On not writing obituaries

It used to be that I would spend a fair bit of time paying respects to people who died on this blog.

I still read obits. My regular routines online involve checking the Wikipedia Recent Deaths page every few hours. It's not some journalistic need to report the news first, it's that for most of my life - lived prior to the phenomenon of the internet - it wasn't all that easy to tell which writers, filmmakers, musicians and such that I cared about were still alive.

But it seems like that sort of "reportage," coming from me, is redundant now. People keep their own tabs, and pay respects on Facebook - I've posted a few Daniel Johnston songs there in recent days (saw him twice, would have gone again, used to buy his cassettes back in the day).  I may still check in about people who mean more than most, to me - as with Ryszard Bugajski, a few months ago - especially if their lives or works are not so well known to the masses. But - you know, even though I did note, say, that Mardik Martin passed last week (a screenwriter who collaborated with Scorsese), I don't know his contributions well enough to say anything meaningful; and as for Ric Ocasek, I was never actually a Cars fan. I've liked some of Fred Herzog's photographs and I've seen part of Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues, but again, I have nothing to say that really counts, and people pay close enough attention now that they already know...

...though did you notice Theatre of Hate are coming to the Rickshaw in October? Opening for the new version of the Chameleons that is playing. A curious thing that I may ask Kirk if we talk is how Robert Frank ended up taking photos of them! (One of their early singles has a Robert Frank pic on it).

Anyhow, I guess this is sort of a "mass obituary" in a way... people keep dying... It will continue whether I write about it or not...