Das Tagebuch Murnaus

Nash the Slash, a.k.a. Jeff Plewman, dead at 66
Bandaged musician a mainstay in Toronto music clubs during '70s and '80s
CBC News Posted: May 12, 2014 3:59 PM ET| Last Updated: May 12, 2014 5:07 PM ET

Jeff Plewman, the musician behind the experimental rock persona Nash the Slash and the band FM, has died at age 66.

Nash the Slash was a mainstay in Toronto live music clubs throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was known internationally after a world tour with Gary Numan and Iggy Pop and had opened up for the Who. Before performing as Nash the Slash, Plewman played in the prog-rock band FM in the 1970s.

Two of his longtime friends and colleagues confirmed Plewman's passing to CBC, though details are sparse.

Nash the Slash appeared on stage in a black tuxedo, top hat, dark sunglasses and wrapped in bandages. It would become his signature look. His bandaged appearance from 1979 onward prompted many questions about his mysterious identity.

He started the independent record label Cut-Throat Records, which he used to release his own music. Among his albums was Decomposing, which he claimed could be listened to at any speed, and Bedside Companion, which he said was the first record out of Toronto to use a drum machine.

His biggest hit was "Dead Man's Curve", a cover of a Jan and Dean song.

More recently, he played at Toronto's Pride Festival and toured up until 2012. In 1997 Cut-Throat released a CD compilation of Nash the Slash’s first two recordings entitled Blind Windows. In 1999 he released Thrash. In April 2001, Nash released his score to the silent film classic Nosferatu.

Plewman retired in 2012, bemoaning file-sharing online and encouraging artists to be more independent. "It's time to roll up the bandages," he wrote.

He will be remembered for his experimental ethos as well as his unusual stage presence.

"I refused to be slick and artificial," Plewman wrote of his own career.

There has not been word on how the musician died.

*******

I loved this guy's music and his weird persona.
I was a fan from the time that I started to get into music, over 30 years ago.
I would play one Nash cut every time I would DJ Circuit Breaker (which, by the way, is still going on after almost 3 1/2 years - sorry I have not been posting setlists here, it's all at http://circuitbreakerclub.org) and last night I played "Citizen" from his album And You Thought You Were Normal.

Paul Fussell died recently - I particularly enjoyed his books "BAD" and the collection of essays "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb", as well as his memoirs of his military service.

Brian Fawcett, a writer I want to like but who I am not sure would like me, put it well in his obit at dooneyscafe.com:

***
RIP Paul Fussell 1924-2012
June 4, 2012 by Brian Fawcett

The celebrity obit page in the Globe and Mail for June 4, 2012 has two entries. At the bottom, a four inch obit for Paul Fussell, who died May 23 at age 88. Fussell was a man who wrote two and maybe three great books during his life. One, The Great War and Modern Memory, is easily one of the five most important books written about the First World War, an analysis of the war’s effect on literature and on the writers who experienced it. Both its intellectual elan and its ability to draw in the realities—and the details—of combat are unique and forceful, and Fussell’s prose is a joy. His memoir of combat during the Second World War, Doing Battle, revealed him as a stunningly insightful chronicler of war at ground level, and short of Ernst Junger’s The Storm of Steel, might be the best book ever written on the subject. I’d argue that it was the best American book to come out of World War II, and not just because Fussell personally saw more raw combat than virtually any other American writer (as a 20 year lieutenant he was wounded while fighting in Alsace, and was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart). His third masterpiece was his late (2003) memoir, The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945, which is an elegy for the young men he fought with in France and Germany, a book at once tender-hearted and articulately angry about the waste of young lives he was witness to.

Fussell wasn’t just a war writer. He was a middle class Californian who wrote a biography of Samuel Johnson, several manuals on prosody, a number of hilariously witty volumes on the class system in America, and a dozen other books that display the astounding range of his interests. He was also, in the best sense, a “character”: irascible, chatty, indiscrete (both intellectually and personally) and a man who learned to wear his heart on his sleeve. Best of all he was a man whose intellectual wildness grew as he got older: he was lovable, socially terrifying, and permanently angry that the world wasn’t better than it was. I wish I’d known him personally, because he was one of those rare intellectuals who was interesting on any subject that gained his attention.

He’d have been angry to see the Globe’s obituary page, because the rest of it chronicled the life of a British-born Hollywood dickhead by the name of Richard Dawson, who died at 78 a few days after Fussell. Dawson’s main claim to fame was the daytime Emmy he was awarded in 1978 as a game show host. He hosted a pedestrian game show called Family Feud for nine years between 1976 and 1985, where he specialized in kissing his female contestants—about 20,000 of them in all, some of whom he groped on camera, and one of whom he married. His other accomplishments were a role in Hogan’s Heroes, and a decade of marriage to British breast celebrity, Diana Dors. He got 4/5ths of the Globe’s obituary page because he was on television, where he did nothing to make the world better or easier to understand. If television descends to the level some of us think it could, and begins to televise human executions and dismemberments, some executive will likely mourn the fact that Richard Dawson won’t be around to host it.

That’s a cruel epitaph, but it’s the sort of thing Paul Fussell would have thought, and found some better way to say.

574 w. June 4, 2012
***

Aww....

http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Gumby+creator+Clokey+dead/2428741/story.html

First noteworthy obit of 2010.
I enjoyed Gumby and Pokey, in small doses.

Over the weekend, J. G. Ballard succumbed to illness caused by prostate cancer. He was 78. He had been ill for several years, as he revealed at the end of his very last book, Miracles of Life.

JGB was a brilliant writer, a highly original thinker, my favourite author and an interesting man in his own right. No one saw the world just as he did, and he became, without most of the rest of that world knowing it, its unacknowledged prophet and psychic chronicler.

I read my first Ballard at age 13 - I saw a Penguin edition of The Terminal Beach, a collection of short stories, on a shelf in a dusty used bookstore in Sidney. I read them without completely understanding them at first, but there was this quality to the writing and the ideas that kept me coming back.

Since then, I have read everything that he wrote, with the exception of uncollected pieces that he did for newspapers and magazines. It's sad to think that there will be no more books or thoughts from him, ever.


THE site for things Ballardian: http://www.ballardian.com/ has a very moving personal tribute by Simon Sellars, and a collection of remembrances etc. by other authors. Here it is, I could not say it any better:

Goodbye, Jim…

As publisher of this site, my goal has always been to take J.G. Ballard as a philosopher, rather than simply a ‘novelist’. Sometimes this has truly angered fans and champions of his work, more often it has brought me into brilliant and inspiring contact with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and theorists who all see the world through that same Ballardian lens — and with Jim Ballard himself, who, along with his partner Claire Walsh, always remained supportive of the site.

Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination — of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.

Ballard embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard’s characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power.

This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard’s writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios are what I term ‘affirmative dystopias’, neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the ‘yes or no of the borderzone’, to use a phrase from his work.

Here, dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. He reinhabits the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a ’state of mind’.

To read and to understand Ballard, then, is to be gloriously, finally liberated.

To James Graham Ballard: thank you.

Links, etc. - there are hundreds of Ballard sites out there but here are a couple I stuck in, for want of anything better or having to look harder:

CBC's rather superficial obit, apparently cribbed from Wikipedia_: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2009/04/19/ballard-obit.html
[EDIT: a much better written appreciation of Ballard replaced this shortly afterwards: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2009/04/20/j-g-ballard-obituary.html]

Guardian article on JGB and pop music: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8008277.stm

And another reminiscence from V. Vale, co-founder of Re/Search of San Francisco which published a lot of Ballard miscellany (http://www.researchpubs.com/Blog/?p=163):

I particularly hate it when “rebels” die — there are already so few of them/us. Sometimes it seems like virtually everyone you meet these days in the world is a slave to the profit motive/capitalist imperative: “What’s the meaning of life?” “To make money!” J.G. Ballard, and another of my relatively recently deceased role models, W.S. Burroughs, both refused to prostitute their writing, and they both refused to shmooze and “network” merely to further their “careers.” Both had a hatred of bourgeois hypocrisy and phony politeness, while at the same time being deeply polite and courteous, almost to a fault …

But for now, let us think of ways to publicly mourn one of the greatest thinkers and poets of the past century. By some irony, “The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard” is reportedly soon to be published in the United States, complete with two additional stories not included in the U.K. edition. Short stories, more than novels, may appropriately suit the trend of the increasingly shorter attention span of the human populace, who demand more flash ads, tiny videos and music quotations as they read their two-minute, two-page articles on the Internet. I suggest that for the next month (or year), readers shut out everything else and read ONLY J.G. Ballard novels, short stories, essays, interviews and reviews. Your mind, language, and outlook are guaranteed to be permanently altered…

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” wrote William S. Burroughs. He also advised all of us to “Stay out of hospitals,” and “Avoid Doctors.” Well, even though I had been concerned about J.G. Ballard’s health after hearing two years ago that he had been diagnosed with “advanced” prostate cancer, I still felt a kind of unthinking complacency mixed with my concern: “Almost every humane male has prostate cancer when he dies; it acts very slowly and can take decades to kill a man.” To be honest, having seen him recently in October 2008, I really didn’t think he would die THIS SOON. And when I found out he had died — I had arrived home from a 9-hour bus trip today to hear the news on our answering machine — well, my first thought was, “There’s no thinker left alive that I can totally trust. They’re all dead.”

For the past two or more years Ballard had been undergoing state-of-the-art, high-tech treatment from a young doctor who reportedly was trying every new medical breakthrough remedy or procedure which promised “hope” for Ballard’s condition. Recently, however, Ballard had been rushed to a hospital, and after sustained care there had returned to the home to his longtime (40-plus years) companion, Claire Walsh. The latest word was that he had recently required around-the-clock care by visiting professional nurses, which sounded somewhat alarming. Still, I maintained calm. Now I wish I had tried to telephone him and talk one last time, even if just for a minute. I think I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83. Well, I was wrong. And now the world will miss his unique, witty, and sometimes acerbic commentaries on itself. We miss him and are grateful for his dark sense of humor and generous output.

– V. Vale, RE/Search founder back in 1977, San Francisco


I have that UK edition of his complete short stories and will start working through it. And I'm going to have a prostate exam. Let's all bend over for Uncle Jim! (well, the men, anyway)

One thing relatively few remembrances/comments I have read so far mention is his sense of humour and grim wit. I liked that in him; he was actually very funny, in his way.

Patrick McGoohan has died at age 80.

I of course remember him best in The Prisoner, one of the the most imaginative things that have ever been broadcast on TV (not eagerly awaiting the much-rumoured remake that will probably feature Keanu Reeves: "whoa... dude... I am not a number, um, I am a free man...").

I also remember him from Scanners, and Ice Station Zebra, and Kings and Desperate Men, a remarkable borefest remarkable only because it featured Margaret Trudeau's one and only screen appearance - her autobiography waxes long and tedious about the "chemistry" she says they shared.

But first of all was Dr. Christopher Syn/The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, made in 1962 for Disney! I thought this was great when I was a kid.

"SCAAARECROOOOW!!!"



{EDIT: Oh, and Ricardo Montalban died too. He was OK; I liked him in Battleground, one of the better movies made about the Battle of the Bulge.]

Yma Sumac has Passed On:
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2008/11/03/yma-sumac-obit.html

I first heard of Yma Sumac through the Re/Search book Incredibly Strange Music, and then heard some of her actual music on The Ernie Kovacs Record Album. I'm not a great fan of "lounge" music, but I have a small collection of "exotica" albums, and she's there.

Halloween was pretty quiet; a few more kids came to the door than last year. Heard hardly any fireworks, the police must be really cracking down on sellers as in previous years the firecrackers started two weeks before Halloween and went on for another week after. Saturday was Catalyst at the Bayanihan community centre; I was kind of tired but it was nice to hear some good music and see people I haven't seen in a long time. I talked to Casper who came in costume as Milan Fras from Laibach - we talked about the Laibach show I missed in Seattle in September (next time they come, in about three years, I should be able to see them - just too much going on right now). People kept asking me if I were in costume - I was, sort of, in my Chinese waiter's jacket, skull collar tabs and black trousers and boots - nothing fancy but I said I was the 12th assistant janitor on the Death Star, because no matter what job you have there you have a natty uniform.

Yes, as has been noted all over the Internet today, Gary Gygax has died.
Sure I remember him for D&D, I played a lot of it in my high school years, but I also remember him for his miniatures rules and board games. At one time or another I owned and/or played:

Cavaliers and Roundheads (English Civil War miniatures rules) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/25990
Chainmail (the "magic" appendix to this set of minis rules grew into D&D) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/8193
Dragon Chess (mostly unplayable 3-level mega-chess, in issue #100 of The Dragon) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/12776
Dungeon (board game for kids; still have this one) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1339
Tractics (WWII - modern armor miniatures rules - this one drove me spare with its clunky mechanics, but boy was it detailed) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3716

Dunkirk: Battle of France (seen this one, lusted to have it) http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/26519

And before there was The Dragon magazine, there were The Strategic Review and Little Wars magazines, which he edited and contributed to massively.

But as usual, The Onion has the last word:

http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/dungeons_amp_dragons_creator_dies

'Munsters' star Yvonne De Carlo dies
By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer


LOS ANGELES - Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popularity on TV's "The Munsters," has died. She was 84.

De Carlo died of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.

( Read more... )

So, the last living Munster is Butch Patrick (who also seems to have made the most money milking his childhood role).

Dudley Do-Right writer dies

Last Updated: Monday, December 18, 2006 | 11:56 AM ET
CBC Arts

Chris Hayward, a television writer who brought his off-beat sense of humour to the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV show and comedies such as Get Smart and Barney Miller, has died.

( Read more... )

This guy had some of the cleverest scripts, and certainly the concept guy behind The Munsters deserves to be remembered.

All of the good humour seems to be draining out of this world. I think it was Mort Sahl who started the practice of reading newspaper headlines to present truth as comedy, this is all we are left with now....

Grandpa Munster Al Lewis dead at 82

( Read more... )

[EDIT: It's not generally known, but Al Lewis was also a long-time radical and labour organizer. Read this transcript of an interview he did in 1997 with the "underground" paper The Shadow - very informative! http://flintultrasparc.livejournal.com/19492.html]