The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[SlowwHand]

I liked it. Easy dancing.

[Wezil]

[Uncle Sparky]

And those were not sequins!

Do you have Ick?

[-Jrabbit]

Actually, I've been a vociferous antidiscoist dating back to the 70s.

And those were not sequins!

[Wezil]

Ruh-roh!

Is it true you once owned a pair of sequined pants?

[Wezil]

After a two month lull it looks like I might need to sharpen the points pencil soon.

I'll be glad to see the Libyan terrorist go. He's lived too long as is.

Not so glad about Robin Gibb but I guess he can serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of disco.

[-Jrabbit]

Robin Gibb Gravely Ill In Hospital: Reports »

AP | April 14, 2012 at 09:56 AM
LONDON Former Bee Gee Robin Gibb is in a coma after contracting pneumonia, a statement on his official website said Saturday. The statement, which confirmed media reports that the singer was gravely ill, said "we are all hoping and praying that he will pull through."

Ruh-roh!

[molly bloom]

Another painter hits the canvas:

John Golding, who has died aged 82, packed into his life separate but intertwined careers as artist and historian of modern art. Soon after he had completed his doctoral dissertation on cubism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, it was published as Cubism, A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914 (1959), and has stood ever since as the clearest exposition of that extraordinary era in the history of the art of the 20th century.

In a field in which so many literate and knowledgable writers had known Pablo Picasso well – from the compiler of the Dictionnaire Picasso, Pierre Daix, to his first English biographer, the painter Roland Penrose, his most discriminating collector, Douglas Cooper, and the writer of what is likely to be the definitive biography, John Richardson, – this was a remarkable achievement. Golding added to it in 1988, when an exhibition in Paris and Barcelona, organised around Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), overlapped with another show, Late Picasso, in Paris and London, of Picasso's late period (1953-73), and Golding wrote what remains one of the finest accounts of Picasso's achievement in an essay of nearly 11,000 words in the New York Review of Books.

Yet more than with any of his writings, he made his public mark with another Picasso scholar, Elizabeth Cowling, by curating two groundbreaking Tate exhibitions: Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, in 1994, and Matisse/Picasso, in 2002-03, which also travelled to the Grand Palais in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The first of these shows demonstrated what many people already suspected, that as a sculptor/painter, Picasso had more sculptural ideas than most specialists in that field. After its success, the Tate's director, Nicholas Serota, challenged his dream team to come up with something as good. Cowling suggested Matisse/Picasso to Golding, who concurred enthusiastically. Everybody knew about the creation of cubism by Picasso and Georges Braque, "like two mountaineers roped together", as Braque described it. The idea that the wary and slow-burning relationship between Picasso and Matisse should have been just as productive, though lasting more than half a century rather than the six or seven hectic Picasso-Braque years, had never been so boldly proposed as in this exhibition.

Golding attacked the project with determination, talking not just great galleries but reluctant private collectors into parting with masterpieces chosen not simply for their quality but to be placed in conjunction, Picasso with Matisse, Matisse with Picasso, to show how they fed off each other. Together with a catalogue essay by Golding, argued with characteristic calmness and lucidity, the exhibition was a triumph of enlightened scholarship and sheer pleasure.

Neither Picasso nor Matisse of course was ever an abstractionist. Golding was, and the clue to his practice as a painter lies in his Paths to the Absolute (2000). This effectively stood as his credo, that abstract art was not simply decorative but, as he put it in the preface, was "heavily imbued with meaning [and] with content", a case he argued with studies of seven abstract artists, beginning with the early 20th-century Europeans Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky and ending with the post-second-world-war Americans Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. The book was essentially a transcript of his AW Mellon lectures of 1997, the famous series of talks that also produced such celebrated studies of art history as EH Gombrich's Art and Illusion and Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Golding's rigorous but approachable work comfortably takes its place among them, and in the year of its publication it won the Mitchell prize, the principal annual US award for art history.

Although he was born in Hastings, East Sussex, Golding's parents brought him up from early childhood in Mexico. During the second world war, he came to know the maverick English surrealist Leonora Carrington, who had made her home in Mexico, and in her eclectic circle Golding met the film-maker Luis Buñuel and the poet Octavio Paz, as well as emigre surrealists such as the French poet Benjamin Péret and the Austrian artist Wolfgang Paalen. But it was the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Juan O'Gorman and especially José Orozco who really interested him. He was especially impressed by the boldly schematic figures of Orozco that aimed at the grand simplicity of early Italian masters in the circle of Giotto, and it was these that he remembered after the war when he himself began to paint.

First though, Golding took a degree at Toronto University. He made frequent visits during this time to the Museum of Modern Art and worked for a period as a stage designer. He returned to London to take an MA at the Courtauld. In 1953 he saw the major show of cubism in Paris at the Musée d'Art Moderne and decided to write his doctoral thesis at the Courtauld on the formative years of the movement, from 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, until the outbreak of war in 1914. The resulting book won the approval of both Braque and Picasso and became a keystone in Golding's life. Although he had decided while he was studying that he would work as an artist as well as a historian, inevitably the acclaim for his book drew Golding deeper into academic life.

He started to teach at the Courtauld in 1959. He was a reader in art history by 1981, at which point the Royal College of Art made him the siren offer of senior tutor in the painting school. Golding took it, in the knowledge that at the RCA he could immerse himself full time in the practice of painting, his own as well as his students'. "I am not interested in art as self-discovery or therapy," he said. He wanted to be a full-time professional, committed to pushing painting forward in the exploration of colour and light.

His painting was already gaining recognition, notably when he was included in the 1974 Hayward Annual, British Painting, selected by Andrew Forge. In the 1980s he had a run of one-man shows in top galleries, including Juda Rowan in London and the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, as well as in Tokyo, Sydney and at the Yale Centre for British Art in Connecticut, where the catalogue for his show was written by Forge, who, like Golding, was a painter and deeply sensitive critic.

Golding's knowledge of Renaissance painting, especially the great Venetians and particularly their rendering of the fall of light on to bodies, the way it breaks up outlines and dissolves form and mass, informed his own work as he moved out of figuration and into abstract canvases in which light was the subject. He painted vertical streaks of colour down his canvases like pleated light (as he put it) and occasionally on, say, a misty blue, he would scatter clusters of gold pigment to reflect the actual light. After the end of the 20th century, he started to structure his paintings so that they appeared to be based on photographs from thousands of feet above the Earth, with "roads" and "bridges" and "canals". He even called one of these canvases Mappa Mundi.

In retrospect, though, it seems to have been inevitable that Golding's own painting should be overshadowed by his reputation as a historian. As a teacher, he was popular with his students. In person he looked a little like Picasso, but his voice was soft and his delivery almost contemplative, as though he was thinking his way forward, trying his ideas out on his audience as he formulated them, even on subjects he knew well.

The historian James Joll, with whom he shared his life for many years, died in 1994. He is survived by two nephews, Michael and Richard.

• Harold John Golding, artist, art historian and curator, born 10 September 1929; died 9 April 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/apr/12/john-golding

[Wezil]

TRIPOLI - The former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people was transferred to hospital on Friday after his health deteriorated quickly, his brother said.

Abdulbasit al-Megrahi was taken from his Tripoli home to a private hospital, his brother Abdulhakim told Reuters. “His health began to deteriorate quickly and we were worried about him, so took him immediately to the hospital where he is receiving a blood transfusion,” he said.

[SlowwHand]

Mike Wallace Dies: '60 Minutes' Correspondent Was 93
ABC News - 26 minutes ago
Veteran broadcast journalist Mike Wallace has died, according to CBS News. He was 93 years old and had been in declining health in recent years.

Andy and now him.

[molly bloom]

The Dubliners bow out, with the last of the originals... farewell Barney.

Barney McKenna, who has died aged 72, was the last surviving founding member of the Irish folk group the Dubliners. While Ronnie Drew's gravelly voice gave the band its memorable vocal sound, it was McKenna's playing of the tenor banjo, coupled with John Sheahan's fiddle, that gave the Dubliners their original instrumental quality. In the process, McKenna redefined the role of the banjo in Irish traditional music. His distinctive playing can be heard on the Dubliners' two UK hit singles in 1967, Seven Drunken Nights and Black Velvet Band, as well as on group favourites such as The Wild Rover and McAlpine's Fusiliers. When the Pogues brought the Dubliners back to the vanguard of Irish music in 1987, their joint recording of The Irish Rover has his banjo well to the fore.

McKenna was born in Donnycarney, Co Dublin, and started to play the banjo because he could not afford a mandolin. He was rejected from the Irish army band because of his poor eyesight. In Dublin in the late 1950s and early 60s, there was just a handful of folk musicians, often playing informally in a variety of combinations. McKenna was initially a member of a short-lived group fronted by the uilleann piper Paddy Moloney, who cited that lineup as the first incarnation of the Chieftains.

Meanwhile, Drew was asked by the actor John Molloy to perform at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and he invited McKenna to join him on stage. On Fridays, Drew and McKenna would meet Molloy at O'Donoghue's pub to get paid. One night, with the landlord's permission, they played some tunes in the bar. The music sessions became a regular event – a rarity in pubs at the time – and the two musicians were joined by Luke Kelly, newly returned from England, and Ciarán Bourke. Known as the Ronnie Drew Folk Group, they soon changed their name to the Dubliners.

When RTÉ banned the band's bawdy single Seven Drunken Nights, the pirate station Radio Caroline helped propel it into the British charts. The group's hard-living, hard-drinking image was seemingly confirmed by album titles such as A Drop of the Hard Stuff (1967). Concert tours in the US led to further international touring for a band whose matching bushy beards made them immediately recognisable.

McKenna was enormously influential and his GDAE tuning was copied by countless banjo players in Ireland and beyond, making it the standard for Irish music. The tuning was an octave below the fiddle, opening up the banjo to a wide range of traditional music. The broadcaster and banjo player Mick Moloney told me: "His very gentle, subtle picking style, along with the beautiful swing in his playing, were an absolute revelation to the Irish music scene." The Dubliners' concerts invariably included banjo solos from McKenna, such as, in recent years, The Maid Behind the Bar and The High Reel. In addition, McKenna played the mandolin and the melodeon.

Throughout his 50 years with the Dubliners, McKenna made a vocal contribution to their concerts and albums on love and sea songs, often with minimal instrumental accompaniment. A favourite was John Conolly's Fiddler's Green. He was well known as a raconteur, both on and off stage, and his funny sayings became known as Barneyisms.

Both Kelly and Bourke died in the 1980s. Drew, who died in 2008, had periods away from the band. New members joined, such as Seán Cannon and Eamonn Campbell. But it was McKenna – alongside Sheahan, who joined in 1964 – who provided the continuity in a band that defied the changing tastes of Irish traditional music to build a worldwide fanbase for the good-time, occasionally raucous, street songs of Dublin.

McKenna had recently completed the Dubliners' 50th anniversary tour of England, as well as concerts in Germany and Dublin. In February, the band was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk awards. McKenna, with failing eyesight, looked frail but still performed with style.

McKenna's wife, Joka, died in the 1980s. He is survived by his partner, Tina, his sister, Marie, and brother, Sean.

• Bernard Noel McKenna, folk musician, born 16 December 1939; died 5 April 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/06/barney-mckenna

Not a Dubliners' song, but one I'm sure he would have enjoyed- the Parting Glass.

[SlowwHand]

What a shame. My heart pumps purple panther piss for him.

[Wezil]

Hugo Chavez is invoking a heavy-hitter in his attempt to stay out of our pool.

(CNN) -- An emotional Hugo Chavez discussed his struggle with cancer Thursday night, tearing up at times as he spoke at a Mass in western Venezuela.

"Christ ... give me life, because I still have things to do for the people and this country. Do not take me yet," the Venezuelan president said.

At a service in his home state of Barinas billed by state television as giving thanks for his health, Chavez described cancer as "a true threat that marks the end of the path for many people. The end of the physical path, that's the truth."

But Chavez stressed that he was recovering, saying he had "much faith, much hope, much willpower to defeat this threat, as many people have, with the help of God and medical science."

He ended his sometimes somber, sometimes jocular remarks at the Holy Thursday Mass with what he said was his message for God.

"Give me your crown, Christ, give it to me. Let me bleed. Give me your cross, 100 crosses, so I can carry them. But give me life, because I still have things to do for the people and this country," Chavez said. "Do not take me yet. Give me your cross, give me your thorns, give me your blood. I am prepared to carry it. But with life, Christ. Amen."

The 57-year-old president has not specified the type of cancer he is battling, and the government has released few specifics, fueling widespread speculation about his health and political future.

Get your things done Hugo. We're waiting...

[Uncle Sparky]

Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika died yesterday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-suspense.html

[Wezil]

Have we had the Coptic Pope ?

He died the same day as John Demjanjuk.