The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Wezil]

Al B's not even playing...

[Al B. Sure!]

Sloww is delusional.

[Wezil]

You should enter a team next year to cut down on his confusion.

[Al B. Sure!]

You should enter a team next year to cut down on his confusion.

I'm too young to be competitive and I'm with DaShi on this one.

[SlowwHand]

I think that you and DaShi will make a nice couple.

[Wezil]

Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter has died at the age of 57.

The former Montreal Expos star was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour last May.

The 11-time all-star was the first player to go into the Hall of Fame with an Expos cap on his plaque.

A three-time Gold Glove winner, Carter’s single for the New York Mets in the 1986 World Series touched off one of the most improbable rallies in baseball.

His bottom-of-the-10th single in Game 6 helped the New York Mets mount a charge against the Boston Red Sox and eventually beat them.

Nicknamed Kid, Carter played nearly two decades with the Mets, Montreal, San Francisco and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

http://www.thestar.com/sports/baseball/mlb/article/1132748--gary-carter-baseball-hall-of-famer-dead-at-57?bn=1

Gary Carter was 57 and a Unique Pick for ColdWizard (5).

= (171 - 5) + (100 - 57) +25

= 234 points.

With his second hit of the season ColdWizard takes the lead.

[DaShi]

I demand an investigation! They were doing just fine until Coldwizard put them on his list.

[SlowwHand]

You bastard!

[ColdWizard]

I'm still not sure why Joe Pa wasn't on my main list. Probably willful oversight.

[-Jrabbit]

Yeah, I swapped out JoePa from my original list. For some reason, I thought he might go Zsa Zsa on me.

[SlowwHand]

I'd like to make a motion that we don't even mention her name again. Maybe if/when she finally kicks the proverbial bucket. I can't take it.

[molly bloom]

David Kelly, a fine character actor on stage, television and film died:

IRISH character actor David Kelly, who played Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and motorcycled naked in Waking Ned Devine, has died. He was 82.
His family and friends said Kelly died on Sunday in Dublin after an acting career on stage, film, TV and radio that spanned a half-century. His cause of death was not announced.

Kelly was best known in Ireland for his 1980 depiction of doomed tenement dweller Rashers Tierney in the historical miniseries Strumpet City and for his large body of work as a Dublin stage actor in the 1950s and 1960s.

TV viewers also could recognise his face and bony frame from short, usually comedic turns on myriad soaps and sitcoms, most memorably as a work-dodging Irish builder opposite John Cleese in a 1975 episode of Fawlty Towers.

A longtime colleague, Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan, noted Kelly's old-school charms, punctuated by his propensity for bow ties and smart suits.

"In rehearsal he had a biting wit. He wouldn't do a part unless he knew he could bring something to it no one else could," Colgan said.

Irish comedian Niall Tobin, who worked alongside Kelly in the 1990s village comedy-drama series Ballykissangel, said Kelly "would make you laugh all the time. Even when he was in the depths of a hangover, he would make you laugh".

Usually consigned to bit parts in film, Kelly's two most prominent roles came late in life.

In 1998's Waking Ned Devine he portrayed an Irish villager who must impersonate the late Devine to collect a huge lottery win - and finds himself hurtling down a muddy road, naked apart from his motorcycle helmet, socks and shoes, to keep the ruse intact.

Kelly often joked that his career took off in his 70s once casting agents finally knew about his sexy body.

In 2005 he played Charlie Bucket's grandfatherly escort in Tim Burton's adaptation of the fantasy world of Willy Wonka. That year he also received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Film & Television Academy.

His final role was in 2007's fantasy film Stardust, in which he played the guard between the English village of Wall and the magical kingdom of Stormhold

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/irish-character-actor-david-kelly-dies/story-e6frf7jx-1226273182403

[molly bloom]

Dory Previn writes no more:

Singer-composer Dory Previn dies
Dory Previn (l) was married to composer Andre (r) from 1959 to 1970 Continue reading the main story
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Dory Previn, the US singer and composer who collaborated with former husband Andre on two Oscar-nominated songs, has died in Massachusetts at the age of 86.

Born Dorothy Veronica Langan in 1925, she began as a lyricist before finding success as a solo artist in the 1970s.

She married Andre Previn in 1959 and worked with him on the theme to 1967's Valley of the Dolls.

After he left her for Mia Farrow, she recorded such albums as On My Way to Where and Mythical Kings and Iguanas.

According to the New York Times, her difficult childhood, divorce from Previn and bouts of mental illness informed her music.

The six albums she released in the 1970s were confessional and confrontational.

Beware Of Young Girls, a track from On My Way To Where, directly addressed Mia Farrow's role in the break-up of her marriage.

"Beware of young girls, who come to the door, wistful and pale, of twenty and four," she sang.

"She was my friend. She was invited to my house," the lyrics continued. "She admired my wedding ring".

Her death on Tuesday at her Southfield farm was confirmed by husband Joby Baker, a Canadian actor she married in 1984.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17041329

[molly bloom]

Picture this:

The American artist Dorothea Tanning, who has died aged 101, was a talented painter whose reputation was confounded by her long marriage to the great surrealist Max Ernst. He figures prominently in her autobiography Birthday (1986), but Tanning was not an acolyte or imitator of Ernst. Her own vivid, dreamlike images are highly distinctive, more gothic than surreal.

If anything, in her mid-70s Dorothea Tanning became more productive than ever. Photograph: Peter Ross The manic lucidity and graphic strength of her early work is characterised by the ironically titled Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943), now in the Tate's collection, in which an immense, writhing sunflower appears as animated as the figure of a girl, with her hair on end, standing in an apparently endless corridor. Even more celebrated is the 1942 self-portrait Birthday (held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art), in which Tanning's elegant, bare-breasted figure, set amidst infinitely receding doors, is juxtaposed with a hippogriff seemingly borrowed from a painting by Ingres.

Oddly for a woman not usually lost for words, Tanning had difficulties in finding the title for this picture, which was apparently proposed by Ernst, who had recently arrived from France and was introduced to her by the dealer Julian Levy. Ernst visited Tanning's studio while selecting works by female surrealists for the Art of This Century gallery owned by his wife, Peggy Guggenheim. He stayed for a game of chess, and his relationship with Dorothea endured until his death in 1976.

Tanning's childhood in Galesburg, Illinois, is powerfully evoked in her second memoir, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (2001). Her upbringing in a milieu of eerie, bourgeois calm clearly fed into her art, with its autobiographical tone and childhood imagery. Her formal artistic education was limited, consisting of three weeks at the Chicago Academy of Art. She spent several years in Chicago before migrating to New York in the mid-1930s.

While working as a commercial artist in Manhattan, Tanning evolved an artistically conservative, literary style inspired by gothic novels as well as the seminal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which she saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. She went to Paris three years later in search of the surrealists, only to discover that they had already fled as the second world war approached.

Tanning and Ernst married in 1946, after he and Guggenheim divorced. They initially lived in Sedona, Arizona, a remote desert hamlet in which they built a rough-hewn house of three rooms. When Ernst was refused American citizenship, they moved in 1957 to France, first to Paris and the Loire valley and subsequently to Provence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/02/dorothea-tanning-obituary

[molly bloom]

Homage to a Catalonian:

The distinguished Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, who has died aged 88, conceived of his work as a form of meditation on "the void" – more specifically, "that play of emptiness and fullness which composes everything and which reveals the meaning of nature". He expressed this esoteric philosophy, partly inspired by Zen Buddhism, through a multiplicity of potent, often paradoxical, objects.

In his "matter paintings", Tàpies mixed pigment and varnish with unconventional materials, including marble dust and sand, to create dense, wall-like surfaces that are both blank and teasingly mysterious. He also frequently included cruciform shapes that look less like Christian symbols than negative marks on a child's exercise book, the signatures of illiterate people, or even distortions of the artist's own initial. Clearly he relished the ambiguity.

Tàpies's achievement was to create highly intuitive, enigmatic images that have the potential to change our perception of reality, but defy reduction into a few lines of analysis. But then he was never working with his obituarist in mind. One of his earliest collages, from 1946-47, consisted of a cross made from paper torn out of a Catholic journal's obituaries page. He obviously did not have much respect for the genre.

Despite this elusiveness, it is still possible to outline a variety of themes and influences: leftwing politics and humanitarianism; the practices of Zen meditation, in which contemplation of a wall or a garden of sand can lead to enlightenment; the Christian concept of incarnation; and a conviction that art was a kind of alchemy or magic that could transform the basest materials. While some of these qualities can be traced to aspects of Tàpies's early life, the precise path that he took still has the potential to surprise and bewilder.

Born in Barcelona, Tàpies came from the Catalan intellectual elite. His father, Josep Tàpies i Mestres, was a lawyer with secular, nationalist sympathies who worked for the republican Catalan government during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. In contrast, his mother, María Puig i Guerra, was a devout Catholic, the daughter of a prominent rightwing separatist, who insisted on a religious education for her son throughout the upheavals of the period.

Tàpies's schooling did not have quite the desired effect. Apart from gaining a fear of nuns, he developed an idiosyncratic spirituality that was to influence his later work, although not in ways that were appreciated by the church. Even more important were the two years that he spent recovering from a lung infection contracted in 1940. During this period, he made copies of Van Gogh and Picasso, and read Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as the Japanese Buddhist Okakura Kakuzo – a varied list that weaned him from the conventional classicism admired by many older Catalan artists.

Compelled by his father to begin a law degree, in 1944 Tàpies also attended a drawing course at the Academia Valls in Barcelona, where his artistic aspirations were encouraged by the poet and critic Josep M Junoy. He spent the 1940s developing an idiom that was inspired partly by the "primitive" art of children and, more obviously, by Paul Klee and the surrealists. At times, he used Max Ernst's grattage (or scraping) technique, and he was also influenced by his friend Joan Miró, whom he met in 1948. In the same year, Tàpies co-founded the avant-garde Dau al Set group with, among others, the surrealist poet Joan Brossa.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/07/antoni-tapies