A Slight Delay

If you’re one of those people for whom the obituaries are essential reading (or the first part of the paper you go for), I think I may have found you the perfect website. It’s called The Music’s Over, and if you go in for music, obituaries, pop culture, or some combination of the three, it’s to die for. Okay, bad choice of words, but you get the idea.

The blog’s author has pretty catholic tastes, commemorating the passing of the famous (i.e. Buddy Miles), the obscure or quasi-mythical (Syd Barrett), the unfortunately forgotten (Mia Zapata), and those famous just as much for being dead as for their music (Kurt Cobain), among dozens of others. And this isn’t some slapdash, half-assed effort; the author–I keep referring to him as “the author” ’cause his name’s not listed on his site–has clearly done his homework. Hopefully Don McLean never sees The Music’s Over, or we’ll be subjected to a rewritten, 77-minute, CD-length version of “American Pie;” unless and until that day comes, enjoy the site.

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. –George Carlin

I’m not normally big on dead celebrities. Often as not–though there are exceptions–they’re gone when they’re well past their prime, and this seems especially true of comedians. Bob Hope would be Exhibit A, keeping good company with George Burns, and others of that ilk.

But then there are the exceptions. Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and one George Denis Patrick Carlin. The same “safe” Carlin who was a frequent guest on the Tonight Show (starting back in the Jack Paar days) would, soon enough, be the same Carlin who gave America the Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television (the original seven, which grew to something close to 2,500, were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, in case you were curious), “A Place for My Stuff,” and Brain Droppings. Carlin could be maddeningly hit-or-miss, but when he was on, he was as much standup philosopher as he was comedian, holding a mirror up to the uglier bits of human nature and playing them for laughs. He could be as dead-on (forgive the pun) about politics as he was about religion and so much else.

Usually when a great personality dies, someone ends up saying that the world seems like a smaller place without them in it. In George Carlin’s case, though, the world seems somehow more serious, which in its own way seems an even bigger shame…

Robert Rauschenberg died on Monday, May 12. He left behind a body of work that spanned six decades, and at least that many styles and media. While he could be stylistically linked with Warhol or Jasper Johns (also romantically linked, in the latter instance), his style–a pastiche of Dada, Pop, Merz, and anything else he happened to find (literally) was sui generis. The New York Times ran a good obituary on him that you can read here. In the meantime, I’ll let the artist himself have the last word:

“People ask me, “Don’t you ever run out of ideas?” In the first place I don’t use ideas. Every time I have an idea it’s too limiting, and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven’t run out of curiosity.”