The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Alexander's Horse]

seen a lot of cooz?

[Uncle Sparky]

Deep Throat was one of the first porn flics I ever saw.

I'm feeling old.

I saw it in Time Square. Double feature with The Devil in Miss Jones.

[Wezil]

Nothing fancy like that for me. I saw it on VHS somewhere around 1980.

Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door were other early ones I remember. Marilyn Chambers.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

hairy bush porn

You big girl's blouse.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Impressive how he looked 40 at 25. The 70s were a hard decade.

[Uncle Sparky]

Acting hard is a hard business.

[molly bloom]

Acting hard is a hard business.

The stress must have aged John Holmes quite a bit... that and the insane drug abuse, hold-ups, et cetera. Speaking of jazz films, Terry Lightfoot's clarinet has blown its last:

The jazz clarinettist and bandleader Terry Lightfoot, who has died aged 77 from prostate cancer, fell for traditional jazz early on, forming his first band, the Wood Green Stompers, when he was 17. He stayed true to the band's freewheeling ensemble style until the end. Along the way, he occupied much the same territory as his fellow bandleaders Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, employing excellent musicians, the accent in his stage presentations on cheerful enjoyment of the music. "I like to think I've got a band which can present itself so as to get the music across to a broad public," he said. While never reaching the commanding heights of jazz creativity, Lightfoot's bands were always popular and easy to admire, moving seamlessly from the smoky clubs of his youth into the nation's TV studios and then to cabaret venues and concert halls around the world.

Lightfoot was born in Potters Bar (then in Middlesex, now in Hertfordshire). His first musical experience was as a boy songster in a junior variety troupe. There were also piano lessons and attempts at the cornet with the town band before jazz took hold and he moved to clarinet to fill a hole in the Enfield grammar school jazz band. Self-taught but enthusiastic, he prospered and formed his Stompers, while working briefly on a local newspaper and then in accounting. Good enough to act as support to the bands of Chris Barber and Humphrey Lyttelton at the Wood Green jazz club, north London, the Stompers achieved their apogee at the Conway Hall in central London on a bill that included Lyttelton and the vocal belter Sophie Tucker.

Following national service in the RAF, he formed his Jazzmen in 1955, turning professional two years later. The Jazzmen's drummer, Ginger Baker, was later to achieve greater fame with Cream. Attracting widespread praise for their well-turned traditional style and tapping into the emerging "trad" boom, Lightfoot's band – now including Ball on trumpet – toured with the skiffle star Lonnie Donegan, US country singer Slim Whitman and some then prominent "beat" groups, including the Who. In 1959, there was added recognition when they opened for New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory on his UK concert tour. Then came their inclusion in Richard Lester's spirited 1962 movie It's Trad, Dad!, the band's featured number Tavern in the Town gaining a chart entry, one of several Lightfoot tunes to become a minor hit.

With success came more success, the band appearing at the Beaulieu jazz festival, Hampshire, in 1961 and enjoying residencies on top BBC radio shows such as Easybeat, Saturday Club and Sunday Break. Later there were many TV appearances including six seasons of the Morecambe and Wise Show and Des O'Connor's first series. In what was an immensely productive period for Lightfoot, the band toured regularly with visiting American jazz artists, recorded often and earned a much-prized role in 1965 as support band for the Louis Armstrong All-Stars UK tour.

"Jazzed out" after 10 years of continuous touring, Lightfoot and his wife, Iris, then ran a pub for a year. Back in music, he joined Ball's hugely popular band as clarinettist, touring the world. Newly enthused, Lightfoot re-formed his band, which carried on much as it had before, with many overseas visits, often to military camps, their mix of bright, accessible jazz, comedy vocals and down-home fun as attractive as ever. In 1978, Lightfoot took over the Three Horseshoes pub in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, calling in favours from his many friends and promoting live jazz at the venue for some five years before again responding to the call of the road.

Thereafter, Lightfoot concentrated on themed concert presentations billed as The Special Magic of Louis Armstrong or From Bourbon Street to Broadway. As ever, his sidemen were of the highest calibre, most notably the trumpeter Ian Hunter-Randall – a Lightfoot man for 25 years – and the trombonists Ian Bateman and Roy Williams, with Lightfoot adding alto and soprano saxophones to his more usual clarinet. Recent shows had included his daughter Melinda Lightfoot as the band's featured singer.

Lightfoot is survived by Iris and their daughters, Melinda and Michelle.

• Terence Lightfoot, jazz clarinettist and bandleader, born 21 May 1935; died 15 March 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/19/terry-lightfoot

See also: http://www.terrylightfoot.com/2010/TerryLightfoot.htm

From 'It's Trad, Dad', this is Terry and 'There's A Tavern In The Town' :

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

James Herbert, one of the UK's most popular novelists and writer of bestselling horror books including The Rats, The Fog and The Survivor, has died at his home in Sussex aged 69.

His publisher, Pan Macmillan, said Herbert, author of 23 novels published in 34 languages that sold more than 54m copies worldwide, died peacefully in his bed.

Tributes were led by Jeremy Trevathan, his editor for 10 years. He said: "Jim Herbert was one of the keystone authors in a genre that had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. It's a true testament to his writing and his enduring creativity that his books continued to be huge bestsellers right up until his death. He has the rare distinction that his novels were considered classics of the genre within his lifetime. His death marks the passing of one of the giants of popular fiction in the 20th century."

Novelist James Smythe, who writes about horror fiction for the Guardian, said: "James Herbert was one of the first adult writers – in both senses of the term – that I ever read. When I stopped reading my gateway teenage books and moved on to my dad's horror novels, he was one of the big three: him, Stephen King and Dean Koontz.

"He was the weirdest, the nastiest. The Fog and The Rats terrified me; Creed was spoken about in my school in almost mythological ways, being both horrifying and introducing us to sexual concepts we'd never contemplated before that point; and The Magic Cottage, when given to me aged 13 by an amazing English teacher, was one of the books that made me want to become a writer.

"The early books still retain an amazing power over me to this day, showing his skill as one of the greats of the horror fiction genre."

Herbert was born in London in 1943, the youngest son of East End market traders, and got his first work in advertising, becoming art director and head of the agency he joined.

At the age of 28 he began writing his first novel, a terrifying story of London being overrun by mutant, flesh-eating rats. When The Rats was finally published in 1974, the first print run of 100,000 copies sold out in three weeks.

The pattern was to be repeated time and again: he scared the living daylights out of readers with books such as The Dark, The Magic Cottage, Haunted and Creed.

Four of his novels – The Rats, The Survivor, Fluke and Haunted – were made into films while one of his later works, The Secret of Crickley Hall, became a three-part supernatural thriller for the BBC last year.

The paperback of his 23rd novel, Ash, was published last week.

In an interview last year Herbert said: "I hate violence and I didn't plan to write horror; it just poured out of me. The great thing is that you can write humour, romance or political thrillers under that genre."

Herbert, awarded an OBE in 2010, is survived by his wife, Eileen, and their three daughters.

My generation's favourite horror writer.

[Uncle Sparky]

The stress must have aged John Holmes quite a bit... that and the insane drug abuse, hold-ups, et cetera. Speaking of jazz films,...

Molly - I think you have again mixed up the words 'jazz' and 'jizz'... as in the sentence, "Every Friday night we go to a private club where the jazz washes over us."
The mistake can be life altering.

[Wezil]

It's pretty sad we can't post a clip of Holmes' work.

[Krill]

Molly - I think you have again mixed up the words 'jazz' and 'jizz'... as in the sentence, "Every Friday night we go to a private club where the jazz washes over us."
The mistake can be life altering.

Sig material right here.

[molly bloom]

Molly - I think you have again mixed up the words 'jazz' and 'jizz'... as in the sentence, "Every Friday night we go to a private club where the jazz washes over us."
The mistake can be life altering.

Yuk yuk

Or do I mean yuck yuck ? Actually my other half calls p0rn mags 'jazz mags' based on jazz being the past tense of jizz... Anyway, British character actor Pat Keen has lost her edge:

The actor Pat Keen, who has died aged 79, had a successful career in supporting roles for more than half a century. She possessed an uncommon versatility, as happy in Chekhov and Ibsen as she was feeding lines to Les Dawson, whom she adored. For all that she was in demand in later years to play harridans and busybodies, she never resorted to caricature. She believed in the people she portrayed, breathing life into the stereotypes beloved by too many writers of comedy for television. She refused to take the easy route of playing for laughs, whether on stage or screen.

Pat was born and raised in Willesden, north-west London. She left school after taking A-levels, and it was because of her ability to speak very good colloquial French that she secured a post at the Foreign Office when she was 18. Two years later, she decided to enrol at the Central School of Speech and Drama, which was housed then in an upper floor of the Royal Albert Hall.

After graduating in 1956, she was immediately invited to join Frank Hauser's Oxford Playhouse. She stayed for two, mostly happy, seasons, appearing in everything from Greek tragedy to Aldwych farce. Some parts were bigger than others, but she seemed not to care about the number of words she was required to speak. Pat believed throughout her life in Stanislavsky's dictum that there are no small parts, only small actors.

Her West End debut came in 1960, in the first production of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, as Margaret, the only child of Sir Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield. She would always talk fondly of the experience of acting with that least starry of great actors, who invariably told her ribald jokes in the wings before coming on stage and reducing audiences to tears with his saintly nobility.

In 1962, John Schlesinger cast her in A Kind of Loving, adapted for film from the novel by Stan Barstow, as Christine Harris, a plain northern girl in love with a man who does not want her. There followed many years of distinguished work for television. Pat was the perfect Clara Peggotty, beaming with pleasure at Barkis's proposal of marriage, in David Copperfield (1974) and a startled Miss Pinkerton in the serial adaptation of Vanity Fair (1998). She contrived to be cosily sinister in the dramatisation of Elizabeth Taylor's story The Flypaper (1980), in which she played a cheery paedophile.

When she returned to the cinema, it was as Mrs Wisely, an anxious mother on a motorbike, in Clockwise (1986), written by Michael Frayn and starring John Cleese. She was Mrs Hudson in a dotty Sherlock Holmes frolic, Without a Clue (1988), in which the great detective (Michael Caine) is outwitted by an unusually sharp-eyed Dr Watson (Ben Kingsley), and she brought unobtrusive dignity to the part of the housekeeper in Shadowlands (1993), directed by Richard Attenborough.

Pat's early years in the profession were scarred by a sadness that would remain with her. The death from cancer of her younger brother, Alan, in his mid-20s, shocked her with its awful suddenness. He had married and fathered two small children, whom she helped in more than financial ways. She possessed an unassertive goodness, which may well explain why she was so adept at making kind characters interesting.

As students at Central School, Pat and I shared the same enthusiasms, sitting in the gallery at the Globe (now Gielgud) theatre on successive Saturday nights to watch the incomparable Beatrice Lillie making a sublime fool of herself. We must have seen Peggy Ashcroft's Hedda Gabler a dozen times. In her 60s she went to as many of Ken Dodd's gigs as she could, happy to stay in the auditorium for eight hours while the unstoppable genius became ever more wildly inventive. One of the last jobs she was offered was to play a dying woman in an episode of Casualty. "I've died twice in that bloody programme already," she told me. "I'm not going to do it a third time. And, anyway, the money's not good enough."

She is survived by her sister Angela Yeo, three nieces and a nephew.


• Patricia Margaret Keen, actor, born 21 October 1933; died 1 March 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/mar/21/pat-keen

[molly bloom]

It's pretty sad we can't post a clip of Holmes' work.

His later work is still available on very floppy disk.

[molly bloom]

Has Jason Molina been mentioned ?

Jason Molina, who has died aged 39 after a period of illness, was a singer-songwriter of singular grace. Everything he created had a beautiful handmade feel, from the music he made as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co – wherein he stitched classic rock with alt-country, laced with the loneliness of the American frontier – to the dozens of scribbled-over cassette tapes he sent to his label boss, Secretly Canadian's Chris Swanson, in the months before his death.

"He was an enigma in many ways," says Swanson. "He yearned for older times, pre-computer technology. To people alive in this age, he could be a mystery. He was there to remind you of the past. His journey was similar to [the 18th-century American pioneer] Daniel Boone's – Jason was considered an artist and a songwriter, but really he belonged to a much older generation, a generation of adventurers. He was doing something more dangerous."

There was a magic about Molina's music – simple, direct, plaintive – as his songs conjured up cold moonlight, the guitar picking out gentle beauty amid the red sky's forked lightning; burnt out shipbuilding and the distant clatter of busy steel forges; and the drifting of aimless youth.

Molina began making music under the Songs: Ohia name in 1996, with the release of the seven-inch Soul on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's label, Palace Records. After Swanson heard Soul in a record shop in Bloomington, Indiana, he formed Secretly Canadian to release Molina's music.

Molina made music as Songs: Ohia for several years – the band was basically him and a rotating roster of musicians. After Didn't It Rain (2002), he became Magnolia Electric Co with the release of their eponymous album in 2003 produced by Steve Albini. As he said at the time: "Something has changed fundamentally. I can't put my finger on it."

As Swanson says: "The work that he did, in many ways it was indie rock but it was truly transcendent, and as he got older his records became richer and richer, and wiser and wiser."

Three albums followed Magnolia Electric Co's debut, as well as many concerts worldwide. A boxset, Sojourner (2007), was followed two years later by the album Josephine and Molina's collaboration with Centro-matic's Will Johnson. However, alcohol-related problems increasingly began to threaten Molina's health and limited his public appearances from 2009 onwards.

Molina was born in Oberlin, Ohio, and studied art at Oberlin College, graduating in 1996. His father was a professor, but Molina came from firmly working-class roots. His childhood was split between small towns in Ohio and West Virginia. He was proud of his heritage – that much was clear from listening to the song Captain Badass on the 1999 album Axxess & Ace.

"What made Jason so endearing was his lack of pretence," wrote his close friend Henry Owings in Chunklet magazine. "For as intense as he wrote, he was a goofball. But maybe, just maybe, his music was alluding to what was fighting inside him. The demons. The ghosts. The pain. The disease."

In 2011 Molina's family posted a plea on the Magnolia Electric Co website for donations to his medical bills. In that statement, his family said he had been in and out of rehab for two years, that he did not have health insurance, and that he had been convalescing on a farm in West Virginia.

Molina is survived by his wife, Darcie; a brother and a sister; and his father.

• Jason Andrew Molina, musician, born 30 December 1973; died 16 March 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/19/jason-molina

An alt-country look:



'Hold On Magnolia' :

[embalmer42]

My generation's favourite horror writer.

Crap. Sad news indeed.

I'll have to see if I can find my old copy of "The Fog" or "The Rats" and give it another read.

RIP