Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Retired Adm. Barry K. Atkins, who received the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism while commanding what many military historians believe was the only U.S. Navy destroyer to sink an enemy battleship during World War II, has died. He was 94.

Atkins died Tuesday of natural causes in a hospital in Richmond, Va., a family spokesman said.

A 1932 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in his hometown of Annapolis, Md., Atkins was commanding officer of the Melvin during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, widely regarded as the world’s largest sea battle.

About 3 a.m. on Oct. 25, 1944, as the Melvin and two other destroyers entered the narrow Surigao Strait, the Japanese battleship Fuso was spotted about 10,000 yards ahead.

Deviating from plan, Atkins brought his destroyer closer to the Fuso and at a better angle. He then ordered his crew to fire 10 torpedoes. Nine were launched and one misfired.

The Fuso, meanwhile, spotted the Melvin and began firing star shells, flares that illuminated the sky.

As Atkins recalled in a 2004 Associated Press interview, the Fuso “opened fire on us, and I didn’t care for that, particularly because they were getting pretty close to hitting us. I remember saying to the ship’s doctor, ‘When the heck are those torpedoes going to get there?’ ”

LA Times
Alfred Anderson, believed to be the last surviving soldier to have heard the guns fall silent along the Western Front during the spontaneous “Christmas Truce” of World War I, died Monday. He was 109.

His parish priest, the Rev. Neil Gardner, said Anderson died in his sleep early Monday at a nursing home in Newtyle, Scotland. His death leaves fewer than 10 veterans of World War I alive in Britain.

More than 80 years after the war, Anderson recalled the “eerie sound of silence” as the shooting stopped and soldiers clambered from trenches to greet one another on Dec. 25, 1914.

Born June 25, 1896, Anderson was an 18-year-old soldier in the Black Watch regiment when British and German troops cautiously emerged from the trenches that day. The enemies swapped cigarettes and tunic buttons, sang carols and even played soccer amid the mud, barbed wire and shell-holes of no man’s land.

The informal truce spread along much of the 500-mile Western Front, in some cases lasting for days — alarming army commanders who feared fraternization would sap the troops’ will to fight. The next year brought the start of vast battles of attrition that claimed 10 million lives, and the Christmas truce was never repeated.

“I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” Anderson told Britain’s Observer newspaper last year.

“All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices,” said Anderson, who was billeted in a French farmhouse behind the front lines.

“But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.”

No, today’s title is not a line of dialogue from the forthcoming movie Casanova
, nor is it an exclamation from a tourist upon seeing the Ashahi Kaikyo Bridge
in Japan. It has to do with a little verbosity on the part of ODDfellows today, but we have some things to say.

First, today brings word of the death of Ret. Admiral Barry Atkins, who commanded the destroyer Melvin, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf
. The battle was the largest naval battle in the history of the world. The Melvin sunk the Japanese battleship Fuso, believed to be the only incidence of a destroyer sinking a battle ship. As we think about things tomorrow for which to be thankful, think about Admiral Atkins and the other veterans of WW II. We are losing 1000 a day
. Also gone is Alfred Anderson, who was the only living survivor of the Christmas Truce of 1914 in WW I. There are less than 10 WW I veterans still alive in Great Britain. In the United States, it is estimated that there are less than 25 alive
. Again, as you give thanks, think of the more than 150,000 American men and women who are in harm’s way in the Middle East. To say we have our armed forces to be thankful to for our freedom to–among other things, be a bit ODD–is a cliché, but just because it’s a cliché doesn’t make it any less true.

All seriousness aside.

Songs we recommend you not play tomorrow during dinner include:
The Gords rendition of Snop Dog’s “Gin and Juice.”

Paul Thorn’s “Burn down the trailer park.”
(but otherwise a great song about flamingo and revenge)
James McMurtry’s “Holiday”
(all to true, and as a result, all too depressing)
Cross Canadian Ragweed’s “Boys from Oklahoma”
(something about how they roll their joints all wrong—whatever that means).
Selected readings from Annie Proulx’s “Broke Back Mountain” (Find you own damn link for that one.)

Things we ODDones are looking forward to tomorrow include:
Potatoes from the San Luis Valley
(much, much better than those from that funny shaped state between Washington and Montana.)
Salazar Natural Beef

The look on the parrot’s face when we take the turkey out of the oven.
Maybe catching an another showing of “Walk the line”
(a drop-dead great movie, highly ODDly recommended).

ODD question of the day: “Why did Bruce Springsteen name a dark, seedy album about serial killers, broken hearts, and having nothing left to lose, ‘Nebraska?’
” To find out answer, tune into ABC television at 3:30 p.m. EST
on Friday.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday. We ODDities are particularly grateful for those of you who took the time to read to the end of this, err… “stuff.”

LA Times
Link Wray, the rock guitar pioneer who gave birth to the aggressively primal sound known as the power chord on his 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble” and influenced two generations of rock guitarists, has died. He was 76.

Wray died Nov. 5 at his home in Copenhagen, his family said on his website. Although no cause of death was given, his wife, Olive, and son, Oliver, wrote that the North Carolina native’s heart had been “getting tired.”

On stage, the rebel Wray never tired of wielding his ax.

“He just loved playing,” said Michael Molenda, editor in chief of Guitar Player magazine, who saw Wray perform last July at Slim’s, a small San Francisco club.

“He was certainly a young soul, very gracious, kind of like a punk to the end,” Molenda said Monday. “He wasn’t like a guy who was 76 years old. He was like a 19-year-old in a 76-year-old body.”

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, said Monday that Wray “was one of the key figures who helped establish the guitar as the instrument of choice in rock.”

Wray, Hilburn said, “was someone who turned the sensualness and mystery of the blues into a supercharged sound that was both eerie and anxious. His key works were powered by a force and, even at times, a brutalness that encouraged generations of musicians to explore the extreme boundaries of human emotion and sonic possibility.”

The legendary three-chord riff that Wray used in “Rumble,” his signature tune and biggest seller, has reverberated down through the decades.

“Without the power chord, punk rock and heavy metal would not exist,” Dan Del Fiorentino, historian for the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, said Monday.

Countless musicians, including Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and Jeff Beck, are said to have been influenced by Wray.

“He is the king; if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I would have never picked up a guitar,” Pete Townshend of the Who wrote for one of Wray’s albums.

Neil Young once said, “If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Wraymen.”

Del Fiorentino said the raunchy sound of Wray’s guitar in “Rumble” represented a different attitude in rock music.

“It added more of a zing, more of a delinquency, if you will, to rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

And Wray, the 1950s performer, personified his sound on stage.

“Who else in rock ‘n’ roll had a leather jacket and was smoking cigarettes, with sunglasses on in the middle of the night?

“That was him,” Del Fiorentino said.

BBC Online
Thursday, 15 July, 2004 - The bass player for the New York Dolls died died on July 13, 2004 in Los Angeles aged 55 as a result of complications from leukaemia.

Arthur “Killer” Kane, born February 3,1951, - known for his swaggering style on stage - was one of three surviving members of a band credited with pioneering punk rock.

The Dolls, who made their name in the 1970s, last month played two reunion gigs at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

Morrissey, a diehard Dolls fan who organised the shows, said: “He has left us with some great musical memories.”

I will always remember the look of bashful happiness on Arthur’s face as people in the audience constantly called out his name

The band agreed to re-form for their first gig in 27 years after Morrissey, who was curating the alternative arts festival Meltdown, made a personal approach.

The singer, a former president of the UK New York Dolls fan club, paid tribute to Kane on Wednesday.

He said: “I am personally very grateful to Arthur for his essential contribution to the Dolls and their music.

“He was a very gentle soul and I know he lived for many years in the hope of a Dolls reunion.”

The ultimate Ax Man Link Wray passed away earlier this month. Before Wray electric guitarists produced only clean sounds and jazz style chords. Wray made the big leap and produced a new sound by inventing fuzz-tone, adding feedback, distortion and noise. He pioneered the power chord.

Look over there to the left for a moment and consider: Pete Townshend stated in liner notes for a 1974 Wray album, “He is the king; if it hadn’t been for Link Wray and ‘Rumble,’ I would have never picked up a guitar.”

And Townsend isn’t the only one. Add to the list Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Marc Bolan, Neil Young and Bob Dylan all of whom have cited Wray as an influence. That’s some serious heavy hitting.

This is the BUT! section…Wray was named as one of the hundred greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone magazine, BUT still has not yet been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. SAY WHAT??? He is, however, a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. At least there is some sense in the world.

His music has been featured in numerous films, including Desperado, 12 Monkeys, Johnny Depp’s Blow, Brad Pitt’s Johnny Suede, and Pink Flamingos by John Waters.

It is thus easy to wander from Link Wray over to Arthur Kane and The New York Dolls. As Wray gave us that new rock sound the Dolls gave us a new rock experience adding an extreme visual aspect to go along with their sound. The Dolls were a hint of what was to follow, something we termed Punk and perhaps, just perhaps they could be said to have influenced all your favorite Hair Bands.

Can you imagine being a New York Dolls groupie? Those memories would be some of the Best in Town Cookies, eh Lady?

Everyone is trying to get to the bar.
The name of the bar, the bar is called heaven.
The band in heaven plays my favorite song.
They play it once again, they play it all night long. ~ ‘Heaven’, The Talking Heads

NY Times
Lou Myers, a satiric artist and graphic essayist whose expressive style helped modernize cartoons in advertisements and major American magazines, died yesterday at his home in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y. He was 90.

The cause of death was spindle cell carcinoma, said his daughter-in-law Alyse Myers, vice president for marketing services at The New York Times.

In a career that spanned about seven decades, Mr. Myers developed a deceptively childlike, raw, black brush stroke that gave the illusion of lightheartedness. But his cartoons were more like comic bombs that exploded political and social taboos. Among Mr. Myers’s frequent topics were sex (especially the relational tensions between men and women) and war and peace (especially the nuclear arms buildup of the 70’s and 80’s). One of his most memorable images shows a circle of bent-over military officers, each of whom is lighting the fuse of a missile poised to fly into the next.

Louis Myers was born in Paris in 1915 and came to New York with his family in 1917. He saw his father drown in 1926 and was the one who had to tell his mother, and his son Marc attributed the “fatalistic sense of humor” of his father’s work to that experience.

After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Mr. Myers studied at the Art Students League in New York and worked for 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in New York, illustrating movie posters. After enlisting in the Navy during World War II, he was dispatched to paint combat scenes and officers’ portraits throughout Europe.

After the war, Mr. Myers returned to his job at Columbia, where he met his second wife, Bernice, a children’s book illustrator. In 1952, they moved to Paris, where Mr. Myers also illustrated children’s books and began drawing captionless cartoons for French magazines and newspapers. While in France, he also illustrated “Paris After Dark,” a book by Art Buchwald that established Mr. Myers’s graphic style and artistic reputation.

His cartoon style had developed a sophistication that began to attract the attention of ad agency art directors. As the demand for his work grew among corporate clients, so did his risk-taking. By the late 60’s, many of his advertisement images toed a fine line between conformity and subversion; Mr. Myers achieved his client’s marketing goal while also taking a playful swipe at corporate life.

In the mid-60’s, Mr. Myers’s provocative style was in such demand that clients included his oversize signature in their ads, a practice unheard of at the time and still rare today. Most clients prefer to keep artists’ signatures out of ads to avoid distracting consumers from their marketing message.

So you get up in the morning. It’s a beautiful day. You have a lot of work, but you’re actually looking forward to it. There’s a certain spring in the gait. You speak kindly to the parrot. You decide you really don’t need a third cup of coffee because you’re ready to go. Then, ZAP, the cosmos strikes back. You find yourself pounding the desk, slamming ctrl-alt-delete like it’s the spin wheel on a penny slot machine. You hang up on the tech support guy (not really—we’re not that far into self-inflicted wounds.) You ask for help. All you manage to do is ruin another person’s day. Not so beautiful day in the neighborhood
beautiful day in the neighborhood after all

Perhaps it’s fitting that today’s dead person was a master of cartoons and advertisements that played on theme of darkness, death, and the ugly side of human nature . Bon voyage Lou Myers.

Welcome to the holiday season

We’re off to more practice in writing in the passive voice. “Natas si setag llib.”