5 posts tagged “death”
BANGKOK (AP) - Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu" who also had a wide-ranging career in the movies, has been found dead in the Thai capital, Bangkok. A news report said he was found hanged in his hotel room and was believed to have committed suicide.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, Michael Turner, confirmed the death of the 72-year-old actor. He said Carradine died either late Wednesday or early Thursday, but he could not provide further details out of consideration for his family.
The Web site of the Thai newspaper The Nation cited unidentified police sources as saying Carradine was found Thursday hanged in his luxury hotel room and is believed to have committed suicide.
Carradine was a leading member of a venerable Hollywood acting family that included his father, character actor John Carradine, and brother Keith.
In all, he appeared in more than 100 feature films with such directors as Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman and Hal Ashby.
But he was best known for his role as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin priest traveling the 1800s American frontier West in the TV series "Kung Fu," which aired in 1972-75.
He reprised the role in a mid-1980s TV movie and played Caine's grandson in the 1990s syndicated series "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues."
He returned to the top in recent years as the title character in Quentin Tarantino's two-part saga "Kill Bill."
Reposted from: iWon.com
You either love him or hate him. Bernie Mac passed away this morning:
CHICAGO (AP) - Bernie Mac, the Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor and comedian who worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago's South Side, died Saturday at age 50.
"Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital," his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.
She said no other details were available and asked that his family's privacy be respected.
The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.
Recently, Mac's brand of comedy caught him flack when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.
Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama's campaign.
But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.
"Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show."
Mac started his comedy career at age 8, with a standup performance at a church dinner. In 1977, at age 20, he took that act to comedy clubs in Chicago.
His film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans movie "Mo' Money" in 1992. Mac went on to star in the "Ocean's Eleven" franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney and his turn with Ashton Kutcher in 2005's "Guess Who?" - a remake of the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn 1967 classic "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" - topped the box office.
Mac also had starring roles in "Bad Santa,""Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" and "Transformers."
The comedian drew critical and popular acclaim with his Fox television series "The Bernie Mac Show," which aired more than 100 episodes from 2001 to 2006.
The series about a man's adventures raising his sister's three children, won a Peabody Award in 2002. At the time, judges wrote they chose the sitcom for transcending "race and class while lifting viewers with laughter, compassion - and cool."
The show garnered Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for Mac. He also was nominated for a Grammy award for best comedy album in 2001 along with his "The Original Kings of Comedy" co-stars, Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley and Cedric The Entertainer.
In 2007, Mac told David Letterman on CBS'"Late Show" that he planned to retire soon.
"I'm going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit," Mac told Letterman. "I missed a lot of things, you know. I was a street performer for two years. I went into clubs in 1977."
Mac was born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough on Oct. 5, 1957, in Chicago. He grew up on the city's South Side, living with his mother and grandparents. His grandfather was the deacon of a Baptist church.
In his 2004 memoir, "Maybe You Never Cry Again," Mac wrote about having a poor childhood - eating bologna for dinner - and a strict, no-nonsense upbringing.
Mac's mother died of cancer when he was 16. In his book, Mac said she was a support for him and told him he would surprise everyone when he grew up.
"Woman believed in me," he wrote. "She believed in me long before I believed."
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.
"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day. When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.
"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
When asked about the fallout from the Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction," Carlin told the AP, "What are we, surprised?"
"On that Super Bowl broadcast of Janet Jackson's there was also a commercial about a 4-hour erection. A lot of people were saying about Janet Jackson, 'How do I explain to my kids? We're a little family, we watched it together ...' And, well, what did you say about the other thing? These are convenient targets."
Carlin was born May 12, 1937 and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Forth Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar.
Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.
Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.
"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."
Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."
Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.
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Associated Press writer Christopher Weber contributed to this report.
Diddley died of heart failure at his home in Archer, Fla., spokeswoman Susan Clary said. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.
The legendary singer and performer, known for his homemade square guitar, dark glasses and black hat, was an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and received a lifetime achievement award in 1999 at the Grammy Awards. In recent years he also played for the elder President Bush and President Clinton.
Diddley appreciated the honors he received, "but it didn't put no figures in my checkbook."
"If you ain't got no money, ain't nobody calls you honey," he quipped.
The name Bo Diddley came from other youngsters when he was growing up in Chicago, he said in a 1999 interview.
"I don't know where the kids got it, but the kids in grammar school gave me that name," he said, adding that he liked it so it became his stage name. Other times, he gave somewhat differing stories on where he got the name. Some experts believe a possible source for the name is a one-string instrument used in traditional blues music called a diddley bow.
His first single, "Bo Diddley," introduced record buyers in 1955 to his signature rhythm: bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp, often summarized as "shave and a haircut, two bits." The B side, "I'm a Man," with its slightly humorous take on macho pride, also became a rock standard.
The company that issued his early songs was Chess-Checkers records, the storied Chicago-based labels that also recorded Chuck Berry and other stars.
Howard Kramer, assistant curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, said in 2006 that Diddley's Chess recordings "stand among the best singular recordings of the 20th century."
Diddley's other major songs included, "Say Man,""You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover,""Shave and a Haircut,""Uncle John,""Who Do You Love?" and "The Mule."
Diddley's influence was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Buddy Holly borrowed the bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp rhythm for his song "Not Fade Away."
The Rolling Stones' bluesy remake of that Holly song gave them their first chart single in the United States, in 1964. The following year, another British band, the Yardbirds, had a Top 20 hit in the U.S. with their version of "I'm a Man."
Diddley was also one of the pioneers of the electric guitar, adding reverb and tremelo effects. He even rigged some of his guitars himself.
"He treats it like it was a drum, very rhythmic," E. Michael Harrington, professor of music theory and composition at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., said in 2006.
Many other artists, including the Who, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello copied aspects of Diddley's style.
Growing up, Diddley said he had no musical idols, and he wasn't entirely pleased that others drew on his innovations.
"I don't like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it," he said. "I don't have any idols I copied after."
"They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there," he said.
Despite his success, Diddley claimed he only received a small portion of the money he made during his career. Partly as a result, he continued to tour and record music until his stroke. Between tours, he made his home near Gainesville in north Florida.
"Seventy ain't nothing but a damn number," he told The Associated Press in 1999. "I'm writing and creating new stuff and putting together new different things. Trying to stay out there and roll with the punches. I ain't quit yet."
Diddley, like other artists of his generations, was paid a flat fee for his recordings and said he received no royalty payments on record sales. He also said he was never paid for many of his performances.
"I am owed. I've never got paid," he said. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."
In the early 1950s, Diddley said, disc jockeys called his type of music, "Jungle Music." It was Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed who is credited with inventing the term "rock 'n' roll."
Diddley said Freed was talking about him, when he introduced him, saying, "Here is a man with an original sound, who is going to rock and roll you right out of your seat."
Diddley won attention from a new generation in 1989 when he took part in the "Bo Knows" ad campaign for Nike, built around football and baseball star Bo Jackson. Commenting on Jackson's guitar skills, Diddley turned to the camera and said, "He don't know Diddley."
"I never could figure out what it had to do with shoes, but it worked," Diddley said. "I got into a lot of new front rooms on the tube."
Born as Ellas Bates on Dec. 30, 1928, in McComb, Miss., Diddley was later adopted by his mother's cousin and took on the name Ellis McDaniel, which his wife always called him.
When he was 5, his family moved to Chicago, where he learned the violin at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He learned guitar at 10 and entertained passers-by on street corners.
By his early teens, Diddley was playing Chicago's Maxwell Street.
"I came out of school and made something out of myself. I am known all over the globe, all over the world. There are guys who have done a lot of things that don't have the same impact that I had," he said.
(reposted from AP News http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20080602/D9121T2O0.html)
Over the years I have studied, looked at, laughed at, and attended services for over twenty different types of organized religion. I have read the bible, the English King James version, both new and old testaments. I have listened to ministers tell me that if I was not baptized in their church then I was going to Hell. I have had girls from a church take me out on dates, the whole time taking about how they would only really get serious with someone who was a member of their congregation. I watched leaders of a church drive around town in $40,000 cars, live in large homes, and ask their factory working parish to give more money because the church has fallen on hard times; and watched the collection plate fill up. I have heard the same word of God spoken by several different people and all of them have their own idea of what it means; and each of them was adamant that they were correct in their interpretation and everyone else was wrong.
I have learned that in some beliefs a blood transfusion or organ transplant is bad thing, that it is wrong to celebrate birthdays or holidays, that pork is bad, fish should be eaten on Fridays. Pre-marital sex is either a sin, or something that should be viewed with guilt, in some cases post-marital sex should be viewed the same way. You should love your neighbors, unless they are heathens, in which case you should either try to convert them, or kill them. You should love your parents, again unless they fall into the heathen category. Murder is bad, unless the church sanctions it, or if you feel there is a underlying religious reason why you did it, and you pray for the person’s soul before your end their life. The ten commandments are sometimes flexible and open to interpretation, not by you, but by people that the church has decided know more about these things than you do. You should give 5%, 10%, 15%, up to 35% percent of your income and time to the church, because it takes a lot of time and money for you to study religion, even if it happens to be in a ballroom at a local hotel.
BUT, these things are not what irritate me. Here is what does: When they jump into a situation that they have no right to get involved in. Whether it be gay rights, abortion, or even politics. Or when they feel they have to become a PR firm for anyone in their congregation; past or present. My most current example is something that just happened in Champaign. I will not list the student’s name or the church involved. I do this more out of respect of the student and her family, and less to protect the church.
The student, was a local graduate, who came back to town to celebrate during a well known party weekend. Too much alcohol and a mistake in judgment regarding a motorcycle resulted in the student’s death. This is a horrible thing too happen. I am not going to criticize a young person who drank too much and made a mistake. BUT, I am going to criticize her church (or former church). They have launched a major PR campaign to make sure that everyone knows that she was a member of their congregation. They are doing it using the backdoor approach. Articles and stories written about the student are all laced with glorification of the church, and little information about the women. Example: one of the stories has an interview with her “friend” who says (and I paraphrase) “she was a wonderful friend who I was happy to see found our church during my freshman year.” Wait there is more, they also stated that the student “found joy in praying for her non-saved family” and she “prayed for their salvation all the time.” Okay. Maybe it was just an isolated “friend” selling the church. Nope. The next “friend” spent time taking about how the student was loved by all and had a glorious nature about her “that came out more after finding their church.” Whoa, I am going to fight the urge to dwell on how the student died, lets just say it was not on a church field trip; But all of the “friends” interviewed could only seem to talk about all the time that she spent in church. They did interview the family too, they published basically one sentence that can be summarized with “we will miss our daughter and this is a tragedy.” They did have comments from a few more “church friends” and they all said the same thing: “She was part of our church, thank God or she would be in hell right now.” Then they talked about how they have all left comments on her blog site talking about her and the glory of their church.
Okay, here is my parting shot. If ever someone asks me to comment on a friend of mine; and all I can talk about is what church they went to, I would not consider myself one of their friends. If I was interviewing people for an article I was writing, and I was NOT trying to create a PR piece for my church, then I would actually try and find some real friends to talk to who could say things like “we used to gorge ourselves on Dominos pizza after hitting the bars on Friday night”; and if while doing that article I interviewed her family: Damn it, they are more important and they merit more than just one freaking sentence in the piece.
I am not against people attending church. I am not against religion in general. I am against their need to tell me how to live my life, when as a group they cannot agree which way is the right way.
