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Lin Sunderland
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« Reply #865 on: January 03, 2013, 06:41:47 AM » |
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KC
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« Reply #868 on: January 05, 2013, 09:35:12 PM » |
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Beate Sirota Gordon died last Sunday at the age of 89. As a 22-year-old interpreter on General MacArthur's staff in Japan after World War II, she helped write Japan's postwar Constitution. In particular, she was responsible for clauses on women's rights: Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day.
“It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. For decades, Ms. Gordon said nothing about her role in postwar Japan, at first because the work was secret and later because she did not want her youth — and the fact that she was an American — to become ammunition for the Japanese conservatives who have long clamored for constitutional revision.
But in the mid-1980s, she began to speak of it publicly. The release of her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room,” published in Japanese in 1995 and in English two years later, made her a celebrity in Japan, where she lectured widely, appeared on television and was the subject of a stage play and a documentary film, “The Gift From Beate.”
In recent years, amid renewed attacks on the Constitution by Japanese conservatives, Ms. Gordon spoke out ardently in its defense.
Ms. Gordon was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, a high honor bestowed by the Japanese government, in 1998. But perhaps the greatest accolade she received came from Japanese women themselves.
“They always want their picture taken with me,” Ms. Gordon told ABC News in 1999. “They always want to shake my hand. They always tell me how grateful they are.” www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/world/asia/beate-gordon-feminist-heroine-in-japan-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=allR.I.P.
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KC
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« Reply #870 on: January 07, 2013, 11:49:16 PM » |
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Jed Cooper
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« Reply #874 on: January 12, 2013, 04:37:02 AM » |
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More a celebrity by association but a celebrity nonetheless. RIP Mr. Wilkinson. Elvis Presley's rhythm guitar player, John Wilkinson, dies at age 67 in Southwest MissouriWilkinson first met Elvis Presley when he was 10 years old after sneaking into his dressing room before a show at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. He amused Presley when he told him, "You can't play guitar worth a damn."
Family friend and spokesman Gary Ellison said a Springfield history museum recalled the pair's meeting in an exhibit that ran until about three weeks ago.
"John loved to tell that story," Ellison, a fellow musician, said Friday.
After the chance meeting, Wilkinson developed a name for himself as a singer and guitarist, performing with such groups as The New Christy Minstrels.
He was 23 when Presley saw him perform on a television show in Los Angeles in 1968, and asked him to join the TCB Band — not knowing he was the youngster who insulted his playing a decade earlier, Ellison recalled.
Wilkinson went on to play 1,200 shows as Presley's rhythm guitar player until the legendary singer's death in 1977.

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« Last Edit: January 12, 2013, 04:40:11 AM by Jed Cooper »
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“Eyuh.”
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higashimori
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« Reply #875 on: January 15, 2013, 10:04:14 PM » |
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" Nagisa Oshima, Iconoclastic Filmmaker, Dies at 80 " http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/movies/nagisa-oshima-iconoclastic-filmmaker-dies-at-80.htmlNagisa Oshima, the iconoclastic filmmaker who challenged and subverted the pieties of Japanese society and the conventions of Japanese cinema and who gained international notoriety in 1976 for the sexually explicit “In the Realm of the Senses,” died on Tuesday at a hospital near Tokyo. He was 80. Among other later films, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (1983), a prisoner-of-war drama starring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, was shot mainly in New Zealand. Mr. Oshima, collaborating with Luis Buñuel’s frequent screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, also put a twist on the French sex farce with “Max Mon Amour” (1986), which paired Charlotte Rampling and a chimpanzee.
His final film, the 19th-century samurai drama “Taboo” (1999), which he directed after suffering his first stroke, continued his late-career theme of forbidden love, bringing to the surface the homoerotic currents of “Mr. Lawrence.”  I liked very much "Gohatto" ( “Taboo” 1999), it was the best for me. He was sick a long time .... rest in peace, Mr. Oshima... http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/01/15/world/asia/ap-as-obit-oshima.html?ref=news&_r=0http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/15/nagisa-oshima-dies-aged-80
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" They just don't make then like this anymore ." " I just don't meet then like him anymore !! "
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KC
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« Reply #879 on: January 19, 2013, 06:57:10 PM » |
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Stan "The Man" Musial, one of the all-time baseball greats, dies at 92: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/sports/baseball/baseball-great-stan-musial-dies-at-92.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 A signature Musial image endures: He waits for a pitch in a left-handed crouch, his knees bent and close together, his body leaning to the left as he peers over his right shoulder, the red No. 6 on his back. The stance was likened to a corkscrew or, as the White Sox pitcher and Dodger coach Ted Lyons once described it, “a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming.”
Swinging from that stance, Musial won seven batting championships, hit 475 home runs and amassed 3,630 hits. His brilliance lay in his consistency. He had 1,860 hits at home and 1,860 on the road. He drove in 1,951 runs and scored 1,949 runs. And his power could be explosive: he set a major league record, equaled only once, when he hit five home runs in a doubleheader.
“There is only one way to pitch to Musial — under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant teams that Musial often victimized, once said.
He was renowned for his concentration at the plate, and his patience: he struck out only 696 times in 10,972 at-bats — a 6 percent ratio — in his 22 major league seasons, all as a Cardinal. A gentlemanly and sunny figure — he loved to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica — he was never ejected from a game. When admirers approached him, he chatted them up with his familiar “whattayasay, whattayasy.” R.I.P.
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