Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Gary Bertini, a conductor and composer who played a significant role in shaping the musical life of Israel, died on March 17 in Tel Hashomer, Israel. He was 77.

The cause was complications from lymphatic cancer, his Swiss managers, Konzertgesellschaft Basel, told European newspapers.

A former music director of the Israel Chamber Ensemble and the Jerusalem Symphony, Mr. Bertini was also active internationally, holding posts with the Scottish National Orchestra and Scottish Opera, the Frankfurt Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the Rome Opera and others. At his death he was the music director of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and artistic director of the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv.
Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms; Abraham and Isaac
Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Requiem für einen jungen Dichter (Requiem for a Young Poet)

NY Times
Leona Rostenberg, a rare-book scholar and dealer who with her partner of 50 years, Madeleine B. Stern, discovered a series of racy novels written by Louisa May Alcott under a pseudonym, died on March 17 at her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 96.

Ms. Rostenberg died after having heart problems for two years, said Abbey Lustgarten, a filmmaker who became friends with the two women while making a documentary about them.

The discovery in 1942 of the works by Alcott, all written before she gained fame as the author of “Little Women,” brought a moment of detective-work thrill for Ms. Rostenberg and her partner and forever altered Alcott scholarship.

A past president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, Ms. Rostenberg wrote numerous books herself: scholarly works on printing history, and memoirs written with Ms. Stern that twinned their love of literary sleuthing with reminiscences of their life together.

Ms. Rostenberg’s relationship with Ms. Stern, whom she met in 1930 and with whom she lived for nearly 50 years, runs like a constant thread through her decades in the world of rare books.
Special Collections in College and University Libraries
The Minority Press & the English Crown: A Study in Repression, 1558-1625
Connections: Our Selves Our Books

Well, it’s 4:20in ODDland, and no, this refers to yesterday’s trivia, not a herbal slang term.

We want to thank a listener who suggested that Rainer Grimaldi be placed On Deck. Look for his name and details to appear soon. Unfortunately, we are also going to place Annette Funicello in the same category’reluctantly. Like most people, we are also aware of what’s going on in The Land of Chads , but no On Deck recognition from ODD. We may be edgy and irreverent, but we aren’t creepy.

Today’s postings have the themes of sleuthing and conducting. We could make an ODD association about how detectives conduct investigations, but that wouldn’t just be silly, it would be sophomoric.

Stay well, and if you can’t, document, document.

LA Times
Barney Martin, a film, television and stage actor who became known to millions of TV viewers in the 1990s as Jerry Seinfeld’s dad on the popular “Seinfeld” show, has died. He was 82.

Martin died Monday of cancer at his home in Studio City.

Martin was a New York City police detective who used humor to spice up speeches for deputy commissioners when he started in show business by writing on the side in the 1950s for “Name That Tune” and “The Steve Allen Show.” He began acting in the 1960s, and Mel Brooks cast him in the “The Producers” in 1968. In 1981, he played Liza Minnelli’s father in “Arthur.”

Martin also appeared several times on Broadway, including the role of murderer Roxie Hart’s husband, Amos, in the original production of the Bob Fosse musical “Chicago,” in 1975. Martin introduced the song “Mr. Cellophane.”

Although Martin was the third actor to play Seinfeld’s father, he is the one most identified with the role of the Florida retiree, Morty. He once said that Morty’s job as a father was to save his son money.
Great Seinfeld stuff on eBay
Seinfeld Cantstandya Design T-Shirt

LA Times
Don Durant, who sang with Ray Anthony and His Orchestra in the 1950s and starred in the short-lived TV Western “Johnny Ringo,” has died. He was 72.

Durant, who had been battling chronic lymphocytic leukemia since 1992, died March 15 at his home in Monarch Beach, Calif., said his family.

As the gunfighter-turned-lawman in “Johnny Ringo,” a half-hour series that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1960, Durant had the distinction of being the only prime-time TV cowboy to not only sing but compose — both lyrics and music — the theme for his own show.

In a television era in which many Western series heroes brandished gimmick firearms, Durant’s fast-drawing Johnny Ringo wielded a LeMat handgun that had an additional barrel that fired a shotgun round.

Although it ran only one season, the Aaron Spelling-produced “Johnny Ringo” generated about 100 toys and other items — including Johnny Ringo board games, character puppets, gun sets and canteens.

The show, which continues in syndication, also spawned what is considered to be the single most valuable TV Western toy collectible ever — the “Johnny Ringo Western Frontier Play Set,” featuring miniature figures, horses and wagons. In 2001, a play set sold on EBay for $8,998.

Johnny Ringo memorabilia on eBay
Quick Draw McGraw

LA Times
Saul Israel Holiff, 80, a former concert promoter and Johnny Cash’s manager for 17 years, died March 17 in British Columbia, Canada, after years of declining health, his family said.

Holiff, who also managed Tommy Hunter and the Statler Brothers, served as a rear gunner in the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II. He had a fruit and vegetable business and dabbled in acting before becoming a concert promoter and manager with offices in Los Angeles and Nashville.

Holiff began working as Cash’s manager about 1960. “He didn’t start out to be Johnny Cash,” he recalled after Cash died in 2003. “Sometimes he sang dreadfully, if he had too much to drink or too many pills.”

As his material evolved, however, “suddenly he was another American hero,” Holiff said. He left Cash in 1973, when he thought the singer’s career had peaked. “I was guilty for underestimating him repeatedly.”

LA Times
Wayne Miyata, 63, a surfer who appeared in the cult surfing film “The Endless Summer,” was found dead Monday at his home in Hermosa Beach.

He had cancer of the esophagus.

Miyata was one of the first surfers to be filmed doing a successful “tube ride” through a large wave as it curled over. The footage, taken off Ala Moana in Oahu, Hawaii, was included in the 1966 film that helped introduce the world to surfing.

The native Hawaiian was known to many Southern Californians for his hand-crafted surfboards.

Surf boards on eBay

Music doth drive us today. Lookee here and let us wander from Barney Martin’s
start with ‘Name That Tune’ over to
singing Don Durant and his one season western ‘Johnny Ringo‘, then onward
to Saul Holiff and Johnny Cash before finally ending on the beach with Wayne Miyata and surfing; hence of course
surf music and the surf guitar.

‘Although your world wonders me
with your majestic superior cackling hen.
Your people I do not understand.
So to you I wish to put an end.
And you’ll never hear surf music again.’

Word has it that the last line here was
dedicated by Jimi
to the King of Surf Music Dick Dale who was in the hospital suffering from
rectal cancer and given a scant 3 months to live. This
was 1967 and at the time Jimi was
recording the song ‘Third Stone From The Sun’.

And did you know that Dick, like Jimi did, plays a Fender Stratocaster upside
down? Of course you all recall Dick’s playing in ‘Pulp Fiction’, but do you remember what time it was (always) in
the movie?

Let’s try a bit of a Jump To The Left going
from images of John
Travolta and the Twist in ‘Pulp Fiction’ over to
Elaine’s roundly
booed dance in Seinfeld. Some people shouldn’t air their moves it seems, but we’re awarding ODD Bonus Points if
you can guess the next jump to a time when your moves literally kept you alive. If you guessed the art of the
QuickDraw, then the points are yours Lucky Citizen. Of
course gun fights in the True West
were no picnic.

And speaking of no picnic, we’ve arrived at the bonus round and our cleanup act for today courtesy of surfing. Remember to
bring more than a pistol when two great whites attack.

LA Times
John Box, four-time Academy Award-winning art director and production designer who re-created wintry Russia in midsummer Spain for “Doctor Zhivago” and built lavish dreamscapes for other period productions, has died. He was 85.

Box died March 7 in Leatherhead, Surrey, England, of natural causes associated with aging.

The Briton collected an impressive four Oscars for epic films released from 1962 through 1971: “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Oliver!” and “Nicholas and Alexandra.” He was also nominated for Academy Awards for his work on the 1972 film “Travels With My Aunt” and the 1984 “Passage to India.”

Box earned Britain’s equivalent of the Oscar, the British Film Academy Award, (for best art direction for re-creating 16th century England for the 1966 “A Man for All Seasons,” imagining early 20th century America for “The Great Gatsby” in 1974 and conjuring the game as well as the arena for the futuristic 1975 “Rollerball.” He also received the British Film Academy Award for special contribution to filmmaking in 1991 and a Film Critics’ Circle Award for lifetime achievement in 1999.

Among his more recent films were “Black Beauty” in 1994 and “First Knight” in 1995, starring Sean Connery as King Arthur and Richard Gere as Lancelot, for which he built a Camelot from scratch in a Welsh reservoir.

NY Times
Kenzo Tange, the Japanese architect who converted the core of a barren Hiroshima into a tranquil peace park in the 1940’s and 50’s, and designed Tokyo’s starkly modernist St. Mary’s Cathedral in 1964 - where his funeral is to be held - died yesterday at his home in Tokyo. He was 91.

The cause was heart failure, The Associate Press reported, citing a spokesman for Mr. Tange’s architectural firm.

Although he designed buildings throughout the world, he was perhaps best known for his work in Japan, including the massive New Tokyo City Hall (1991), housing 13,000 bureaucrats; the Fuji television building (1996), two towers linked by earthquake-proof pedestrian bridges; and two sports arenas for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

Mr. Tange was an admirer of both Le Corbusier and traditional Japanese architecture, and his early work synthesized the two. His Olympic arenas, whose swooping suspended roofs are often described as among the most beautiful structures of the 20th century, also evoke the simplicity of archaic temple forms.

In awarding Mr. Tange the Pritzker Prize - architecture’s highest honor - in 1987, an international jury acknowledged this duality. “Tange arrives at shapes that lift our hearts,” the citation said, “because they seem to emerge from some ancient and dimly remembered past and yet are breathtakingly of today.”

NY Times
Stanley Sadie, a musicologist, writer and editor whose prodigious output included editing the last two editions of the titanic and authoritative New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, died on Monday at his home in Cossington, England. He was 74.

The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, said his wife, Julie Anne Sadie.

Mr. Sadie had spent three weeks at a hospital in London, but was intent on returning home in time for the first concert in a music series that he and his wife run in a church near their home. The concert, on Sunday evening, was an all-Beethoven program performed by the Chilingirian String Quartet. Mr. Sadie was able to stay for the first half, but felt unwell and went home to bed. At the conclusion of the performance, the quartet went to Mr. Sadie’s house, set up quietly in his bedroom, and performed the slow movement of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) as he drifted in and out of sleep

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

NY Times
Walter Hopps, a leading curator of 20th-century art and founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 72 and lived in Houston and Los Angeles.

The cause was pneumonia, a spokesman for the Menil Collection said.

In the museum world, Mr. Hopps was famous for groundbreaking exhibitions, inspired installations and an empathy with living artists, many of whom he helped push to the forefront of the art world, including Ed Ruscha and Edward Kienholz. His career coincided with the coming of age of postwar American art and contributed significantly to the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.

His exhibitions included the first American retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, and the first museum survey of American Pop Art, all organized at the Pasadena Art Museum, where he worked as a curator and then as director from 1959 to 1967. He also organized the first midcareer survey of the work of Robert Rauschenberg (in 1976 at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and in 1997 organized an exhibition of Mr. Rauschenberg’s early work at the Menil that traveled to four other American museums. He once likened installing exhibitions to conducting a symphony orchestra.

The ODDfellows are a bit harried with their day jobs, but we do have a moment to reflect on notable passings from the world of the cultured. Maybe we need a little yogurt, cultured or otherwise. A recent report from the International Journal of Obesity
stated that an isocaloric diet
which incorporated yogurt was effective in promoting weight loss, particularly in the trunk of the body. While mechanism is still speculative, both the calcium and some other factors within dairy products may be responsible for the effect.

Okay, time for today’s ODDfact. Did you know that cow flatulence in the form of methane gas is significant source of greenhouse gases? It is estimated that the sheep and cattle in Australia produce one-seventh of all the methane released into the atmosphere each year. Talk about “silent, but deadly”.

Mind your manners and drink your milk.