Second deathlist score of the year: Dom DeLuise!
Granted, he was number seven on the bottom shelf, but let’s offer a full-figured farewell to Dom DeLuise, the jolly Burt Reynolds sidekick (remember those Win, Lose or Draw episodes), Dean Martin stock player, and Paul Prudhomme doppelganger. Seems the guy’s best work was always done in someone else’s shadow. But now I score a deathlist kill in his!
DeLuise was also a Mel Brooks perennial, and he starred in History of the World – Part I, which also (albeit briefly) featured recent croaker Bea Arthur. Not to mention Harvey Korman, whose corpse is not even a year old yet. Shecky Greene and Sid Caesar, maybe even Cloris Leachman, best make sure their papers are in order.
Because it’s not the top shelf, this death does not count for any competitive purposes. It’s just a feather in my cap, and my first bottom shelf kill since Marlon Brando in 2004. And yes, one day this blog will once again be something more than a deathlist place-holder. But alas, my paycheck duties, which involve stocking and packing one of DeLuise’s children’s books (King Bob’s New Clothes, if you’re curious) among thousands of others, beckon.
And then there’s more…
Yesterday, TVOne was airing a daylong Good Times marathon (counting down the viewer-voted top episodes and whatnot). Good Times was, of course, a spinoff of Arthur’s Maude, and the sparring scenes between Arthur and the late Esther Rolle dug right into the uncomfortable, and often unacknowledged, racial tensions boiling beneath the Friedan-Steinem feminist movement. Sadly, Rolle scenes have been uniformly omitted from Arthur’s memorial clip packages, though they contain some of both actresses’ finest (and most subversive) work. (I do love hearing the Maude theme song though, my pick for the all-time greatest TV theme: a Donny Hathaway vocal and a cheeky line about Joan of Arc’s death.)
Speaking of Maude, let us not forget that I’m banking on another of Arthur’s Maude co-stars dying this year. No, not Bill Macy (who was born a mere five days after Arthur). But Conrad Bain, number six on my deathlist. Here’s to hoping Maude stars become as hot a Reaper target as Golden Girls seem to be!
Thank you for being a goddess
I usually take pleasure in celebrity death, especially the unexpected ones. But it is with misty eyes and a sunken heart that I admit the following: Bea Arthur has died. I am still in disbelief. Yes, she was 86. Yet her passing still comes as a shock. Arthur is the second Golden Girl to die in the past year. Unlike Estelle Getty, whose demise was slow and relatively public, Arthur’s fatal battle with cancer was an amazingly well-contained secret. In retrospect, she did look alarmingly ill at her Television Hall of Fame induction this past December, as the below photos demonstrate.
First deathlist score of the year…
…goes to Dan Seals, number ten on the top shelf! Lower than I’d have hoped, but as I’d been batting zero all year, I’m not complaining (and still the inevitable one-up over Gavin). It’s about fucking time. This is the longest I’ve gone without a kill since 2002, for Christ’s sake! So thank you, England Dan! I will now appreciate that nights-are-forever song or the not-talking-about-the-linens song with eager, elated ears next time I take my mother to the rheumatologist. Or not!
One Foote in the Grave
I’ve got some Idol to watch and some Rilo Kiley to listen to, so I’ll be brief. While Ed McMahon rots his way to his 86th birthday, the dormant death game is livening up, thanks to Paul Harvey and, today, playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote, the man who adapted Harper Lee’s legendary novel into a legendary film (arguably the greatest film adaptation of a great American novel). Foote was 92 and not on my deathlist, so his death would not be particularly interesting, except for its arrival on the heels of To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan, whose death went grossly underreported back in December. Could a Harper Lee death later this year secure a novelist-screenwriter-director trifecta? I guess we’ll never really know until we climb inside her orthopedic shoes and walk around in them.
Hey, while I’m on the death game topic, I would like to point out that we’re into March now, and not one of my thirty 2009 deathlist hopefuls has died. This is the first time since 2002 that I didn’t score at least one kill in the first two months of the year: I got Nedra Volz in 2003, Jack Paar in 2004, Philip Johnson in 2005, Lou Rawls in 2006, Art Buchwald in 2007, and Earl Butz in 2008. Anybody who knows me (and pity those who don’t if they’re reading this entry) knows that the success and prosperity of my deathlist (and celebrity death in general) is inextricably linked to my personal success and prosperity. And since, from a personal contentment standpoint, 2009 is looking to be my worst year since 2006, so may I be sitting on my worst deathlist since 2006’s shameful two-name showing (Rawls and P.W. Botha, if you’re curious). I took some risks on this year’s deathlist (like omitting Swayze and Kennedy) and, like the risks I’ve taken in the somewhat more mature facets of life, I doubt they’ll pay off. (And I’ll note right here that I did initially list Ed McMahon, but in a fit of impulsivity, bumped him for Merle Haggard. Fuck.)
Course, this could be a quirk of the death game itself. Of the Top 50 names on 2009 Stiffs.com ballots, only one (former Attorney General Griffin Bell) has thus far bitten the dust. Expand that to the top 100, and you’re still only at three, adding Ricardo Montalban and Paul Harvey. In short, January and February have produced few major celebrity deaths, and even fewer predictable ones.
Hopefully, this weekend, I’ll get to what the hell happened to my 2008 wrap-up (here’s a hint: it won’t materialize in any notable fashion), if I’m not blogging about the aforementioned McMahon error or the first all-white Top 12 in American Idol history (which is looking increasingly possible).
Vanessa Grigoriadis misses the point…again
It’s a shitty time to be a writer. Magazines and papers are crumbling left and right, freelance money is evaporating, superb writers (and hangers-on like myself) are reduced to Net-dwelling bloggers. And yet, Rolling Stone keeps giving cover stories to Vanessa Grigoriadis, a writer who never met a subject she couldn’t condescend to. Her latest victim is current RS cover girl Taylor Swift. Now, Swift is easily the most important and groundbreaking mainstream country music artist since the Dixie Chicks, and arguably the most important female pop star since Avril (consider that Kelly Clarkson and Miley Cyrus owe a Avril a debt that Taylor does not). She is deserving of a penetrating, insightful profile, but Grigoriadis is hardly the person to deliver it.
Drew Peterson wishes you a Happy Valentine’s Day!
If Drew Peterson was a movie villain, he’d rank among the legendary and the complex, on par with Hannibal Lechter and Keyser Soze. But he is real, or at least tabloid-TV real. He has repeatedly, shamelessly, and often compellingly capitalized on a very real tragedy, however. And because he is so obviously a sociopathic narcissist, the court of public opinion has already convicted him as a murderer as well (which, let’s be honest, he probably is). If he’s never brought to trial, he may have gotten away with the perfect crime, not once, but twice (special thanks go to his police department buddies), and he will continually flaunt this, under the unconvincing guise of insisting innocence. Unlike, say, Scott Peterson (and how weird that Drew named his daughter Lacy?!?) or Casey Anthony, Drew Peterson is an expert media manipulator: an alarmingly detached, inappropriately avuncular camerahog, who has parlayed tragedy (a tragedy he may very well have created) into celebrity. He is as much showman as psycho. Ruthlessly toying with your treasured concept of reasonable doubt, he knows that, deep down inside, despite all ostensible evidence, you don’t know if he’s guilty, but he does. He is almost joyously fucking with America, and we keep coming back for more. His antics, while morally reprehensible, are consistently watchable—when this man is on camera, it is tough to look away.
Take this interview from Friday’s TODAY show (bumped to the second hour due to some pesky plane crash that killed 49 people instead of two), with 55-year-old Drew and his 24-year-old new fiancee, potential wife number five and potential victim number three, who called off the engagement just last week, and quickly returned to the fray once Drew no doubt upped the fame-and-fortune ante. (Not for nothing is this her first television interview.) You’ll stay for all seven unsettling minutes, because bad humanity often translates to great television.
Not since the Laredo compound have I seen a young woman make such believable autonomous statements. Note that the betrothed couple’s hands are more clenched than locked, and Drew is watching, almost coaching, her every response with a fixed, penetrating, easily enraged gaze. The interview plays more like abducted and abductor rather than future husband and wife: the gun to her head is palpable. If this was a movie, this scene would be artfully chilling. But it’s not a movie, it only plays like one—and that makes it more chilling than even the most artful of cinematic thrillers. Welcome to the 21st Century!
Happy Valentine’s Day! If these two crazy kids can find each other, then how the fuck are you single? (And if you are single, please e-mail me, as I am spending Valentine’s Day blogging about Drew Peterson.)
The real Grammy drama: even scarier than that Joe Jonas-Taylor Swift reunion
And yeah, I had no idea until the show was over about the Chris Brown scandal. What I get for watching WKRP instead of the red carpet coverage, and paying more attention to the pre-ceremony winners list than the actual news during commercial breaks. But apparently, Chris Brown is being held on $50,000 bail in a felony assualt investigation. That cost him a Grammy performance, and his (hopefully ex) girlfriend Rihanna likewise bowed out. Their slot was filled by the Al Green-Justin Timberlake-Keith Urban performance, which explains their respective ubiquities on the show, and proves my theory that Timberlake is a day-saving pop-culture superhero. Rihanna, rumored to be the victim of Brown’s assault (not officially confirmed), was slated to perform at least a portion of “Live Your Life,” as my comments during “Dead and Gone” had wished. But thanks to Chris Brown’s aggressive hands (allegedly, natch), no such luck. Full story here, and I’m sure all along the blogopshere.
Adventures in liveblogging: The 51st Annual Grammy Awards
So I’ve never done a live blog before, but having read those of blogs and publications with vastly wider audiences (including many real-time readers) than this one, it always looked like an enjoyable way to spice up special cultural events, specifically awards show. And so begins a grand experiment, one that will test my wits, my blog savvy and my blind typing skills. And hopefully produce a handful of worthwhile observations (and I’m sure a fair share of trite comments) in the process. At the very least, we’ll see how many of the previous post’s eight predictions come true.
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