RIP

[Kobi]

Ralph Waite, who played the kind patriarch of a tight-knit rural Southern family on the TV series "The Waltons," has died, his manager said Thursday. He was 85.

Waite, a native of White Plains, N.Y., served in the U.S. Marines before earning a bachelor's degree from Bucknell University and a master's degree from Yale University Divinity School, according to a 2010 profile by The Desert Sun.

He became an ordained Presbyterian minister and then worked at a publishing house, the paper said, before falling under the spell of acting. Waite appeared on the stage before moving onto the big screen with roles in 1967's "Cool Hand Luke" and 1970's "Five Easy Pieces," in which he played the brother of Jack Nicholson's character.

Waite received an Emmy nomination for "The Waltons" and another for his performance in the ABC miniseries "Roots."

Waite appeared last year in episodes of the series "NCIS," in which he played the dad of star Mark Harmon's character. He also appeared in "Bones" and "Days of Our Lives."

[Kobi]

ATLANTA (AP) - Jim Fregosi, a former All-Star who won more than 1,000 games as a manager for four teams, died Friday after an apparent stroke. He was 71.

James Louis Fregosi was born in 1942 in San Francisco and starred in baseball, football basketball and track and field at Serra High School. He signed with the Boston Red Sox out of high school and went to the Angels in the 1960 expansion draft.

Fregosi was an infielder in the majors from 1961 to 1978, hitting .265 with 151 homers and 706 RBIs. His best seasons came with the Angels, where he was six-time All-Star as a shortstop. Fregosi left the Angels in a 1971 trade with the New York Mets that sent Nolan Ryan to California.

Fregosi later played for the Texas Rangers and Pittsburgh Pirates. He began his managing career at 36 with the Angels in April 1978 - two days after his final game as a player with the Pirates.

Fregosi managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the 1993 National League pennant and the 1979 California Angels to their first American League Western Division title. He also managed the Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays. In 15 seasons as a manager, he posted a 1,028-1,094 record.

Fregosi ended more than 50 years in baseball as a special assistant to Braves general manager Frank Wren.

---------


When I was a kid, I thought this guy was a hunk.

[Martina]

Rage Against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

It is difficult for me to write a farewell to Stuart Hall, my teacher, mentor, interlocutor and friend. He has been the most significant intellectual and political figure in my life for 45 years, and yet, in celebrating and mourning him, I do not wish to sanctify him. My grief is both deeply personal and intensely political. I had not thought to make it public, but I have been moved to write because of the appalling absence of any notice of his death in the U.S. mainstream press as well as the alternative media. What this says about the left in the U.S., I will leave to another time.

The facts are known: his Jamaican background; his role in the founding of the New Left and New Left Review, as well as CND; his early work on media and popular culture; his crucial contributions to and leadership of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and his continuing iconic status and creative efforts to develop cultural studies while at the Open University; his brilliant analyses of and opposition to the rise of new conservative and neoliberal formations (he coined the term and wrote the book on Thatcherism); his public visibility as an intellectual in the media, and his bodily presence as a political leader whenever and wherever he saw an opening; his vital contributions to debates around race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and difference; his long-term involvement with and support of numerous Black and global artists and collectives, including the Black Audio Film Collective, Autograph, Iniva and eventually, the house that Stuart built—Rivington Place.

But that is not Stuart’s story; it is only the Wikipedia entry. I want to tell a better story about the man, the work, the ideas, the practices, and the commitments. My story begins by recognizing that every single moment of Stuart’s career was about a commitment to relations and the new forms of intellectual and political work that commitment entailed. Key words like collaboration and conversation, and key elements like generosity and humility, are a tangible part of his legacy. One loses something important if we fail to recognize that the story cannot be written without the people with whom he worked--during his years in the New Left, at the Centre and the OU, at Marxism Today and Soundings (the journal he created with Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin), and at Rivington Place. And these institutions— and Stuart did believe in the institutional moment—were profoundly important as well, because they always involved an effort to find new ways of working, to forge new kinds of organization, new practices of work and governance—open, humble, collaborative and interdisciplinary.

It’s hard to explain Stuart’s influence—the admiration, respect and affection—to those who have never encountered him, or seriously followed his work. Let me tell two stories. In the early 1980s, I co-organized an event called Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. It began with four-weeks of classes, offered by some of the leading lights in Marxist theory. We brought Stuart over for this; it was not the first time he had been to the States, but it was perhaps the first time he was given such a highly visible national platform (close to a thousand attended from all over). At the beginning, everyone flocked to the famous U.S. academic stars; most of the people had never heard of Stuart or cultural studies. But word spread quickly, and the audience for his lectures grew rapidly. People drove down to Champaign-Urbana (not a destination of choice you understand), often traveling for hours, just to listen to him. They saw and heard something—special. Yes, it was the ideas and the arguments, and the interweaving of theory, empirics and politics, but it was more. As so many people told me, they had never met an academic like this before—humble, generous, passionate, someone who treated everyone with equal respect and listened to what they had to say, someone who believed ideas mattered, because of our responsibility as intellectuals to people and the world. Someone who refused to play the role of star!

Some years later, Stuart gave a keynote address to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, not a particularly hospitable environment. But by then, his reputation in the discipline (perhaps the first in the U.S. to grudgingly make a space for cultural studies) had spread and the hall was packed with people who wanted to see this increasingly influential British intellectual. Many were surprised to learn that he was Black. He brilliantly demolished the scientific and liberal underpinnings that dominated communication studies and then he invited—literally invited—people to join him in taking up the intellectual responsibility of addressing the injustices of the world and the role—complicated, contradictory and often nuanced—that communication (and the academy) continued to play in perpetuating such conditions. At the end, one of my friends—a quantoid and therefore not someone I had expected to like the talk—came up and said, “I would have followed Stuart if he had asked us to march on city hall or the local media.” Charisma? Yes, but not exactly. Is there such a thing as “earned” charisma?

Many of the obituaries have described Stuart as the leading British intellectual (academic and public) of culture, society and politics, of cultural theory, and of the politics of the everyday and of ordinary lives. He was that—but if one searches the web for responses to his death, two things stand out: first, they come from all corners of the globe; and second, they celebrate so much more than his ideas and publications. It is hard to place Stuart geographically. He was born in Jamaica but as he repeatedly said, he never went home—that is the life that he chose not to lead. He lived his life in Britain and devoted himself to its culture and politics, but as he repeatedly said, he never felt completely at home there. He wrote about Britain (almost entirely) but he offered something much more resonant. Yes, he was certainly one of the most important British intellectuals of the past sixty years, but he was also, I fervently believe, one of the most important and influential intellectuals in the world during those decades as well.

Stuart believed that everything is relational, that things are what they are only in relations. As a result, he was a contextualist—committed to studying contexts, to thinking contextually, and to refusing any universal claims. That is why he connected so strongly with Marx, with Gramsci, with my other beloved teacher James Carey—to whom Stuart sent me—and ultimately with Foucault. His brand of contextualism—conjuncturalism—sees contexts as complex relations of multiple forces, determinations and contradictions). For Stuart, this defined cultural studies. He knew the world was complicated, contingent and changing--too much for any one person, or any one theory, or any one political stake, or any one discipline. Everything followed from this. Intellectual and political work was an ongoing, endless conversation; one’s theoretical and political work had to keep moving as the contexts changed, if one wanted to understand and intervene into the processes of power that determined the future. They required constant vigilance, self-reflection and humility, for what worked (theoretically and politically) in one context might not work in another. One had to be wiling to question one’s theoretical (and I might add political) assumptions as one confronted the demands of concrete realities and people’s lives.

He believed that work always had to be particular, addressing the specific problems posed by the conjuncture. Despite all his important theoretical efforts, Stuart was not a philosopher, and certainly not the founder of a philosophical paradigm. He loved theory, but his work was never about theory; it was always about trying to understand and change the realities and possibilities of how people might live together in the world. He constantly distanced himself from the attempt to substitute theory for the more difficult work of cultural studies, and he was explicitly critical of the tendency (decidedly strong in the U.S. academy) to fetishize theory—theory gone mad in a world of capitalism gone mad. He did not offer abstract theories that could travel anywhere, for while he thought that theories were absolutely vital, they had to be held to what he once called “the discipline of the conjuncture.” He was too concerned with using theory strategically to understand and intervene into conjunctures that seemed to be pushing the possibility of a more humane world further and further away.

And he believed that work had to embrace the complexities rather than avoid or escape them. He fought against any reduction—anything that said it is all about just one thing in the end—capitalism, most commonly. Such simplifications simply deny the complexity of the world; they do not help us better understand what’s going on, or open up its possibilities. So he refused as well to understand history in simple binary terms: before and after, as if history we made through moments of rupture, absolute breaks with the past. For Stuart, the complexity of history was always a balance of the old and the new. History is always changing and while new elements may enter into the mix, much of what is too often assumed to be new is the reappearance (perhaps in a new rearticulated guise) of the old.

The contingency of the world, the fact that it is continuously being made, meant that there are, as he so often put it, no guarantees in history. The world is not destined to be what it is or to become what one fears (or hopes). Relations are never fixed once and for all, and their modifications are never given in advance. This grounded, at least until recently, his unstoppable optimism (“optimism of the spirit, pessimism of the intellect” as he repeatedly reminded us). And he knew, deep down in his soul, that culture—knowledge, ideas, art, everyday life, what he often called “the popular”—mattered. He had an extraordinary respect for the ordinary stuff of life, and for people (although he never hesitated to attack those who were making the world even worse or who were more committed to their own certainties than to contingent struggle). He refused to think of people as dupes, incapable of understanding the choices they faced and those they made. There is always the possibility of affecting the outcome, of struggle, if one starts where people are—where they may be simply struggling to live lives of minimal comfort and dignity—and move them even as one moves with them. He put his faith in people and ideas and culture—and he committed his life and work to making the world better.

Stuart did not teach us what the questions were and certainly not provide the answers. He taught us how to think relationally and contexually, and therefore how to ask questions. He taught us how to think and even live with complexity and difference. He refused the all too easy binaries that theory and politics throw in our way—he described himself as a theoretical anti-humanist and a political humanist. He sought neither a compromise nor a dialectic synthesis, but ways of navigating the contradictions and complexities rather than redistributing them into competing camps, because that was what a commitment to change the world required. Relations! Context! Complexity! Contingency! He inspired many of us with another vision of the intellectual life.

When I think of Stuart, I think of an expanding rich tapestry of relations, not of followers and acolytes, but of friends, students, colleagues, interlocutors, participants in various conversations, and anyone willing to listen, talk and engage. Stuart Hall was more than an intellectual, a public advocate for ideas, a champion of equality and justice, and an activist. He was also a teacher and a mentor to many people, in many different ways, at many different distances from his immediate presence. He talked with anyone and everyone, and treated them as if they had as much to teach him as he had to teach them.

I imagine Stuart as a worldly Doctor Who, a charismatic figure with a seriousness of purpose and a wonderful sense of style and humor, who changes not only the way people think but often, their lives as well. (I think Stuart would appreciate the popular culture metaphor, because its ordinariness prevents it from sounding too grandiose.) Stuart could not regenerate (what I would give if he could) but he did appear differently to different people. I was always surprised by what people could see in Stuart, and how generous he could be with people whom he thought had clearly missed something essential in his argument. At the same time, to be honest, I occasionally suffered his anger when he thought I had missed the point. I am sure others did as well. And like Doctor Who, the geography of his relations was heterogeneous, with many different intensities and timbres, a multiplicity of conversations, each person taking up, changing and extending the conversation in so many different places and directions.

I met Stuart when I came to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to escape the nightmares of Vietnam and the boring banalities of academic habits. Secretly, I was hoping to find a way to connect my three passions: a love of ideas; a commitment to political change; and a devotion to popular culture. Stuart helped me see how to weave them together into my own tapestry, called cultural studies. He was the first to admit that this was more a project than a finished product, as it had to be; it was the effort to forge a new way of being political and intellectual that set me on my own path. I think of my whole life as a political intellectual as a continuous effort to pursue that project, and to live up to his efforts. I have tried to champion that project, to make it visible and to fight for its specificity and value. Neither of us believed it to be the only way to be a political intellectual, but we were both sure that it offered something worth pursuing.

Now, it is a time to grieve—I doubt that I will ever stop. I remember the times we spent together, the lectures and discussions at the Centre, the conversations we had in person and by phone (the latest concerned the specificity of conjunctural analysis, the nature of affect, and the return of postmodernist theories), his curiosity, warmth and gentleness, his rich voice and exuberant laugh, and the people he introduced me to as I was beginning—many of whom have become my intellectual life blood and my closest friends. And because it is all about relationality, I inevitably think about all that he and his family (Catherine, Becky and Jess) have given me. I will always remember the love they expressed when they came into church for my wedding and later, when Stuart came to my son’s christening as his godfather. And it is a time for contemplation, and for affirming the community of close friends and unknown colleagues who mourn his loss, and know that we are unlikely to ever be able to fill the space that his life created. It is a time to continue the work, and take up the ongoing and expansive conversations that Stuart enlivened. It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories make bad politics. That is my homage to Stuart.



Gratefully offered,

Larry Grossberg

[Breathless]

Chris Jones

2:35 p.m. CST, February 14, 2014



Shirley Temple Black, who died Monday, was, as Shirley Temple, the biggest child star of them all. In the last two years of her contract with 20th Century Fox in the late 1930s, she was making $250,000 a picture, and she made four movies a year for that studio. In 1958, the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, shrewdly observing the relatively low top income tax rates when Temple was at her peak in the late 1930s and her parents' careful management of her trust fund, included her on a very short list of Hollywood's all-time richest women.

"Considering she's been working since she was a child of 4," Hopper wrote. "She must have accumulated a monumental pile."

For Temple did not occupy some cable niche on a Disney Channel sitcom. With her effervescent personality, healthy curls and perfect white teeth, not to mention her uncommon ability to mimic the doings of adult women stars, she was a mainstream star with a fan base that ranged from kids to middle-aged men. And she was an enthusiastic endorser, forever clutching myriad dolls in her own image and putting her face on everything from cola to soap, bringing in thousands a day. Her income in 1938 was said to be the seventh highest in the United States. She was bigger than Rin Tin Tin.



One need only browse this newspaper's archive to understand the wattage of Temple's stardom between about 1934 and 1939:

"Shirley Temple Chief Interest in This Movie: 'Now and Forever' Not Much in Way of Story."

"Shirley Temple Pins Own Police Badge on G-Man Hoover."

"Shirley Temple Won't Help in Vote Campaign."

"Studio Ready to Compromise Today on Shirley Temple's Pay"

In 1938, when Temple was 9 and at the peak of her fame, she came to Chicago (her mother was born on Adams Street) on a press tour, replete with her family, a huge entourage of assistants and the protection of two of Hoover's G-Men — personally assigned by the man himself — ready to stand guard outside the Edgewater Hotel. She upbraided photographers for their lack of imagination, telling them "everyone's getting the same shot," with "good-natured severity" and insisting that "when I'm talkin', you oughtn't to shoot."

Incredibly, Temple's handlers had the child posing on a window ledge, waving her feet while assuring everyone she would not fall. "Is this your idea of a vacation?" asked one veteran Tribune reporter, incredulous at the circus. "Oh yeah," was Temple's reply, her legs dangling over the edge. "I love to pose."

And then it all came to an end. Temple did not begin to twerk like Miley Cyrus, nor did she appear naked in German Vogue. She did not, like Britney Spears, alumna of "The Mickey Mouse Club," don a short Catholic schoolgirl skirt and cavort around arenas in sexualized poses. She did not, like Vanessa Hudgens, appear in an edgy movie like "Spring Breakers," wherein college students partake of a beach bacchanal. She did not even do the equivalent of those things for her own era. To what extent Temple's departure from Hollywood was her own decision, and to what degree it was forced upon her due to her audience disappearing as fast she combed out her curls, is open to question. And it's not that Temple completely disappeared. She had a modest TV career. She never totally walked away.

But it seems reasonable to conclude that Temple, having made her "monumental pile," did not make any attempt to change her identity into the opposite of herself.

It would be a simplification to say that her legacy is without adult complexity. Some critics have observed this week that Temple, who looks like a miniature woman on-screen, was always objectified in complex ways. Still, in the early 1940s, when Temple would have needed a redo that would have involved the repudiation of the image she'd cultivated, the great minds at the powerful talent agencies were less sophisticated at such reinventions, which require not only consent from multiple parties (and the audience) but also a great deal of careful planning.

By both those who paid her and those who watched her, Temple was seen as having one image, strange but singular.

Did Temple's relative lack of post-adolescent beauty or the absence of a great adult voice save her from further exploitation? Perhaps. Did her early start and incomparable dominance of her industry mean there was just nothing left to crave in the Hollywood candy store? It seems that way. Was she just too famous to be insecure about her own demise? Maybe. Whatever. It's impossible not to see this one message of her extraordinary life, walking away just as she was rather than succumbing to the urge to twerk.

Temple, by many accounts, was a happy teen and found a more normal adult life. In 1960, she told this newspaper — which headlined a story about her afterlife "Can This Be Our Shirley?" — that she was happy in her "overflowing life."

"It is because I am Mrs. Charles Alden Black," she said, "housewife and mother of three happy and healthy children. Not because I was Shirley Temple."

Of course, the real story here is that Temple did not stay merely Mrs. Charles Alden Black, (her husband famously claimed never to have seen one of his wife's movies when he married her), but she became Richard M. Nixon's U.S. ambassador to Ghana (from 1974-76) and then George H.W. Bush's ambassador to what was then Czechoslovakia (1989). By many accounts, she was a diplomat who batted away the low expectations of less famous denizens of the State Department and enjoyed widespread respect. She was an influential spokesman for many causes. Her past fame was fascinating abroad.

In her 1988 autobiography, Temple wrote that her father lost most of her movie fortune through poor business deals. By then, she had other money.

No other could be quite like Shirley Temple. But people underestimate the future use of degrees and careers in the arts: President Barack Obama spoke disparagingly, albeit lightly so, of degrees in art history in a recent speech about the utility of a college education. He's wrong about that. And you only have to read the account of how the 9-year-old Temple cajoled and charmed this newspaper's reporters on that day in 1939, partly helping them and partly helping herself. That's a pretty good snapshot of a diplomat's job.

Temple knew all about the power of celebrity when few did. She learned how to give her audience what it wanted and yet turn that into a springboard. She knew when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em and, perhaps most crucially of all, she understood that, rather than just changing your suit, it's always better to come back carrying a whole new deck.

[Kobi]

NTA BARBARA, California (AP) — Mary Grace Canfield, a veteran character actress who played handywoman Ralph Monroe on the television show "Green Acres," has died. She was 89.

Canfield had appearances on a number of TV shows during a four-decade career, including "General Hospital" and "The Hathaways." She was Harriet Kravitz on four episodes of the 1960s series "Bewitched."

But she was best known for her role of Ralph Monroe in some 40 episodes of "Green Acres," which ran from 1965 to 1971.

Monroe greeted folks in the town of Hootersville with a cheery "howdy doody," wore painters' overalls and was forever working on the Douglas family's bedroom with her brother, Alf.

[Hollylane]

Christopher Malcolm died Saturday at age 67 ... his death was first confirmed by his daughter on Twitter.

Malcolm originated the role of Brad in 1973 in the London production of RHS ... playing the newlywed groom who takes refuge with his wife Janet in the home of sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

The stage show was turned into a film in 1975 -- but without Malcolm -- the role of Brad was played by Barry Bostwick.

Malcolm was an accomplished Shakespearean actor who also appeared as starfighter pilot Zev Senesca in "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back" ... and had numerous directing and producing credits.

Cause of death is unknown.

[Hollylane]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Ralph Waite, who played the kind patriarch of a tight-knit rural Southern family on the TV series "The Waltons," has died, his manager said Thursday. He was 85.

Waite, a native of White Plains, N.Y., served in the U.S. Marines before earning a bachelor's degree from Bucknell University and a master's degree from Yale University Divinity School, according to a 2010 profile by The Desert Sun.

He became an ordained Presbyterian minister and then worked at a publishing house, the paper said, before falling under the spell of acting. Waite appeared on the stage before moving onto the big screen with roles in 1967's "Cool Hand Luke" and 1970's "Five Easy Pieces," in which he played the brother of Jack Nicholson's character.

Waite received an Emmy nomination for "The Waltons" and another for his performance in the ABC miniseries "Roots."

Waite appeared last year in episodes of the series "NCIS," in which he played the dad of star Mark Harmon's character. He also appeared in "Bones" and "Days of Our Lives."

This one really made me sad...

[Hollylane]

Maria von Trapp, last member of Sound of Music family, dies.

[Hollylane]

Ghostbusters star Harold Ramis dies aged 69



Ramis (right) found fame in 1984's Ghostbusters

[Jet]

Met Ralph Waite in Palm Springs in 1993 at restaurant called Louise's Pantry. Nice man. He gave me his autograph for a friend of mine to raise money at an auction for disabled kids.

[Kobi]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jim Lange, the first host of the popular game show "The Dating Game," has died at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 81.

Later, after "The Dating Game" brought him national recognition, he also hosted the game shows "Hollywood Connection," ''$100,000 Name That Tune" and "The New Newlywed Game."

Lange also worked as a disc jockey for decades in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and upon his retirement from broadcasting in 2005, he was the morning DJ for KABL-FM, which specializes in playing classics from the Big Band era to the 1970s.

Memories.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...-benn-obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...twing-outsider