Category: Obituaries

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Three Who Didn’t Survive the ’60s

1970 was the last year of the 'sixties, and these three died in September and October.

Alan 'Blind Owl' Wilson of Canned Heat.  Date of death: 2 September 1970.  Cause: "acute accidental barbituate intoxication."  I saw him live with Canned Heat in 1968 in a club named  Kaleidoscope on Sunset Boulevard  in Hollywood.  Wilson's high-pitched voice drew jeers from some members of the audience.  On the Road Again.  Going Up the Country.  On the bill with them when I saw them at the Kaleidoscope was an obscure psychedelic band name of "Fever Tree."  They were damned good as witness The Sun Also Rises and San Francisco Girls and Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing.

Jimi Hendrix.  Date of death:  18 September 1970.  Cause: unclear.  In '67 I heard him play The Wind Cries Mary at the Monterey Pop Festival. Third Stone from the Sun.

Janis Joplin. Date of Death: 4 October 1970.  Cause: heroin overdose. She was at Monterey too.  My favorite  is her rendition of Kris Krisofferson's Me and Bobby McGee.  Otherwise, I didn't much like her vocal stylings: too screechy and screamy.  Dead 42 years, she's been dead longer than she lived.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Youth, Fast Cars, and Death

JamesTomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean.  When the young  Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight.  One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene.  He died  in 2010 at the age of 88.   But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming?  His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:

Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964).  But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal.  Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)

James Dean, Public Service Announcement

James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene

Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby

Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951).  The first R & R song?  With footage of Bettie Page.

Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young


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Richard Swinburne’s Obituary of C. J. F. Williams

I wasn't aware of this until now.  Williams was London Ed's teacher.  I  battle the former via the latter. 

It came as news to me that Williams spent most of his life in a wheelchair.  It testifies to the possibilities of the human spirit that great adversity for some is no impediment to achievement.  I think also of Stephen Hawking, Charles Krauthammer, and FDR.

So stop whining and be grateful for what you have. You could be in a bloody wheelchair!

Helmuth James von Moltke

I  sometimes express skepticism about the value of the study of history. If history has lessons, they don't seem applicable to the present in any useful way. But there is no denying that history is a rich source of exemplary lives. These exemplary lives show what is humanly possible and furnish existential ideals. Helmuth James von Moltke was a key figure in the German resistance to Hitler. The Nazis executed him in 1945. Here is his story.  Here is an obituary of his wife, Freya.

John Hick

John Hick has negotiated that mysterious transition that awaits us all.  Here is one take on his passing.  I saw him in action only once.  I recall him questioning whether Jesus ever claimed to be God.  An ill-mannered colleague of mine attacked him for that, churlishly.  Hick retained his equaninimity, projecting a superiority that was yet without a trace of superciliousness.  That impressed me and furnished me with yet another insight into the hierarchy of the spirit and the inequality of human beings. 

Hick's An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent is required reading for philosophers of religion.  I have two posts on Hick.

John Hick on Religious and Naturalistic Definitions of Religion

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered

My former colleague Xavier Monasterio died last year on this date.  Curiously, January 4th was also the date of death of his philosophical hero Albert Camus.  This being a weblog, and thus an online journal of the personal and the impersonal, I didn't want the day to pass without a brief remembrance of the man.  I'll say a little today and perhaps supplement it later on.

Continue reading “Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered”

Reinhardt Grossmann (1931-2010)

An obituary by his Indiana University colleague, Nino Cocchiarella. 

"Grossmann was well known among his colleagues for his eagerness to discuss philosophical problems and to engage in sustained debate on fundamental positions."  Sounds right.  When I, a stranger, wrote Grossmann sometime in the '80s and posed some questions for him, he responded in a thorough and friendly manner.  May peace be upon him.

Here is another obituary  by Javier Cumpa and Erwin Tegtmeier.  It ends with a tantalizing reference to the book Grossmann was working on when felled by a massive stroke: Facts.  I hope Grossmann's literary executors make the manuscript available.

The summer of '84 found me in Bloomington, Indiana.  Thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, I was a 'seminarian' in Hector-Neri Castaneda's NEH Summer Seminar.  One afternoon we repaired to a bar where we encountered Professor Grossmann.  He told a story about the 19th century  German philosopher Kuno Fischer, who was a big name in his day and a professor at Heidelberg.  One day some workmen were making a racket outside his apartment.  This incensed the good professor and he warned the workmen: "If you don't stop making this noise, I will leave Heidelberg!"  The workmen stopped.  Grossmann remarked that if Quine were  to have lodged a similar complaint, the workmen  would have laughed and bid him goodbye. 

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) on Death

This is from Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

As Heidegger might have said, we achieve our authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) in Being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode).

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse succumbed to the curse of 27 today.  Why is 27 such an auspicious age for a quick exit from life's freeway?  My guess is that at 27 one is still too young  fully to appreciate the ravages to the body of life in the fast lane  but is old enough to have done irreparable damage, so much so that just one more snort, one more shot, one more binge pushes the self-abuser over the edge.  So 27 is a sort of crossroads.

Here is Winehouse singing the great Gerry Goffin-Carole King song, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?  But there never was and never will be a cover superior to the Shirelle's 1961 version.  I've loved this song, in this version, ever since I first heard it in '61.  Carole King's version from her 1971 Tapestry album is also outstanding.