Our Daily Dead

Two very different, yet in at least one way quite similar, people are our ODDguests in the weblog today:Coretta Scott King and Nam June Paik. Nam June Paik was the inventor of video art. Coretta Scott King, as you of course know, was the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the keeper of the flame for his dream.

Did you know also that Coretta Scott King lent her name to a book award? According to Teen Reads the “recipients are authors and illustrators of African descent whose distinguished books promote an understanding and appreciation of the “American Dream.” Check Monster or The Land for example.

Perhaps at this point you wonder how these two were alike? Both were very devout - Nam June Paik in Buddhism and Ms. King ever the Baptist.

In other news the Scotsman Online reports that Terry Isaac passed away in Mombasa, Kenya. FYI - most of the obituary is behind a paywall at the Scotsman. Check the available art work for Terry Isaac over at eBay.com.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: weblog, Coretta Scott King, Nam June Paik, video art, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., news, Terry Isaac

NY Times
Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer, performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art, died Sunday at his winter home in Miami Beach. He was 73 and also lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Paik suffered a stroke in 1996 and had been in declining health for some time, said his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, who manages his uncle’s studio in New York.

Mr. Paik’s career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of expression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited.

At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive. In recent years, Mr. Paik’s enormous American flags, made from dozens of sleek monitors whose synchronized patterns mixed everything from pinups to apple pie at high, almost subliminal velocity, could be found in museums and corporate lobbies.

Mr. Paik was affiliated in the 1960’s with the anti-art movement Fluxus, and also deserves to be seen as an aesthetic innovator on a par with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. Yet in many ways he was simply the most Pop of the Pop artists. His work borrowed directly from the culture at large, reworked its most pervasive medium and gave back something that was both familiar and otherworldly.

He was a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity. A lifelong Buddhist, Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelming: a writer once compared his New York studio to a television repair shop three months behind schedule.

Technorati Tags: Nam June Paik, avant-garde composer, video art, music, theater, television, electronic superhighway, Fluxus, Merce Cunningham, John Cage

NPR
The widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. died Tuesday in Atlanta. Coretta Scott King was 78 years old. After Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Coretta Scott King immediately took on her husband’s role of working for social change. She did much behind-the-scenes work in the movement as well, while she raised four children.

Mrs King established the Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, a library and training site for young people. It started in the basement of King’s birthplace and is now part of a national historic site on 23 acres.

Coretta Scott King campaigned for decades for a federal holiday to honor her husband. She achieved that goal in 1986. In recent years, Mrs. King spoke out against racial profiling, mandatory minimum sentences and attacks on affirmative action. She was also a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.

Technorati Tags: Martin Luther King, Jr, Coretta Scott King, assassinated, social change

Some days it is quite true - we just don’t feel like writing. But, write we do, or at least try. Coble together a variety of ODD bits to create news or at least the latest post for our weblog. Today is one such day. It isn’t the weather, nor the clime in general, nor the oft heard complaint about “interpersonal relationships”.

No, tis something else perhaps. We post about the deaths of many and several here at ODD. The famous, the brilliant, the accomplished all get their last moment. When death arrives closer to home as this past week it renders us a touch speechless. We lost this past week or so a friend and colleague’s father, our sister-in-law’s father, and a childhood friend known since the tender age of 7. Death’s had a busy week close to the ODD home turf. You’ll have to forgive the maudlin wall hangings today.

And still a peek outside informs that the world marches onward. The mid-morning news brought notice that the playwright Wendy Wasserstein lost her battle with cancer at the young age of 55. Joining Ms. Wasserstein here today are Peter Ladefoged, a noted linguist phonetician who’s 15 minutes of fame you can hear on the training record that Henry Higgans plays in “My Fair Lady” and James Fitzgerald who somehow created a career training dolphins for the Navy.

We also tripped over another interesting piece in an obituary posted Down Under. Under the curious title of “Fearless hitter of high notes” you’ll find the story of Richard Montz, trumpeter and teacher who passed away at the age of 63. Mr. Montz had quite the life as a trumpeter including working in Las Vegas with Sigfried and Roy and in Sydney in shows such as Cats. Its in the third page of the obituary that one comes across this curious statement: “When he burst his lip in a gardening accident…”. Oh my. What exact kind of gardening accident causes such an injury? For a trumpeter it was the end of certain aspects of his style. But he rose above and taught himself another instrument.

So a have a bit of caution out there as you heed Candide and tend to your garden stopping only to discourse with Dr. Pangloss about this, the best of all possible worlds.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: news, weblog, interpersonal relationships, Wendy Wasserstein, Peter Ladefoged, Henry Higgans, James Fitzgerald, Richard Montz, Dr. Pangloss

Free New Mexican
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who celebrated women confronting feminism, careers, love and motherhood in such works as “The Heidi Chronicles” and “The Sisters Rosensweig,” died Monday. She was 55.

Wasserstein, who had been battling cancer in recent months, died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Andre Bishop, head of Lincoln Center Theater and Wasserstein’s close friend and mentor, said the cause of death was lymphoma.

“She was an extraordinary human being whose work and whose life were extremely intertwined,” Bishop said. “She was not unlike the heroines of most of her plays _ a strong-minded, independent, serious good person.”

Wasserstein’s writing was known for its sharp, often wry observations about what women had to do to succeed in a world dominated by men.

In “The Heidi Chronicles,” which won the best-play Tony as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1989, its insecure heroine (played by Joan Allen) takes a 20-year journey beginning in the late 1960s and changes her attitudes about herself, men and other women. “The Sisters Rosensweig,” which moved from Lincoln Center to Broadway in 1993, concerned three siblings who find strength in themselves and in each other.

Her most recent work, “Third,” which ended a New York run Dec. 18, 2005, dealt with a female college professor, played by Dianne Wiest, whose liberal, feminist convictions are put to the test by a student she sees as the epitome of the white male establishment.

In public, Wasserstein was genial, often quite funny, presenting herself as a rumpled observer of the baby-boom generation.

Many of her plays were initially seen at off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons and later at Lincoln Center Theater, both run by Bishop.

Wasserstein was first noticed with “Uncommon Women and Others,” written as a Yale School of Drama graduate thesis. The one-act play was expanded and done off-Broadway in 1977 with Glenn Close, Jill Eikenberry and Swoosie Kurtz in the cast. A year later, this satire about the anxieties of female college graduates was filmed for public television with Meryl Streep replacing Close.

The playwright continued her off-Broadway success with “Isn’t It Romantic?” _ about a free spirit who rejects her fiance and tries to find a life as a single woman.

In 1997, Broadway saw “An American Daughter,” Wasserstein’s story of the political downfall of a perfect career woman, played by Kate Nelligan. It was followed in 2000 by “Old Money,” her look at money, manners and morals at the beginning and end of the 20th century, done at Lincoln Center’s small Mitzi Newhouse Theater.

While primarily a playwright, Wasserstein also wrote for TV and the movies, most notably the screenplay for the 1998 film version of Stephen McCauley’s novel, “The Object of My Affection,” about a gay man and a pregnant woman who meet and move in together.

Technorati Tags: Wendy Wasserstein, feminism, The Heidi Chronicles, Pulitzer Prize, drama, The Sisters Rosensweig, television, off-Broadway, playwright, TV, movies, screenplay

LA Times
Peter Ladefoged, a leading linguist phonetician who traveled the world to document the distinct sounds of endangered languages and pioneered ways to collect and study data, has died. He was 80.

Ladefoged, a UCLA professor emeritus, died Tuesday at a London hospital after becoming ill following a research trip to India, the university announced.

When Ladefoged entered the field in the late 1950s, he married linguistic fieldwork and phonetics in a new way, said Pat Keating, a UCLA linguistics professor.

“He did extensive linguistic fieldwork on a scale it had not been done before; and when he brought it back from the field, he found ways to use sophisticated laboratory equipment to analyze his recordings,” she said.

Ladefoged also pioneered the use of state-of-the-art equipment in the field. His first portable phonetics lab that included a tape recorder and various scientific instruments weighed 100 pounds and required a porter but enabled him to do more than listen: He could take quantitative measurements, such as gauging how much air escaped from the nose or throat when a sound was made.

In an earlier trip to India, he recorded the Toda language, which is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, as he documented its six trills produced by the tip of the tongue. In the Kalahari Desert, he studied the click sound native to Africa. In America, an Indian tribe whose members knew their language was vanishing refused to cooperate because they didn’t want to reveal their culture to outsiders.

Soon after moving to Los Angeles from Scotland to become an assistant professor at UCLA in 1962, Ladefoged had a brief career in Hollywood as the chief linguistic consultant on the 1964 film “My Fair Lady.”

Director George Cukor wanted him to teach the film’s star, Rex Harrison — who would win an Oscar for the role of Professor Henry Higgins — to behave like a phonetician.

“My immediate answer was, ‘I don’t have a singing butler and three maids who sing, but I will tell you what I can as an assistant professor,’ ” Ladefoged told The Times in 2004.

Ladefoged helped set up the film set’s phonetics laboratory, taught Harrison to read phonetic symbols — and ate the cookies that the film’s co-star, Audrey Hepburn, baked for crew members.

“I’d never heard of Cukor. It just struck me as the chance to earn a fortune each week,” Ladefoged said. “It was just so much more than a professor’s salary. It paid me enough to buy my first car in America.”

The professor’s voice is preserved on the soundtrack. When Professor Higgins stomps down the stairs, he knocks a record player that starts playing a recording of Ladefoged making vowel sounds.

Technorati Tags: Peter Ladefoged, linguist, phonetician, My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins

Washington Post
James Fitzgerald, 88, an engineer and physicist whose work in sound propagation led to early Navy and Central Intelligence Agency experiments with dolphins, died of cancer Jan. 16 at Camelot nursing center in New London, Conn.

A former resident of Shady Side, Bethesda and Annapolis, he had lived in New London since 1982.

At a cocktail party in Annapolis in 1964, Mr. Fitzgerald casually mentioned to a Navy admiral that dolphins, mammals that rely on natural sonar for hearing and navigation, might prove useful in warfare. The admiral introduced him to a CIA acquaintance who was a specialist in underwater combat.

As Mr. Fitzgerald’s wife recalled, the CIA sent him to Key West, Fla., where he set up a small classified laboratory. His assignment was to study whether dolphin hydrodynamics could be applied to the design of submarines, torpedoes and missiles and whether the animals could be trained to perform missions.

Working with a half-dozen dolphins, he and his associates learned rather quickly that the sleek, intelligent animals could indeed be used to seek out underwater mines, attach explosives and eavesdropping devices on enemy ships and help divers recover lost weapons from the ocean floor.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who gave his dolphins names and often swam with them, communicated with the animals through Morse code-like signals. He discovered that the older dolphins were somehow able to transmit their training to younger ones.

The Navy put dolphins to work. In 1965, a bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy became the Navy’s first sea mammal to complete an open-ocean military exercise, delivering tools and mail to aquanauts 200 feet below the surface of the Sealab II project off the coast of La Jolla, Calif.

Navy Dolphins (Animals With Jobs)

Technorati Tags: James Fitzgerald, dolphins, CIA, underwater combat

NY Times
Nellie McKay, a distinguished scholar and critic who helped secure a place for African-American women in the modern literary canon, died last Sunday at a hospice in Fitchburg, Wis. She was a resident of Madison, Wis., and was believed to have been in her mid-70’s.

The cause was cancer, said Craig Werner, chairman of the Afro-American studies department at the University of Wisconsin, where Ms. McKay was Evjue professor of American and African-American literature.

An authority on black American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Professor McKay specialized in the study of fiction, autobiography and, especially, women’s writing. She was known in particular for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, of which she was a general editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“She was the central figure in the establishing of black women’s studies as a presence in academic and intellectual life,” Professor Werner said in a telephone interview yesterday.

The anthology, published in 1997, was widely credited with codifying the black American literary canon for the first time. The book, which generated considerable attention in the news media, was assigned in college courses worldwide and also proved popular with a general readership. Nearly 200,000 copies are currently in print, the publisher said yesterday.

At more than 2,600 pages, the anthology spans black literature from the earliest Negro spirituals to late-20th-century writers like Gloria Naylor, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley. It was published in a second edition in 2004, adding the work of younger writers like Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead.

“It’s very necessary that we do this to establish the centrality of the African-American experience,” Professor McKay told The New York Times in 1996. “There needed to be a book that gave a coherent text of African-American literature.”

Technorati Tags: Nellie McKay, African-American women, black American literature, news, media, Negro spirituals