Some sad news for those of us who grew up reading the hugely popular Dragonriders of Pern series: The Cambridge-born author of those beloved books, Anne McCaffrey, passed away earlier this week at her home in Ireland after suffering a stroke. She was 85. The first woman to win both a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award for fiction, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction, McCaffrey was a pioneer of sorts, blending the sci-fi and fantasy genres and featuring both male and female protagonists in her work. Her 1978 book The White Dragon (which completed the original Dragonriders trilogy) was the first hardcover science-fiction novel penned by a woman to appear on The New York Times Best Seller list.
“Writing has been so much a part of my life that I’m really quite annoyed that I can’t do as much as I used to,” the prolific author told Locus Magazine in a 2004 interview. “But I have nine series, for godsakes, give me a break! I’m 78, I’m on my pension in Ireland, and all that good stuff. I have my good days and my bad days, but I don’t have as much energy as I used to back when I was young and foolish and didn’t count the cost — and it takes a lot — to write.” Fortunately for all of us, McCaffrey’s career showed women everywhere that there was a place for them in the world of science fiction — both as readers and writers. [via LAT]
The Associated Press reports that Bil Keane, whose timeless, one-panel Family Circus comics ran in newspapers for more than half a century, died of congestive heart failure yesterday at age 89.
“I never thought about a philosophy for the strip — it developed gradually,” Keane explained in a 1998 interview. “I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that’s happened in the strip has happened to me. That’s why I have all this white hair at 39 years old.” Surprisingly, his ultimate goal as a cartoonist wasn’t to make people laugh. Rather, as he once said, “I would rather have the readers react with a warm smile, a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat as they recall doing the same things in their own families.”
In recent years, Keane — who as a young man decided to drop the second “L” from his first name “just to be different” — was assisted by his youngest son, Jeff, who would ink the comics after his father came up with the concept. It’s unclear now whether Family Circus will live on without its original creator, but considering that the beloved strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers nationwide, there’s certainly still an audience for it. As Keane himself once said, explaining its longevity, “It’s reassuring, I think, to the American public to see the same family.”
In shocking and sad news, Back to Black singer Amy Winehouse was found dead at 4pm today in her London home. She was 27. There are currently no details as to the cause of her passing, though we imagine these will become available as the story develops. Though she struggled in recent years with health issues, drug addiction and alcohol abuse, Winehouse was an insanely talented singer and songwriter, credited by many for her role in the reemergence of British soul and R&B into the mainstream, as well as the increased popularity of female singer/songwriters on the world stage.
[via the Daily Mail]
The AP reports that Cy Twombly, an American painter and sculptor famed for his large-scale scribbles and doodles, has died in a hospital in Rome at the age of 83. The polarizing artist, who emerged alongside his friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as an important figure in New York’s 1950s art scene, created abstract work that defied classification or theorizing by critics and elicited a primal response from the viewer. As Lee Siegel at Slate once wrote of Twombly’s images, which were often inspired by mythology, poetry, and history, “They are not just products of the imagination; they do not exist as correlatives to ideas, let alone to things. Done in pencil and crayon, Twombly’s trademark images capture the transient, universal sign of distraction: the doodle. Twombly inverts both Pollock’s and LeWitt’s seriousness. He does not make art. He makes pre-art.” In 2008, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones referred to Twombly as “the thinking person’s Banksy,” and called his career retrospective at the Tate Modern “a victory march by the greatest artist alive.” Find a small sample of the beloved artist’s work after the jump.
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Emmy-winning TV writer Leonard Stern, who worked on classic shows like The Honeymooners and Get Smart — but is perhaps best known as the creator of Mad Libs — has died at the age of 88.
Stern came up with the idea for the fill-in-the-blank books while writing a scene for The Honeymooners. “I was trying to find the right word to describe the nose of Ralph Kramden’s new boss,” he told Publishers Weekly in a 2008 interview. “So I asked Roger [Price] for an idea for an adjective and before I could tell him what it was describing, he threw out ‘clumsy’ and ‘naked.’ We both started laughing. We sat down and wrote a bunch of stories with blanks in them. That night we took them to a cocktail party and they were a great success.”
Initially, due to concern over whether what he was pitching was technically a book or a game, Stern’s concept was turned down by every publisher in the New York area, so he decided to self-publish 14,000 copies with Price’s help. In 2008, fifty years after this mass rejection, more than 110 million copies of the popular books had reportedly been sold. As Stern once said, “It just proves how important rejection is if you want to get a good start.”
Veteran character actor Len Lesser, probably best known for playing Jerry’s greetings-obsessed Uncle Leo on Seinfeld, died yesterday at the age of 88 after suffering complications from pneumonia. “He’s the kind of guy who is a total nuisance at times and the kind of guy you avoid,” Lesser once explained in a 1998 interview with the LA Times. “He’s a very expansive character, and that has an attraction to it.” The scene stealing Leo (we’re never told his last name) was also a close talker, an extremely proud father, and a part-time shoplifter. Celebrate the man that Jerry once avoided saying “hello” to on the street (the horror!), by clicking through for some of our favorite Uncle Leo moments.
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New York-based art pioneer Dennis Oppenheim died over the weekend at the age of 72; known for a large body of work that spanned the Land Art, Body Art, and Conceptual Art movements, and then later, his “machine works,” Oppenheim was constantly innovating and refused to allow himself to be pigeonholed. “I have never been able to be what they call a signature artist,” Artinfo quotes him as saying. “Most of my work comes from ideas. I can usually do only a few versions of each idea. Land Art and Body Art were particularly strong concepts which allowed for a lot of permutations. But nevertheless, I found myself wanting to move onward into something else.” We look at some of his most recent pieces — the large-scale, often controversial public artworks that dominated the latter part of his career — after the jump.
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While it has yet to be confirmed by a major news outlet, TMZ is reporting that actor Gary Coleman has died at the age of 42. Following a fall in his home on Wednesday, Coleman suffered a serious brain hemorrhage, and had been on life support in an intensive care unit at a Utah hospital.
Coleman broke into acting in the late ’70s/early ’80s as Arnold Jackson on Diff’rent Strokes, where his catchphrase “What’cu Talkin Bout Willis” made him into a household name. A congenital kidney disease, which slowed his growth in childhood, resulted in both his small stature (4’8″), two kidney transplants, and daily dialysis; earlier this year he suffered from an unexplained seizure on the set of The Insider. He is survived by his wife Shannon Price.
Update: The Utah Valley Regional Medical Center has confirmed Coleman’s death.
In their obituary for artist Dustin Shuler, who died earlier this month, the New York Times refers to him as a sculptor known for “known for impaling things, flattening things and putting things on top of other things.” Which sounds unremarkable if you’re not aware that said “things” were cars, resulting in large-scale pieces of roadside art that dotted hotels and shopping centers around the country. Shuler’s work was seen by many as a form of social commentary, but as he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1996: “There’s no message. I go by gut feeling.”
You probably recognize his most famous piece, Spindle, which cameoed as the “Car Kabob” in the Wayne’s World movies; it was demolished a few years ago to make way for a Walgreens store. Click through to explore more of Shuler’s work.
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According to Billboard, Bob Mercer, the British music industry veteran responsible for the “NOW That’s What I Call Music” phenomenon (aka, the way my mom kept up with “the hits” for over a decade now), has died at the age of 65. It should be noted that beyond launching the NOW series, Mercer also signed artists at EMI including Queen, Kate Bush, Marc Bolan and Olivia Newton-John in the ’70s, got pissed when the label dropped the Sex Pistols, and briefly managed Paul McCartney.
But we’re here to eulogize NOW. After the jump, prepare to rock out to our “NOW That’s What I Call Music” Megamix — a best of compilation of all 33 best of compilations.
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