I am fighting with every fiber of my being the urge to leave my apartment and go to a bar for the night. It’s raining in Los Angeles, and whether you hate westside douches or eastside hipsters, both of them fear the cold and rain. Tonight is, without a doubt, the best night to go out and have a good time. I bet Photo Hunt is sitting all alone at Footsies on this Friday night, not a single annoying fauxhemian in the joint pawing her pretty little touch-screen monitor. It’s so tempting…
Alas, I’ve got a lot of dead people to write about. I cant have any fun until the dead are dug up, slapped across the face and reburied by yours truly. That’s right, it’s time for the Swan Fungus annual Top Ten Deaths Year-End list!
December is almost over. Websites and magazines (including this one!) have been rolling out “Year-End” lists for two weeks now. Across all forms of media, the next week will be filled with even more cloying fits of nostalgia, hindsight-enriched wistfulness, and even some good old fashioned navel-gazing. Each friday this month Swan Fungus has concluded the week with a new list. Last week was the Top Ten Negative Reader Comments, and before that was the Top Ten Top Ten Lists of 2010. In two weeks I will present the epic Top 100 Albums of 2010 list. Stay tuned.
It’s really hard to scour 12 months of death notices in one afternoon, but I think I’ve done it. The task grows more difficult with each passing minute. Sometimes I’ll see a name on a death list and think, “Oh shit, that guy died?” only to realize that I actually don’t know who that guy is. His name is just similar to another celebrity’s name (Robert Rowley Jr. vs. Robert Downey Jr., or Jack Block vs. Jack Black). Sometimes I’m confused by a really common name, like Dan Fitzergerald. By the way, on January 19th of 2010 the world lost both Dan Fitzgerald (the college basketball coach) and Danny Fitzgerald (Gaelic football player). Weird, right?
Honorable Mention: Suicide by jumping. 2010 was a banner year for suicide by jumping. While Americans and Europeans love suicide by hanging or drugs, Asian countries and plenty of westerners opt for suicide by jumping. Tom Nicon, the 22-year-old French model jumped to his death on June 18th. Because there’s nothing more depressing in life than being a beautiful 22-year-old French model. Perhaps Nicon’s suicide was just a response to the jumping death of American adult film star Stephen Clancy Hill, whose obituary pointed out that he didn’t just jump to his death, he jumped off a cliff. Cliff beats Hill. That’d be my headline if I ran a local newspaper.
Drug overdoses were also popular in 2010. Former Playboy playmate Jennifer Lyn Jackson died of a very sexy heroin overdose on January 22nd. 11 days earlier, former playmate Juliet Anderson was found dead in her bed. No cause of death was released, so it was probably also drug overdose. Not to be outdone, former playmate Allison Parks died of heart failure on June 21st. Her Wikipedia page doesn’t specify whether or not she consciously stopped her heart — it just says she died of heart failure — but willingly causing one’s heart to fail would probably count as suicide. Jay Reatard died of cocaine toxicity on January 13th, which is just “indie rock” slang for a drug overdose. Alas, hipsters alone didn’t OD this year, Paul Gray of Slipknot died of an “accidental” fentanyl and morphine overdose. Mixing fentanyl with anything is pretty much asking to die. That shit is strooooong! And good…so, so good. Famed female wrestler Luna Vachon (the ugliest woman to ever wrestle in the WWF?) died of an overdose on August 27th. John Sekula of the band Mushroomhead died of “undisclosed causes” (read: drug overdose) on October 28th. I have to admit, when I first saw his name I yelled, “Noooo! The guy from Quantum Leap died!” but then I realized that wasn’t John Sekula, it was Scott Bakula! Duh. Keep on livin’ strong, Scott Bakula! Necessary Roughness ruled!
Nearly Ironic Death Alerts!: Wilma Mankiller was herself killed on April 5th, not by a man (oh, how ironic that would be!) but by pancreatic cancer. So close! 13-year-old motorcycle racer Peter Lenz (really? 13? shouldn’t he be in school or something?) died in a collision on August 29th. I blame the parents. Joe Rollino, a 104-year-old (!!!) former American strongman, weightlifter, and boxer was struck by a van and killed on January 11th. I guess it must have caught him off guard or something, because I’ve seen strongmen lift vans on ESPN2 before. Eugene Terre’Blanche was a 69-year-old white separatist leader from South Africa who once spent 3 years in prison for assaulting a black petrol station worker. He also attempted to murder a black security guard in 1996. He was hacked and beaten to death over a wage depute on April 3rd. I guess it’d be ironic if his killers were white, but fate must have missed the memo, as the laborers who killed him were both black. Think of the irony! THINK OF IT…
The Top Ten Deaths of 2010
10. Mildred Fay Jefferson – I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be happy or sad that Mildred died this year. I mean, on one hand she was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard medical school. But she was also a really staunch pro-life activist. At one point she tried to run for senator in Massachusetts on the Republican ticket and lost. She died on October 15th of one of my favorite causes of death: undisclosed causes. This usually leaves us with two options. AIDS, or suicide. Those are pretty much the only terms under which a family won’t release a cause of death, right? My guess is suicide. She doesn’t strike me as an Apache, the rapper who clearly died of AIDS. Mildred strikes me as your classic closet-case self-loather. Just look at her life. She had to have difficulty reconciling the fact that she was an inspiration to black women everywhere with her being a piece of shit of pro-lifer. She probably swallowed a bottle of Xanax and peacefully asphyxiated on vomit.
09. FitzRoy Somerset – On January 4th of this year the world lost FitzRoy Somerest, 5th Baron Raglan. The only reason he’s included on this list is because I was reading this Wikipedia entry for deaths on that day and it listed everyone by name and cause of death, so this guy’s entry said, “FitzRoy Somerest, 5th Baron Raglan, British aristocrat.” So, apparently, FitzRoy died of being an aristocrat. Ha! No further investigation needed. I’m happy with the obituary just as it reads. Thank you.
08. Olga Guillot – A Cuban singer who was known to be the “queen of bolero.” I would elaborate, but I’m not Cuban so I don’t know what else to say about her. I will say that I was momentarily baffled when I read her cause of death. I’ve been doing this for almost five years now and, I have to say, infarction is a totally new word to me. At first I thought it was an “infection” typo, and then I thought that maybe it was supposed to be “infraction,” as if to say she died because she did something wrong…but, nope: infarction. Infarction is “the formation of an infarct, that is, an area of tissue death (necrosis) due to a local lack of oxygen caused by obstruction of the tissue’s blood supply.” Sounds messy.
07. He Pingping – According to the Guinness World Records, He was the world’s shortest man who was able to walk. I guess Guinness makes a distinction between short people who can or can’t walk. Interesting factoid! He Pingping was 2′ 5″ or roughly half the size of my penis. Just kidding. He was smaller than half of my penis. He died of heart complications on March 13th. On the opposite end of the size spectrum, basketball player Manute Bol died of kidney failure and Stevens-Johnson syndrome a few months later on June 19th. Bol was 7′ 7″ or roughly the size of one of my penises.
06. Alexander McQueen – Suicide by hanging was popular too this year. Cricketer Asim Butt finally got tired of all those name-calling sports fans and took his life. Who knew there were two Asim Butts! One Asim Butt died in his sleep last year, but the sculptor and painter (or as well call ’em in America, nancy boys!) hung himself on January 15th. Boxer Edwin Valero hung himself on April 19th. Alexander McQueen was the big winner this year, though. He attained the triple crown of bad luck: he was British, he was a fashion designer, and his last name had “Queen” in it. He hung himself on February 11th.
05. John Rety – Hungarian-born British poet, chess master, and anarchist. You can spend your whole life fighting for the abolition of authority and government, you can fight against the war in Vietnam, you can fight for extreme individualism, but you can’t fight off death. Sorry, that’s pretty much the one truth in life: you’re going to die. John did, on February 3rd.
04. Michele Causse – Lesbian theorist, translator and author. Who knew lesbians had their own language! Did she only translate lesbian to French? Is it possible to find translations of her lesbian translations in English? And did she write in lesbian, too? I’d love to read a translation of her lesbian books too…as long as they have pictures.
03. Richard LaMotta – Move over, dead Jimmy Dean, sausage king and country musician! You might have died on June 13th. Ray LaMotta has passed, and the man needs some room to breathe in the hall of great, deceased food businessmen. The inventor and principal promoter of the Chipwich died on May 11th…a month before you. Whoops! Maybe I should have switched the order around, as that would have made more sense on a death-timeline level. Oh well. I wanted to say that everyone knows Jimmy Dean and his sausages but no one knows Richard LaMotta, the Chipwich guy. I don’t even like Chipwich ice cream sandwiches. I love sausage though…maybe I just don’t care about LaMotta’s death. At all. Sorry, Mr. Dean. You can have your deserved limelight back.
02. Orlando Zapata – A Cuban dissident who fought the government by going on a hunger strike. He died of starvation on February 23rd. This is just sad. I think at some point in all our lives we’ve threatened to go on hunger strike for some stupid reason or another. For me it was at overnight camp because the head counselor took away some privilege of ours. Homer Simpson did it to prevent the Springfield Isotopes from being moved to Albuquerque (“Occasionally, I’ll be quirky. I’ll be quirky. Albuquerque!”). At some point, we all realize the hunger strike is a really stupid, unproductive idea, and we stop. Orlando Zapata selfishly refused to leave that infantile “notice me!” phase of his life. The stupid fucker killed himself. And for what? He was upset that he had to wear a certain color uniform in prison. Good job, Orlando. I hope in death you enjoy a shitty mural somewhere in Cuba while everyone else chows down on some Ropa Vieja. What a dumb thing to do. If Zapata is worthy of any praise, it’s that he lived to be 42. Usually people who get the “activist” or “dissident” tag attached to their name die in their 20s.
01. Peter Graves – Where was Twitter on March 14th? Where was Facebook? Where was the national news media? Sure, on November 28th they were all out in force to celebrate the life of Leslie Nielsen, who died of pneumonia. But where was the celebration of Peter Graves on March 14th? Don’t recognize the name? What if I told you Peter Graves was Captain Clarence Oveur in Airplane! and Airplane II? Then would you recognize Mr. Graves? “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” “Joey, have you ever been in a…in a Turkish prison?” “You ever been in a cockpit before?” “You ever seen a grown man naked?” Fuck you, everybody. You all writes stupid epitaphs for Leslie Nielsen when he died, but you forgot about Peter fucking Graves!
Dead Kennedys – Forward To Death
Queen – Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To…)
The Kinks – Death Of A Clown
