Passages

[antnield]

Shashi Kapoor.

[colinr0380]

Ulli Lommel

He turns up in lots of roles throughout Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films but currently I remember him best as an actor for his amazingly deranged role as the son seeing his mother's infatuation with their servant usurp his incestuous affections in Fassbinder's western film Whity. I particularly like that his volatile over the top performance contrasts very well with the (beautiful) almost blank performances from the rest of the characters, especially in the scene where he intrudes on the Whity and his mother being tender post-whipping and then gets slapped silly by mother!

I particularly like that the mother has stopped using whiteface by this stage of the film, matching Whity's dangerous lack of makeup, which emphasises that the characters in either whiteface or blackface are trapped by their superficial masks of colour, unable to show their true faces.

Then Lommel became a director, most famously of The Tenderness of the Wolves, then went to the US and made the music-crime film Cocaine Cowboys (with Andy Warhol in the cast!) and punk film Blank Generation before getting some notoriety with the video nasty The Boogeyman (the score of which is perhaps its best aspect!) and apparently sort of got forced into making a sequel to it after the first film became a success, which kind of turned into a meta-movie about the pressures of the film business and a director trying to contain his creation a long time before Wes Craven's New Nightmare!

He seems to have been working steadily since then on a mix of low budget serial killer biopics, horror films, abortive Marilyn Monroe-conspiracy theory pictures(!), documentaries about Native Americans and his time at Warhol's Factory, and even an apparent 'reboot' of The Boogeyman, Boogeyman: Reincarnation. All of which don't look too good, but its nice to see that he was keeping busy!

[Colpeper]

Christine Keeler

[domino harvey]

Johnny Hallyday-- I'll always remember him for this (and Detective, of course)

[rohmerin]

Jesus, what a year for French myths !

[rohmerin]

King Michael I of Romania has died.

[hearthesilence]

King Michael I of Romania has died.

Just read his obituary. What an incredible story. For the most part, his legend rests on one bit of action, but what a tremendous one it was.

[mfunk9786]

Don't have a SFW link at the moment, but pornstar August Ames has died of an apparent suicide at age 23

[domino harvey]

For future reference, here's a non-pornographic resource of all known porn star deaths, FYI. I find it oddly fascinating reading every once in a while

[mfunk9786]

Still not necessarily SFW to click on and establish a link to from my work computer ("porn" is in the URL), but useful all the same, thanks for posting it.

Seems she refused to do a job two days ago when she found out the male in the scene had done gay porn, and warned whoever was replacing her to be cautious because of differing STD testing protocols. In response, she was being totally lit up by pretty much everyone imaginable for two days online, and her last tweet just read "fuck y'all." Was a fan of her work, she seemed outspoken and strong and obviously was insensitive in this instance but it's always very sad to see anyone bullied to the point of [if the rumors here are correct] taking her own life.

[knives]

Actually given the differences in protocol I don't think refusing should be considered insensitive.

[Big Ben]

Actually given the differences in protocol I don't think refusing should be considered insensitive.

It appears there is a difference with STD testing or something with men and gay pornography? This is all news to me but it doesn't make this situation any less messed up.

[knives]

If I recall, been awhile since I've paid attention, the testing isn't the primary difference. The use of condoms and other similar safety procedures are which has made this a common refusal for some actresses.

[Professor Wagstaff]

For future reference, here's a non-pornographic resource of all known porn star deaths, FYI. I find it oddly fascinating reading every once in a while

It's weird to see Cameron Mitchell's name listed among the performers. Apparently he was tricked into appearing in non-pornographic scenes for a 1980s porn film.

[domino harvey]

It's also not current, as it doesn't have the other big recent porn star death included, Shyla Stylez. Still a pretty exhaustive, if morbid, resource

[colinr0380]

For future reference, here's a non-pornographic resource of all known porn star deaths, FYI. I find it oddly fascinating reading every once in a while

I did take a brief look at it and the list of Non dead status updates struck me as very Ballardian:
"Allegedly Alive"; "FAKED: Car crash"; "Not dead"; "Accidental Head Injury, whilst on Valium"; "Rumor". And of course "Still kickin, tho living in Indiana"

Though it does get much darker with the AIDS section.

[med]

Based on what I've read, HIV/AIDS is the only thing regularly tested in the industry, and that if you've worked in porn long enough you accept you'll catch something at some point.

[mfunk9786]

Ames’ death has been confirmed as suicide by hanging.

[domino harvey]

I didn't know who she was but a cursory search on Twitter yielded hundreds of people making variations of the same two jokes: either they know who she is but their girlfriend doesn't, or they're going to knowingly masturbate to a dead woman as "tribute". So, another reason to just never look at social media, I guess

[mfunk9786]

The level of dehumanizing that people do re: people who entertain them in some cases more often than Academy Award winning actors is really nauseating, I agree. Not sure why these people are treated like such garbage to this day, even as their industry is more and more normalized

[Brian C]

Haven't read any of the comments in question and won't, but from what Dom wrote, the "tribute" seems like a variation of the "I can tell by the way that stripper smiled that she's super into me" delusion more than anything. As with anything else, a disturbing number of people really have a hard time distinguishing the fantasy from reality. Dehumanization, sure, of course ... but that ain't the half of it. We should all be thankful that porn gives these people at least some kind of outlet.

[GaryC]

Australian actor and director Samantha Rebillet, on 27 November, aged forty-five.

[swo17]

Haven't read any of the comments in question and won't, but from what Dom wrote, the "tribute" seems like a variation of the "I can tell by the way that stripper smiled that she's super into me" delusion more than anything. As with anything else, a disturbing number of people really have a hard time distinguishing the fantasy from reality. Dehumanization, sure, of course ... but that ain't the half of it. We should all be thankful that porn gives these people at least some kind of outlet.

If only more people used pornography in the humanizing way.

[Aunt Peg]

Conrad Brooks

[Mr Sausage]

William H. Gass, at 93.

I'm coincidentally in the midst of his mammoth The Tunnel, which I've been reading on-and-off for the past four months. I'd just begun reading it again on Wednesday, which I only learned today is the day of his death.

NYRB classics have recently reissued both his astonishing first story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and his short philosophical treatise, On Being Blue, both excellent places to start if you've never read this bleak but delicious stylist. Until his death, there was no other living writer I could think of who played such meticulous attention to their sentences and how they sounded. Though he lived to an enviable age and was publishing until the end (his last book coming out two years ago), it's still sad we'll get nothing more from him.