http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/alex-chilton-musician-dies/
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Underrated+Iconoclast%3A+Alex+Chilton%27s+Lasting+Influence-2885
The Daily Mirror unearthed a profile of Chilton from 1985:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2010/03/voices-alex-chilton.html
Chilton's death comes only days after the suicide of Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, a musician who meant a lot to friends of mine:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/arts/music/08linkous.html
Spanish novelist Miguel Delibes died last week at 89. He has been fairly extensively translated into English:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/arts/18delibes.html
Absurdist playwright H.M. Koutoukas passed on as well:
He produced at a furious rate, turning out three plays a year in the 1960s and 1970s, by his own reckoning. Many were presented on less than a shoestring at the Caffe Cino and La MaMa, the two birthplaces of Off Off Broadway. Props and flats were scavenged from the street. Often the actors were, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/arts/18koutoukas.html"Author, critic, and broadcaster" Patrick O'Connor sounds like someone I would like to have known:
Lacking the arrogance and egoism typical of so many experts, he delighted in sharing his wisdom and enthusiasm with others.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7058691.ece
The innovative sculptor Eva Hesse, who died of a brain tumor in 1970 at the painfully early age of 34, made many of her pieces out of fragile materials: "aluminum, latex rubber, plastic, lead, polythene, copper, felt, chicken-wire, dirt, sawdust, paper pulp and glue." These pose an ongoing challenge to conservationists, yet, as critic Arthur Danto says, they "vibrate with originality and mischief":
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36873
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Hesse
Buildings in their solidity would seem to be among the most death-defying of artistic expressions, yet due to economic and land-use factors, they are often among the most temporary, as anyone who read books such as Lost Chicago learns in a melancholy manner. If great buildings have to come down, it is at least good if the process is documented, as photographer Chris Mottalini has been doing with respect to demolished works of Paul Rudolph:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/photographer-chris-mottalini-modernist-architect-paul-rudolph.html
http://blog.photoshelter.com/2008/05/chris-mottalini-after-you-left-it-they-took-it-apa.html
Many of Rudolph's buildings currently fall in the preservation "danger zone" -- built between 30 and 80 years ago, no longer "new," but not quite old enough for people to care sufficiently about their fate, or even to be able to see and assess them fairly. As Camille Paglia among a hundred other critics has pointed out, works go through a period of being disvalued when they represent the "recent past," which always seems more old-fashioned than earlier periods. It's worse than disvaluation, really; people frequently want to demolish all evidence of the recent past, and in the case of buildings they actually can do it. The effect is so obvious and often so pronounced that I really feel that preservationists should encode it in their arguments. On the subject of a landmark building in that 30-80 year old time range, we should not be trusted; absent a very compelling argument, they should all be allowed to survive. Later generations may thank us heartily for it.
Edward Durrell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan is a famous example of a building that went through exactly this sort of disvaluation -- many people including architecture critics really hated it, right from its opening in 1966 -- and has now been altered beyond recognition, in a way that I feel confident the future will judge us harshly for:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Columbus_Circle
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