, the part I remember most is probably in The Verdict where he plays Kevin Doneghy, husband to the sister of the victim of criminal negligence.

Obituary that dives into his past as a Vietnam veteran, where he was involved in a lot of horrific combat and returned as a pacifist.

[jbeall]

Anthony Head, best known for playing Giles in the Buffy The Vampire TV series, but if you are into your TV commercials he was also one half of the Gold Blend couple, who had a developing coffee-focused love affair across a series of adverts.

He had quite the career playing characters named Rupert. In addition to playing Rupert Giles, he also played the villanous Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso.

[DimitriL]

Head did have quite a surprisingly musical career as presumably the musical episode of Buffy, Once More WIth Feeling, proved that the cast could sing and he went on to play the "Repo Man" in Repo! The Genetic Opera, which Darren Lynn Bousman parlayed his clout after his run of Saw films to make (I have often wondered if Repo! The Genetic Opera was influenced by the Battle Angel: Alita manga at all. At very least they would play as an interesting double bill together!)

I was surprised that he had such a different voice from his brother Murray, yet just as distinctive.

[The Curious Sofa]

I never realised they were related. I suppose Murray was a musician first, with a more rock 'n' roll voice, whereas the classically trained actor Anthony, had more of more musical theatre singing style, which is where he started out.

[MichaelB]

There was a hefty age gap, so their careers weren’t in sync, a gap exaggerated by the fact that Murray Head became famous much faster. By the time he co-starred in Sunday Bloody Sunday Anthony was still in his teens, and wouldn’t become a household name until well into the 1980s.

[jbeall]

That reminds me, what's going on with Jafar Panahi? I know he was planning to return to Iran after the Oscars were over (i.e. after he fulfilled his promotional obligations to Neon), but I imagine he's still somewhere in the U.S. or Europe until the war ends. Once that happens though, I fear what will happen to him - he's facing a prison sentence that's been appealed, but the change in leadership (thanks to this moronic war) will stack the odds against him even more.

His prison sentence has been upheld in court, though he can still appeal.

[hearthesilence]

Terrible news, but at least his options haven't run out.

The great guitarist James Blood Ulmer at 86, here's an official statement from his family. His album Odyssey, one of the greatest and most innovative jazz albums of the 1980s, is highly recommended.

[fdm]

Back on May 18 Gunter Hampel passed at 88.

[beamish14]

Terrible news, but at least his options haven't run out.

The great guitarist James Blood Ulmer at 86, here's an official statement from his family. His album Odyssey, one of the greatest and most innovative jazz albums of the 1980s, is highly recommended.

I had never heard of him until I read the late Village Voice critic Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk, which is coincidentally just being reissued in a few weeks and even having an audiobook recording after fetching prices for hundreds of dollars

[hearthesilence]

That's a great book - really fortunate for all of us that it's being reissued. Nate Chinen's obituary for NPR (probably the best one I've seen on Ulmer in a mainstream publication) actually cites Tate's piece much more extensively than the family's announcement.

[GaryC]

Australian producer Sue Seeary, aged 64. Much of her work was on television, but for the cinema she produced The Crossing (1990) and was associate producer on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994).

[MichaelB]

David Hockney, star of the 1974 mockumentary A Bigger Splash.

I believe he also dabbled in painting here and there.

[Aunt Peg]

Aside from being insanely talented David Hockney was an endlessly fascinating man. RIP.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Another one of those legendary figures who smoked his entire life and lived long in spite of it.

A couple weeks ago, I went into a wormhole about the Quantel Paintbox, an early graphics computer for photo manipulation and paint before Photoshop. I had never heard of it and found several interviews of folk who used it including important graphic designers, artists, and even David Fincher, who recalls it being the first computer he saw being used to digital manipulate film and video. Saw this BBC television show with an episode on Hockney using it. I knew he did iPad drawings, but had no clue about these. Apparently a few have been archived on 35mm slides, the only way to properly duplicate these images at the time.

[colinr0380]

There is an essay on Hockney in J.G. Ballard: Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007, which is a collection of Ballard's general essays and reviews. Here he is reviewing, somewhat negatively, the Paul Joyce book "Hockney on Photography: Conversations" published in The Guardian on 28th October 1988:

Affable and engaging, his Yorkshire savvy filtered through the warmest shades of California sunshine, David Hockney wears his celebrity more casually than any post-war artist. Neither Warhol, with his eerie death's-head stare, nor Dali, too often coming on like a hallucinating speak-your-weight machine, ever achieved the comfortable rapport with his audience that Hockney has been able to take for granted since the 1960s.

Together, Hockney's life and work sum up exactly what the public today asks of its artists. Cannily, Hockney has saved his real waywardness for his life-style - the gold lame jacket and dyed blonde hair, once so outrageous, and the pool-boys high in the Hollywood Hills - while his paintings have remained wholly acceptable to his Sunday supplement admirers. The playgroup palette reminds them of the kindergarten paint-boxes with which they dabbled as toddlers, while the images of Los Angeles offer a romanticised vision of that latter-day Samakind among the freeways.

In many respects, Hockney performs the role today which Alma-Tadema played for his Victorian audience. Both artists have satisfied the public's need for exotic, far-away lands filled with graceful houris and sybraritic dreams. Both specalised in swimming-pools, but where Alma-Tadema, depicting the seraglios of a wholly mythical east, surrounded his marble grottos with pretty girls, Hockney furnishes the pools of his equally mythical west with a parade of pretty boys.

Anyone who has spent even five minutes in Los Angeles can see that this city of dreadful night is nothing like the sanitised realm invented by Hockney in his paintings of the 1960s. Hockney's Los Angeles resembles the real terrain of dingbats and painted glue, stretching as far as forever under a tangle of overhead wires, only in the sense that Rick's Cafe resembles the real Casablanca.

Needless to say, Hockney's vision is all the better for that, and I for one wish that he had stayed with his houris in the Hollywood Hills, painting even bigger and bigger splashes. But the great period of the swimming pools had passed with the end of the 1970s, at about the time when the first British visitors arrived en masse and discovered the reality of his imaginary city.

By then Hockney had himself begun to discover reality in the form of photography, a long-standing enthusiasm which seems to have seized the centre stage of his imagination during the 1980s. Hockney on Photography is a lavishly illustrated guide to the series of photo-collages he has made in the last six years. These, he believes, pose a fundamental challenge to the "one-eyed" tradition that has always dominated photography since its birth.

In his interviews with the filmmaker Paul Joyce, Hockney describes his first experiments with the Polaroid camera and the significance for the future of photography of what he calls his "joiners". He ranges widely over the history of western painting, contrasting its single-point perspective with the generalised perspective of eastern art, and discusses his attempts in the photo-collages to enlarge the dimension of time and infuse a greater degree of realism.

Hockney speaks with all his customary wit and intelligence, though he is frequently pushed over the top by an immensely subservient interviewer. "I wonder whether you are going almost beyond art itself," he gushes. "Photography is no longer the same after this work of yours..."

"Picasso and others then took off from Cezanne, and now I'm trying to take off from Picasso in an even more radical way," Hockney rejoins. He disdains the ignorant viewpoint of "people who think they know about art, or write for the Guardian."

Suitably chastened, I nonetheless feel that Hockney's ambitious claims suffer severely when placed against the actual photo-collages. The overlapping rectangular prints form a mosaic of sharp angles and unintegrated detail that soon irritates the eye. Hockney maintains that the joiners are "much closer to the way that we actually look at things" but the human eye is not faceted, and the only people who see like this are suffering from brain damage. Gazing at these jittery panoramas one see the world through the eyes of a concussed bumblebee rather than, as Hockney hopes, through the visionary lens of some future Rembrandt of the Rolleiflex.

As for the expanded element of time, there is no sense of when the separate photographs were taken, and the collages could equally have been shuffled together from cut-up copies of the same snapshot. A masterpiece of still photographs such as Cartier-Bresson's "The Informer", reproduced in the book, showing the revenge of concentration camp inmates, resonates with a richness of meanings that transcends the single image and the moment of time it records.

These resonances are missing from the photo-collages, which work, if at all, only as still lives or landscapes. Hockney himself gives the game away when he admits that his technique would be unsuitable for a serious subject like the tragic image of a napalmed child on a Vietnam highway, also reproduced.

I hope Hockney returns to his swimming-pool near Mulholland Drive, shuts his eyes to the city below and once again brings us the candied dreams of the mythic west.

[The Curious Sofa]

In the '90s, I was fortunate enough to see a stunning production of Turandot at the San Francisco Opera, for which Hockney designed the sets. They were absolutely gorgeous. I would sum it up as Dr. Caligari meets Argento's Suspiria.