After Forty Years in the Desert…
Category: Memoriam
…and Sixty-Four on the Beach.
The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
“Elvis was not first; I was the first son of a gun out here, me and Chuck Berry. And I’m very sick of the lie…You know, we are over that black-and-white crap, and that was all the reason Elvis got the appreciation that he did. I’m the dude that he copied, and I’m not even mentioned…I’ve been out here for 50 years, man, and I haven’t ever seen a royalty check.” Bo Diddley, 1928-2008.
The Way He Was.
Into the Mytht.
Robert Asprin, author of the Myth Adventures and Phule’s Company series and a staple of my early fantasy reading, 1946-2008. (By way of Return of the Reluctant.)
To the Promised Land.
“‘The world is a tough place,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You’re never going to get out of it alive.‘” A damn dirty ape no longer, Charlton Heston, 1923-2008. (Between this and Buckley, it’s been a bad year so far for the patriarchs of conservatism.)
Update: Hmmm. After reading up on him further, it seems Heston (nee John Carter!) was a late-comer to the conservative movement, and even to the NRA philosophy: “In his earlier years, Heston was a liberal Democrat, campaigning for Presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. A civil rights activist, he accompanied Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights march held in Washington, D.C. in 1963…In 1968, following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Heston…called for public support for President Johnson’s Gun Control Act of 1968…He was also an opponent of McCarthyism and racial segregation, which he saw as only helping the cause of Communism worldwide. He opposed the Vietnam War and considered Richard Nixon a disaster for America. He turned down John Wayne’s offer of a role in The Alamo, because the film was a right-wing allegory for the Cold War.“
A Survivor Finds Peace.
Death of a Gunfighter.
“I know I’ve made kind of a half-assed career out of violence, but I abhor violence. I am an ardent supporter of gun control. It seems incredible to me that we are the only civilized nation that does not put some effective control on guns.” Richard Widmark, 1914-2008.
A Man for All Seasons.
“Sir John Gielgud admired Mr. Scofield’s stillness and sense of mystery, describing him as ‘a sphinx with a secret.’ Peter Hall, who directed Mr. Scofield’s acclaimed Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus’ in London in 1979, said that as a young man Mr. Scofield brought ‘a sulfurous passion, an entirely new note’ to the stage, and that there was always a tremendous tension beneath the surface, ‘like a volcano erupting.‘” Paul Scofield, 1922-2008.
