theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Obituaries and memorials
Marcella Hazan, author of one of the two cookbooks that I actually cook from, has passed. She did prickly so well.
When Mrs. Hazan arrived in New York in 1955, Italian food was still exotic, served in restaurants with straw-covered Chianti bottles and red-checked tablecloths….
The culture shock nearly crushed her. She was appalled by canned peas, hamburgers and coffee she once described as tasting no better than the water she used to wash out her own coffeepot at home.
NPR has the unhappy news of the passing of Marian McPartland, jazz pianist and genteel radio host. McPartland was one of the last four survivors of the photographic portrait from 1958, “A Great Day in Harlem.”
Cosmo Allegretti, puppeteer and voice of Dancing Bear, Bunny Rabbit, and Mr. Moose, has dropped his last ping pong ball.
Jim Nayder, host of WBEZ-FM’s “Annoying Music Show,” has passed.
A voice for centrism, former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has died. Of his short-lived run for the presidency in 1995, he quipped,
“I was the only one of nine people in New Hampshire who wanted to keep the Department of Education.”
Russell Train, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, has died. He is remembered, briefly, by Robert B. Semple, Jr.
His death serves as a reminder of the G.O.P.’s historic tradition of environmental stewardship, a tradition stretching as far back as Teddy Roosevelt, which the party has now repudiated.
Fade to black for visionary filmmaker Chris Marker, who made the genuinely one-of-a-kind La Jetée (1962). He was 91.
Update: Via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger…, Richard Metzger offers a remembrance and clips of two TV commercials the Firesigns made for a VW dealership in 1969.
Dick Tufeld, voice of the Robot in TV’s Lost in Space (the only character who sounded remotely grounded in reality), has passed away.
(News via Leta.)
Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few women that thrived in the boys’ club of New York school abstractionism, died earlier this week. The Times has a brief slideshow of some of her most important work.
Isabel Wilkerson revisits this year’s obituaries from 750 newspapers across the country. It was a year of “the first African-American to…” O the strides made in humble mundanity.
Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.
Russell Hoban, ventriloquist extraordinaire/author of Riddley Walker, has passed.
(Link via Bookslut.)
At Via Negativa, Dave Bonta offers “This poem has nothing to do with 9/11.”
Jamaica Bay’s conservationists — fishermen and firefighters, limousine drivers and owners of small boats — are not your typical tree-hugging types, not “Upper West Side, Park Slope, brownstone Brooklyn people,” as Mr. Riepe put it. They are people like Mr. Lewandowski from the canoe club, a transit official…