Culture
Chantal Akerman
June 6, 1950 – Oct. 5, 2015
Belgian film director Chantal Akerman died, by her own hand, on Oct. 5. She was 65. In her work, she explored the routines of daily life and thoroughly dismantled them. Her first film, “Saute ma ville” (1971), in which she starred, featured a young woman playfully trashing the kitchen of her small apartment before setting a fire, turning on her stove and laying her head on the burner. Her most famous film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975) is a kind of expansion of her first. Running in excess of three hours, “Jeanne Dielman” centers on the largely bland life of a Belgian housewife who happens to be prostituting herself. The film ends with her stabbing a john.
Influenced by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Akerman’s work is often mentioned alongside that of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol. She incorporated the personal rituals, surreal comedy, composed frames and long takes of her influences into her own aesthetic. Her last film, “No Home Movie,” was released this year. It includes a series of extended interviews with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, in which they discuss the older woman's inability to talk about her experience in Auschwitz. Akerman did not recover from the emotional toll of making the film, or her mother’s subsequent death. “I think if I knew I was going to do this,” she told The New York Times about her last film, “I wouldn’t have dared to do it.”
Benedict Anderson
Oct. 26, 1936 – Dec. 13, 2015
Benedict Anderson, a scholar of nationalism, spoke of nations as “imagined communities,” born of language, technology and capitalism. Without discounting the negative effects of nationalism, he understood the nation to have been constructed in part to inspire love — occasionally to the point of self-sacrifice — and to form social solidarity. He is best known for “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism” (1983), a foundational work in his field.
Born in China to British parents, Anderson didn’t appear to belong to any nation. He was, as described by The New Republic, “a peripatetic child of the British Empire.” He lived variously in the U.S., Ireland and Indonesia. A master of language, he could tell jokes in Javanese and claimed to often think in Indonesian. “Imagined Communities” grew out of his study of Asian communist regimes. He was a professor emeritus of international studies, government and Asian studies at Cornell University. Anderson died in December at 79.
Marcia Brown
July 13, 1918 – April 28, 2015
“We need the stranger to understand ourselves,” children’s book author and illustrator Marcia Brown once said. “You suddenly see yourself as others see you. In a way, that’s been valuable — sometimes gratifying, sometimes not.” She was one of only two artists to win the Caldecott Medal (presented by the American Library Association for the year’s best children’s book illustrations) three times. She was a runner-up an additional six times. Her Caldecott-winning books were “Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper” (1955), “Once a Mouse” (1962) and “Shadow” (1983).
Her career was prolific. When not writing her own books she was often illustrating someone else’s. “I think a good story is a good story,” she once said in an interview. “If you could write it yourself, fine. If you can’t, you find a good story that you relate to and put all you have into it.” Brown died in April at the age of 96.
Guy Carawan
July 27, 1927 – May 2, 2015
“We Will Overcome” was considered a good up-tempo foot stomper when sung by Alabama union workers in 1908. When it was taught to folk legend Pete Seeger decades later, he substituted “shall” for “will” and published it in a 1948 issue of “The People’s Song Bulletin.” Ten years after that, Guy Carawan, a teacher at what was then called the Highland Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, presented the song to students and arranged for it to be sung at a much slower tempo. “And then at a certain point, those young singers, who knew a lot of a cappella styles, said, Lay that guitar down, boy,” he later told NPR. “We can do the song better.”
Over the following years, “We Shall Overcome” would become part of the national consciousness; it represented a powerful combination of beauty, perseverance and hope. The song was sung by Joan Baez on the National Mall. It was invoked by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It was sung by thousands of civil rights marchers as they risked opposition and injury. Over the years, Carawan continued to record dozens of albums and document traditional forms of music. He died in his home in New Market in May at age 87.
Carol Doda
Aug. 29, 1937 – Nov. 9, 2015
In 1964 dancer Carol Doda changed the world when she performed topless in San Francisco during the Republican National Convention. By that point, she was already making headlines: In her act at the local Condor Club, she not only danced on top of a piano but did so while the instrument was being lowered from the ceiling. Within a year, she bolstered another trend: silicone breast implants.
Doda, who also worked as a singer and television host and owned a lingerie store, was beloved in the Bay Area. She was remembered by one friend as “a combination of Joan Rivers, Marilyn Monroe and Mother Theresa.” She died in November at 78 of complications related to kidney failure.
Saeed Jaffrey
Jan. 8, 1929 – Nov. 14, 2015
As a young man headed for a career in civil service in the late 1940s, Saeed Jaffrey heard that All-India Radio was looking for English-speaking announcers. He applied, was accepted and soon was writing scripts for stories and one-act plays, creating dozens of characters along the way that he would then bring to life. In 1956 he was given a Fulbright scholarship to study acting in the United States. By the time of his death at 86, he had made more than 180 films, among them “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975), “Gandhi” (1982), “A Passage to India” (1984) and “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985). He infused each part with his charm, marvelous speaking voice and commitment to acting.
Jaffrey was born in northern India in 1929 and showed an early interest in movies. “My brother and I would put the clock in the dining room forward by an hour,” he said in an interview, “and when it was 8 o’clock but the clock said 9 o’clock, we would say, ‘We’re so hungry. Can’t we eat now?’ Then we would yawn and go to our bedroom, put the pillows underneath the quilts and bugger off to see all the wonderful films the cinemas were showing … We would see 90 films in six months, and that would be my education in film and acting.” Jaffrey was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1995. He died in November.
Albert Evans
Dec. 29, 1968 – June 22, 2015
New York City Ballet dancer Albert Evans died suddenly in June of an undisclosed illness. He was 46. Awarded a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet in 1986, he was given leading roles soon after joining the New York City Ballet in 1988.
“Albert always brought warmth, hospitality, enthusiasm, humor to any situation,” wrote friend and choreographer Justin Peck. “This loss feels particularly surreal and jarring to me, being as Albert was a close collaborator on all the ballets I’ve made at New York City Ballet. He had an ability to balance out the room and had an eye for detail like no other.”
Evans was one of only two African-American principal dancers in the history of the New York City Ballet, a position he was awarded in 1995. He retired in 2010 after a distinguished career dancing in classical and modern works, including some choreographed specifically for his generous, quiet and powerful style.
Frances Oldham Kelsey
July 24, 1914 – Aug. 7, 2015
When Frances Oldham Kelsey began working for the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, she was one of only 11 doctors on staff. At that time, the FDA was tasked with proving that a drug was unsafe, rather than the other way around. During her first month, she was assigned to assess thalidomide, a drug prescribed in Europe for morning sickness and insomnia. She had only two months to determine whether it should be sold in the U.S.
“If we had no objection or if we forgot that the 60 days had elapsed,” she remembered, “the drug automatically became approved, and the company could put it on the market.” Because Kelsey was unable to get reliable data to support the manufacturer’s dazzling claims, she blocked the use of the drug in the United States. Thalidomide was subsequently proven to have induced terrible birth impairments and deformities that affected thousands of infants around the world.
John F. Kennedy awarded Kelsey with the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962. She continued working at the FDA, improving pharmaceutical oversight protocols, until her retirement, at the age of 90, in 2005. She died in August at age 101.
Akiyuki Nosaka
Oct. 10, 1930 – Dec. 9, 2015
While the Japanese animation Studio Ghibli is rightly known for its cinematic masterpieces directed by Hayao Miyazaki, including “Spirited Away” (2001) and “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), it produced at least one other animated film of distinction, “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988). A work of exceeding beauty and sadness, “Fireflies” chronicles the struggle of a young brother and sister to survive in the days after Japan’s surrender in World War II, and is based on the 1967 novel of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. The work was largely autobiographical: Nosaka lost his father and two sisters in the war. “There are many things that I just couldn't get myself to write into the story,” he said in an interview prior to the film’s release.
In 1967, Nasoka received the Naoki Prize, Japan's highest literary award, for "Fireflies" and other collected writings. His novel “The Pornographers” (which was once described as “good-naturedly smutty") is also available in English, and in 1966 it was turned into a film by Shohei Imamura. In addition to being a novelist, Nosaka was a lyricist, singer, columnist, and in 1974, he was elected to Japan's House of Councillors. His slogan as a candidate was, “I never want to see a starving child again.” He died in December at 85.
Vo Phien
Oct. 20, 1925 – Sept. 28, 2015
Vo Phien, a writer and poet who documented the diaspora of the Vietnamese people through literature, died in September at the age of 89. Born Doan The Nhon in central Vietnam, he left the anti-French revolutionary movement to work for the Republic of Vietnam’s Ministry of Information. When Saigon fell in 1975, Vo moved to the United States with his family, ultimately settling in Los Angeles. It was there that he began his life’s work.
In 1999, Vo published “Van Hoc Mien Nam, Tong Quan,” a book of South Vietnamese literature written from 1954 to 1975 — a period when the war threatened to wipe out the region's cultural history. Assiduously collected by Vo, the book features the work of over 200 writers, and though popular in Vietnamese-American households, has never been translated into English.
“The value is the sum of knowledge and experience,” journalist Thai Strom said to The Los Angeles Times of Vo’s masterwork. “What he remembers, what he dug up, what he discovered from the minds of so many important people.” Vo was also a prolific writer and poet. “Vo Phien Tuyen Tap,” a collection of his poetry and prose, was published in 2006. He died in September.
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper
April 17, 1954 – July 31, 2015
In professional wrestling terms, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (Roderick George Toombs) was a talker and a heel — and he was one of the best there was. He was a bagpipes-playing villain, a chair-throwing interview host, and a bombastic dispenser of insults. Although he never won the world title, Piper was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame. While starring in John Carpenter’s “They Live” (1988) he ad-libbed the catchphrase, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
He was at the apex of professional wrestling when it became a global phenomenon in the mid-1980s, starring in the first WrestleMania with Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. Piper appeared in dozens of movies, cartoons and television shows, released a single and once pretended to kick Cyndi Lauper in the head. He died in his sleep of a heart attack in July at age 61.
John Trudell
Feb. 15, 1946 – Dec. 8, 2015
Poet and activist John Trudell first came to public attention in 1969 as the spokesman for the American Indian occupiers of the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island. Despite an initially sympathetic reception to the protest, which sought to turn the island into a Native American cultural center, the movement ground to a halt after a year and a half. He went on to serve as the chairman of the American Indian Movement from 1973 to 1979. “He’s extremely eloquent,” read one memo in his 17,000-page FBI dossier, “therefore extremely dangerous.”
Trudell identified as a poet and began writing after the tragic loss of his family in a house fire. "When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on institutions to tell them the truth,” he once said, “the truth must come from culture and art.” He made spoken word records with guitarist Jesse Ed Davis (one of which was touted by Bob Dylan as the album of the year), appeared in several movies and published a host of books of poetry and essays. Trudell died of cancer this month. He was 69.
Lu Vason
April 6, 1939 – May 17, 2015
When music promoter Lu Vason attended Wyoming’s Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo in 1977, he noticed there were no black cowboys. He rectified the situation a few years later by creating the Bill Pickett Invitational, named after the black cowboy who invented bulldogging, a way of stopping a steer by grabbing its horns and digging in your heels. “People knew the name Will Rogers, but who they hadn't heard of was Bill Pickett,” Vason once said, “and if they had, they didn't know he was black.”
By some estimates, a quarter of all cowboys after the Civil War were African American. He said he considered it his mission to “expose the myth that there were no blacks involved in the development of the West or in rodeo.” The Bill Pickett Invitational still criss-crosses the country each year, attracting thousands of attendees. Lu Vason died in Denver in May of heart disease. He was 76.
Donald Wexler
Jan. 23, 1926 – June 26, 2015
Architect Donald Wexler was nicknamed “The Man of Steel” because of his fondness for the material. Over the course of his career, he became synonymous with the midcentury modern style in Palm Springs, California. He designed airport terminals, affordable housing, schools, banks, gas stations, and movie stars' homes — all with the architectural features popular at the time: glass curtain walls, open interior spaces and flowing, curvaceous lines. “I thought [metal] was great for the desert because I really believe that three materials that are dominant in the desert are steel, glass and concrete,” he once said in a TV interview.
He got his start in 1950, when, fresh out of college and on vacation in California, he arranged to meet his idol, architect Richard Neutra. To Wexler's surprise, Neutra offered him a job. More than a half-century later, there are tours of Wexler’s buildings in Palm Springs and ads for “Wexler-style houses.” Wexler died, in June, at age 89.
Nicholas Winton
May 19, 1909 – July 1, 2015
During World War II, Englishman Nicholas Winton organized the escape of more than 600 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to Britain. There was no such coordinated British effort before Winton, and he said nothing about it until 1988, when his wife found a scrapbook of names, pictures and documents. He pulled off the extraordinary feat through a combination of forgery, bribery, secret agreements with the Gestapo and a patchwork of trains.
Winton was remembered for his courage and unfailing courtesy. He was a reluctant hero, never quite believing his actions to be on par with those of Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. “One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that,” he said simply. Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2002. He died in June.
Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister
Dec. 24, 1945 – Dec. 28, 2015
Motörhead’s iconic lead vocalist and bassist Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister died in December at age 70, two days after being diagnosed with cancer.
Lemmy (so-called because of his habit of asking, “lend me a fiver?”) was born in Burslem, England, and worked as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix before forming his own band, Motörhead, in 1975. Motörhead is best known for its 1980 song “Ace of Spades,” in which the descending riff is played at amphetamine speed. “You know I’m born to lose and gambling's for fools,” Lemmy spits out in a rasp. “But that’s the way I like it, baby. I don’t wanna live forever.”
Motörhead released records for forty years, and Lemmy was the only constant member throughout. They won a Grammy for covering a Metallica song, and were often categorized as heavy metal, a label Lemmy rejected. "We were not heavy metal," he once said. "We were a rock'n'roll band. Still are."
Lemmy was present during the crucial early decades of rock and roll, and welcomed the role of provocateur. He bragged of his sexual conquests, smoked and drank ceaselessly, wore a black leather outfit with Nazi memorabilia on it, and was addicted to slot machines. He shared stages with Chuck Berry and The Ramones, and can be seen in the promotional film for the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun.” In it, he points a long arm towards the stage, a dark look on his face.
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