This one hurts. I know that, in his own way, Corman was as much of a production-line churn-’em’out factory as any of the actual Hollywood majors, and frankly the quality of the movies he oversaw was generally probably questionable at best, but so many people in the American film industry from the 60s onwards started out in the “Roger Corman Film School” that the face of Hollywood would’ve looked vastly different without him. I mean, some of those figures may have made it by themselves, but what if they didn’t? No Coppola, no Scorsese, no Jack Nicholson, no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Robert Towne, no James Horner… lots of Big Hollywood just never happens. So yeah, this is a sad one; Corman was just there for so long—in a bit over a week’s time it will, in fact, be 70 years since his first film (as producer), Monster From the Ocean Floor, came out—that, even though you knew he couldn’t last forever, it’s still a shock somehow. Still, no one will ever accuse him of not having lived his life to the fullest… this is Dark Corners Review’s look back at that life from about a year ago:
Category: [RIP]
RIP Steve Albini, I suppose
As much as he could be a complete shit of a person with harsh words for some of the bands he recorded, Albini was obviously a major player in his particular niche of the music industry, for which, of course, he tended to have even harsher words… a look at his list of credits shows just how many records he was involved with in the last 40 years, of which I suppose the dudes from Led Zeppelin represent one extreme and Whitehouse the other.
This latter is the bit some people are focusing on…
If you are reading this, then you probably have heard that the esteemed rock musician and producer Steve Albini — who produced bands like Nirvana and the Pixies along with fronting bands like Big Black and Rapeman — died today at the age of 61. The usual lugubrious outpourings of phony grief have been rampant on social media, with countless people who had never even heard of him until now professing to have been his biggest fan. In other words, the usual thing that happens when someone even remotely famous dies.
In reality, however, Steve Albini was certainly no hero. In fact, Albini was an admitted lover of child pornography who openly promoted said child pornography in language so sickening that you may feel like a criminal just for reading it.
This is an awfully large accusation, with unfortunate proof also provided, in the form of a tour diary he wrote about Big Black when they toured Europe and, well, found certain magazines while in Hamburg where certain magazines and films were still legal then (there’s a really interesting video here about how Color Climax in Denmark got away with bestiality and CP simply because there were no laws against that sort of thing after censorship was abolished there in 1969). It’s yikes-inducing to read, although from what I can see online there seems to have been some debate about the extent to which he may or may not have been “edgelording” it for effect like Peter Sotos… for whose ‘zine Pure he also gave an approving review, reproduced in the Medium piece. It’s equally yikes-inducing. There’s a fairly long video here about Sotos and Pure, which is about as close to the fucking thing as I want to get.
Sotos was notable as a member of noise/power electronics mob Whitehouse for much of its existence, and for his… literary work, and for being the first person charged under then-new child pornography laws in the US. This has somehow never got in the way of him having a career as a writer and musician, or being taken seriously in that capacity; it never stopped William Bennett inviting him to rejoin Whitehouse when he reactivated the latter in the ’90s (I have long suspected Bennett was a bit of a cunt as well); and it never stopped Steve Albini from being his avowed friend, or from making records with him for Whitehouse and under Sotos’ own name, including… this. Ugh.
For what little it may be worth, the author of that Medium piece is an avowed piece of shit himself, and there’s a commenter on it who’s pretty snippy at him and basically accuses him of writing the piece in bad faith. I don’t know if Sotos is an actual nonce or not—I mean, I suppose it’s possible he just had that CP magazine in order to use it in Pure rather than as, you know, spank bank material—but fuck him anyway. And I similarly don’t know about Albini, who may well have regretted that tour diary bit and his positive review of Pure like he regretted his other “youthful indiscretions”, but… you know. I don’t think I have anything else to say on this one.
RIP IP
This was rather sad news. I am, in general, not especially interested in food, I have a very limited palate and to be honest I often feel like if I didn’t have to eat I probably wouldn’t. There’s a deep-rooted psychological issue in there, I’m sure, maybe an autism thing but that’s not the point. The point is that Ian Parmenter (who I was thinking about just the other day, maybe I shouldn’t do that) has left us, and I actually watched and enjoyed his cooking show, which I didn’t do with many other TV chefs. I kind of like that it was an off-screen passion for him at first, too; he was trained as a journalist and he produced TV news in the late 80s, but then he managed to parlay this off-screen interest into 450 episodes of Consuming Passions… I recall it being like a bumper segment before the ABC news, something like that; I don’t know that I would’ve eaten most of the things he made, but he was fun to watch while he was doing these things, I remember him having fairly animated facial hair, and I am rather sad to know he’s gone.
Now he’ll never catch the real killers
OJ Simpson, the former American football star, actor and notorious suspected double murderer, has died of cancer at 76, his family said in a statement on Thursday. […]
Simpson’s death was announced on X, formerly Twitter, in a simple message from his family: “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace,” the statement said.
Simpson “died without penance”, attorneys for Goldman’s family said on Thursday in a brief statement.
Of course he did. Whether or not he actually did those murders (but he almost certainly did; weird how no one else has been seriously offered as an alternative, and one of the people who was suggested as the real killer allegedly said Simpson hired him to do it, so that still didn’t let me off the hook), he still wasn’t a good guy, and he proved it with that fucking If I Did It book. Evidently he was less than contrite after that time he did go to jail years later too when his guilt was rather more obvious. Prostate cancer got him in the end, and somehow I can’t even feel sorry for him on that account.
Man no longer on fire, alas
News of Grant Page’s passing is starting to come through, just heard about it via an industry friend on Facebook who worked with him on various projects. The greatest stuntman in Australia cinema somehow lived to be eighty-five, when by rights he probably shouldn’t have lived past 40 or so; he was one of the stars of Not Quite Hollywood by Mark Hartley (who seems to have first broken the news of his passing), at the premiere of which he set himself on fire cos, you know, that was the sort of thing he did for a living. It still astonishes me that he made it out of the 70s alive when you look at some of the things he did (cf. the Don Lane Show stunt in the video below), with his most recent stunt co-ordinating credit being from just four years ago. Good rest to you, sir, you worked for it.
RIP David Bordwell
SHIT. One of the good guys of film criticism has left us. I was very much one of those film students who grew up on Film Art: An Introduction, the third edition of which was one of our assigned books when I did Theatre & Film Studies at UNSW back in the 90s; we never got assigned the film history book, though that’s only because him and Thompson didn’t actually write it until many years later… I was particularly delighted to discover that at the local library some years ago, and I still think it’s probably the best example of a general film history book out there. Matt Zoller Seitz offers a solid appreciation here.
RIP Brian Stableford
Just reading about the passing of Brian Stableford. Never read any of his own actual works, but I knew of him as a translator of French literature, especially for Black Coat Press, in which capacity he’s Englished a whole lot of books in the French fantastic tradition… there being a whole lot of SF, fantasy, horror and pulp in French that’s kind of gone unknown by us Anglophones for literal centuries (apart from Jules Verne, whose first English critics woefully misunderstood as a children’s author). And so it is that Stableford introduced me to two of the most singular books I’ve ever read, Petrus Borel’s Champavert and Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus; both published in the early/mid-1830s, the former is a sort of late gothic collection of tales possessed of a very peculiar black humour, and the latter is… just something else. I really don’t know what to call it, basically it’s a vision of the history of the world from the creation to the last judgement, with the latter event going very much not according to plan, but what form is it? A novel told entirely in dialogue without descriptions? A play which features the entire universe as a character at one point? I remember while I was reading it that I could actually imagine the text being sung, as if it were an oratorio or something (and an extremely atonal one at that). So, respect to Brian Stableford for making these two books available to me that I would otherwise never have read…
RIP Alexei Navalny
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny dead at 47, region’s prison service says
Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died, the prison service of the Yamalo-Nenets region where he has been serving his sentence said on Friday.
Mr Navalny, one of the most vocal critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had been in prison since February 2021.
Late last year, he was moved to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle.
Russian state news agency TASS reported that Putin had been told of Mr Navalny’s death.
In a statement, the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District said Mr Navalny “felt unwell” after a walk on Friday, and “almost immediately lost consciousness”.
It said that medical staff had been called, but that they were unable to resuscitate Mr Navalny.
It said the reason of death was being established.
I think we can guess what and indeed who the cause of death was. The only thing I wonder is what took Putin so long to do it. And the president of Latvia is coming right out and saying Putin murdered Navalny, so I guess it’s a matter of time before he gets too close to a dangerously open window too…
He was indeed Damo Suzuki
The decreasing membership of Can has thinned out again with the passing of their singular vocalist Damo Suzuki… I’m reading online that he was diagnosed with cancer about ten years ago, at which time he was only given a ten percent chance of survival. I think it’s fair to say he beat those odds, at least up to now (indeed, his first go-round with cancer had been in the 80s, so he had some experience with fighting it).
Here they are on German TV not long after he got drafted into the band:
And The Fall, with Mark’s equally idiosyncratic tribute to him:
RIP Brother Wayne
Wayne Kramer from the MC5 has left the building, meaning drummer Dennis Thompson is the last man standing from that ensemble. I must confess my first thought on reading the news was an uncharitable one, in that I wondered if this meant A True Testimonial might finally get an actual release now he’s no longer there to stop it, though I do now find that court case he filed against the makers actually went against him, it just still hasn’t come out anyway… whatever. Let us watch the five in full flow back in 1970:
This was shot for a Detroit cable TV show, evidently not the full gig but damn they picked great excerpts for the program. It is probably miraculous that even these clips survive, and in very fair quality at that…
And this is them in France, late in the game (with new bassist Steve Moorhouse replacing Michael Davis’ smack habit), but still, fucking hell. The video and audio were evidently recorded on a potato, and the end result is frankly obnoxious, but at the same time it’s also a perfect artifact and presentation of this sort of rock’n’roll. It’s probably even more miraculous that this survives. I always thought the MC5’s studio records never quite matched up to the on-stage power evinced on Kick Out the Jams; they obviously needed a crowd in front of them to produce their full effect. At any rate, they outlived Hudson’s, and I’m sure that was satisfying…