It is ironic that, as I sit down to write this year’s “Top Ten Newly Dead People of 2007” list (a list that is usually sardonic in nature), I have just finished reading an e-mail from Locust Music informing me that country musician Cast King passed away yesterday. On Monday night, I was drinking bourbon with Rob and listening to Saw Mill Man. Each time I hear those tunes I am taken aback by how good they all are. I’m glad that at the age of 79 he finally recorded his debut album, because those songs will continue to thrive even in his absence. Cast King, rest easy.
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December is a bleak month. The weather is cold, the sky is grey, and it marks the death of what was, eleven months ago, considered a “Happy New Year.” It is fitting then that I use a December Friday to write about the ten most important deaths of 2007. This list doesn’t include Karlheinz Stockhausen or Lee Hazlewood because I liked them too much to mock their deaths. In any event, prepare to laugh at the misfortune of others.
THE TOP TEN DEATHS OF 2007
Honorable Death Mentions (for these people, being dead isn’t quite funny enough for me to write about): Ike Turner, Norman Mailer, Robert Goulet, Luciano Pavarotti, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Jeni
10 – Lady Bird Johnson – When the new First Lady has a name like Lady Bird, the country should have known that shit in America was about to get really fucking stupid. Her legacy is that she was a champion of conservation and a determined environmentalist. But she was evil. She wanted highway billboards and junkyards to be replaced with trees and wildflowers. What a dumb hippie bitch. Without highway billboards I’d never know the joy that comes from seeing a Microsurgical Vasectomy Reversal billboard. Without junkyards, that huge black wrestling guy I liked as a child wouldn’t be The Junkyard Dog. He would’ve had a different racist moniker. Fuck you, Lady Bird!
09 – Michelangelo Antonioni / Ingmar Bergman – These guys are pretty much interchangeable. Two foreign auteurs whose films are mostly spoken about by film students and pretentious assholes at the local scenester bar. For that reason, I’m glad their dead. It might take a few months, but hopefully we can forget all about them and move on. I look forwarded to hanging out with people who would rather discuss films like Wrong Turn 2 and Santa With Muscles than Blow-Up or Cries And Whispers. Boring!
08 – Marcel Marceau – “The Master of Mime” is dead. If you read his various obituaries, idiots write things like, “He played out the human comedy through his alter ego, Bip, without ever saying a word.” Maybe guy should have taken a class or two at UCB and he wouldn’t have been so afraid of talking on stage. Nobody is that painfully unfunny…Wait, a few people I know just popped into my head. Okay, I guess I understand why someone becomes a mime now. I don’t think Marceau died by his own hand, he probably died of cancer or something, but if he did kill himself, I can see why. If I wasn’t the funniest person in the entire world (and I am), I’d probably kill myself too.
07 – Liz Claiborne – Hey, dead bitch. Thanks for helping ladies smell more like dog shit than they normally do.
06 – Dr. Robert Cade – Thanks for making Gatorade, asshole. You might think your discovery was noble and important, but I bet if you watch Idiocracy and watch what happens when people start worrying about electrolyte loss. Oh wait, you can’t watch Idiocracy because you’re dead. Sucks for you!
05 – Evel Knievel – If anything, this guy proved that not even an internationally renowned daredevil can outlast death. Sure, he could jump a motorcycle over a row of burning trucks, but I guess it’s a little more difficult to defeat pulmonary fibrosis. To his credit, he survived a liver transplant after almost dying of hepatitis C, and lived almost a decade longer. Personally, I always liked Super Dave Osborne way more than Evel Knievel. I guess that’s why I don’t care that he’s dead.
04 – Fabulous Moolah – Lillian Ellison was a female wrestler who was born in 1923 and continued wrestling even into her 80s. I watched a lot of wrestling as a young child, and let me tell you: nothing scared me more than this woman. She was so hideous looking and old and flabby and scary, she singlehandedly made me fear all old people. Whenever I passed an old person on the street, for years, I would picture them shuffling uncomfortably across a wrestling ring wearing nothing but a leotard. Just thinking about it makes me shudder. Thank God she’s dead. Maybe I’ll sleep tonight.
03 – Jerry Falwell – Moral Majority my ass. I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell, but if they exist I hope you’re rotting in hell you scumbag, getting raped by dandy fops and having to talk to lots of blacks.
02 – Boris Yeltsin – First president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin was not exactly the brightest
01 – Anna Nicole Smith – Single most awesome death of the year, because she had Klonopin, Ativan, Serax and Valium in her system. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a really fun Friday night. Throw in a few shots of Kentucky straight bourbon and you’ve got yourself a party. As much as I hated hearing about this dumb slut on the news twenty-four hours a day following her demise, this was still the best death of the year. Oh, right. Also, fuck America’s celebrity fixation and annoying gossip culture blah blah blah (insert social commentary rant here).
