Jack Rose
Per Pitchfork, I just learned that the guitarist Jack Rose has passed away at the age of 38.
This one hurts, folks. Rose was an incredible guitarist, one of the real superstars of this decade's revival of Takoma Records-style guitar music. Like the other luminaries of this genre - James Blackshaw, Glenn Jones, and Sir Richard Bishop - his work nimbly blended a vast array of influences, from Indian ragas to Leo Kottke finger-style to esoteric minimalism. But what really came through in Rose's music was his incredible regard for and command of the American folk guitar tradition, especially the lasting influence of ragtime in blues, country, and rock. We've really lost one of the good ones, folks, and my condolences go out to his wife and family.
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Henry Gibson, too?!
A cruel, cruel summer.
Henry Gibson was a great actor - able to move between comedy and drama so fluidly that you didn't often realize that what sounded funny was deadly serious (his great turn as a rich, gay barfly in PT Anderson's Magnolia) and what sounded serious (his performance as the creepy/evil neighbor in The 'Burbs) was incredibly funny. It's a tribute to Gibson's talent for straightfaced comedy work that the only video I can find on Youtube of "200 Years," his bitterly ironic patriotic country song written by Gibson in-character as country music legend "Haven Hamilton" in Robert Altman's Nashville, serves as soundtrack to a completely straightfaced compendium of patriotic images by a teabagger, complete with, for some reason, an image of a computer motherboard, a still from Back to the Future, and an image of Captain America:
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Crystal Lee Sutton (1941-2009)
News comes from C&L today of the death of Crystal Lee Sutton, a textile factory worker and union organizer from North Carolina. You may not know her name, but you almost certainly have heard of her story. Sutton was the firebrand whose work on behalf of her coworkers at the JP Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, NC was chronicled in the 1975 book Crystal Lee: A Story of Inheritance, which was subsequently adapted into 1979's Norma Rae, starring Sally Field as the title character:
That film - one of the great unsung American films of the 1970s, with its bracing, direct-cinema sequences of life on the factory floor and its phenomenal central performance - rightly celebrated the heroics of this incredible woman. It's a powerful film about a woman whose life is upended by her quest for justice; in an attempt to turn her conservative town against her, her employers start a whisper campaign about Norma Rae's out-of-wedlock children, hoping that slut-shaming her will keep her quiet. But Norma Rae/Crystal Lee resisted. As noted in her Wikipedia entry:
“Management and others treated me as if I had leprosy,” said Crystal. She received threats and was finally fired from her job. But before she left, she took one final stand, filmed verbatim in the 1979 film Norma Rae. “I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word UNION on it in big letters, got up on my work table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet…”
Sutton devoted her life after being fired to the cause of unionization and workers' rights in the textile industry, spending upwards of thirty years in pursuit of this cause. On Friday, Sutton died of meningioma, having been delayed in her request for medicine and chemotherapy by two months by her health insurance company. Though the company eventually approved her claim, that two-month delay was enough time for her tumors to grow out of control.
Under normal circumstances, it would be tasteless to politicize the tragic death of a heroic woman like Sutton, but given how strongly she devoted her life to progressive causes, I think she would have wanted it this way. Crystal Lee Sutton, a true American hero, is a victim of a health insurance industry that lacks ethics, a consortium of corporate interests more beholden to their stockholders than their policy holders. These are the real death panels. We treat corporations in this country as if they're individuals, and yet there is no accountability for their actions. This is why we need a public option. I'll leave you with her words:
"How in the world can it take so long to find out (whether they would cover the medicine or not) when it could be a matter of life or death," she said. "It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."
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Ellie Greenwich (1940-2009)
Sad, sad news: Ellie Greenwich, one of the great songwriters of the 1960s, has passed away. As partner with Jeff Barry and Tony Powers and as an independent songwriter, Greenwich was responsible for, simply put, a sizable chunk of the great enduring songs of the golden age of American rock. Though she's gone now, her songs will live on and on as long as there is a place for pop. In tribute to this incredible writer (and performer), here are just a few of her lasting legacies:
And here's Greenwich herself, with one of her few hits as a performer, "You Don't Know," which was featured on the incomparable One Kiss Can Lead to Another box set:
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Te Wei (1915-2010)
It can hardly be called a tragedy when a 94 year old man dies, especially one whose life was as accomplished as Te Wei's.
Who, you say?
Te Wei, the greatest of the great Chinese art animators of the Shanghai animation studio. One of the incontrovertible artistic masters of animation.
I had the good fortune of learning about Te Wei from a man who knew him, David Ehrlich. In my final term at Dartmouth, I fulfilled a National Cinemas requirement within my Film Studies major with a class inauspiciously titled 'Asian Animation.' Wary of Japanese cartoons about robots and the entire culture of anime fandom in the United States, I had low expectations for the class, despite Ehrlich's reputation as a terrific teacher and his own masterful talent as an animator. We touched, briefly, on Japanese animation, though in those classes we spoke of craftsmen like Osamu Tezuka and his experimental animation in the 1980s and Kihachiro Kawamoto, whose incredibly intricate puppet animations of Japanese folk narratives are haunting and uncanny.
Half the class though was dedicated to Chinese animation, and to a few particularly key figures: A Da, Hu Jinqing, and the greatest of them all, Te Wei.
Te Wei only directed four films in his life. Each is an important work. I'm going to post two of them here and talk briefly about them, but it's better to let the films speak for themselves.
His second film is among the most popular and enduring works in Chinese animation, Where is Mama?, which was his first experiment in integrating traditional Chinese visual culture into animation. It's cute, it's fun, and it portends greatly of the work to come. Since this video is untranslated, you should simply know that the film is about a group of tadpoles searching around their pond trying to determine which adult is their mother. As the figurature is rather abstract, it helps to know this in advance.
The second is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), on which Te worked for decades. It's available for viewing in two parts here:
As in his third film, The Cowherd's Flute (1963), Te draws upon the visual economy and poetry of Chinese shan shui, brush-and-ink landscape paintings designed to reflect Chinese elemental theory. The Cowherd's Flute is good. This one is better. Here the narrative is slowed down. It's ethereal. Te is addressing mortality and the life cycle. Feeling from Mountain and Water is a monster of a film, a work that's so magnificent in its artistry it's hard to find other points to compare it to. Within animation, I can only think of another short work which represents such an epochal statement within the craft, Yuri Norstein's Tale of Tales (1979).
I have David Ehrlich, who recently retired from teaching this past semester, to thank for introducing me to this moving work. David's love for art and personal expression in all forms has been an inspiration to every single student who ever took a class with him, and I wish him the best.
I hope that you take the time to watch these films. They're slow, at first glance boring, but if you pay attention to it, the art of Te Wei - the attention to line, shape, fluidity of motion, and the manipulation of time and negative space as formal elements within animation are masterful.
So as I said above: the death of Te Wei is no tragedy. It is simply a loss. A tremendous loss.