Deaths

When I woke up to NPR this morning, the obvious piece of news to blog about was the death of George Carlin. But I didn't get to the blog until around eleven tonight, and of course everyone's already said everything you could about Mr. Carlin and I don't have much to add.

Of course he was brilliant, everyone knew that. And socially edgy and legally relevant. He usually made me laugh. I have a copy of the seven words bit on my big hard drive full of audio, from a box set of American stand-up comedy I own. But I guess I'd be a bit of a poser if I painted myself as an enormous Carlin fan now. He was someone I laughed at and I'd watch his stand-up specials when I used to have HBO a few years ago and he was doing special after special after special, but he was never someone I felt a burning desire to see live and I never had any of his albums, and--yes, I know it's ungenerous to say this right now, but I want to be honest--there were a lot of times in his specials or in interviews where I sort of just found him cranky.

But he'll be missed, of course he will.

And then the other death-related news today was about a gathering to honor Stan Winston yesterday. Winston was the man behind the curtain in most of James Cameron's movies, in a way he was the man who made Jurassic Park--not to take anything from Spielberg, who's one of my favorite directors, but we all know the magic in that film was watching dinosaurs do dinosaur things on the big screen; you could have taken out all the plot, story and most of all those damn kids and you still would have had something awesome with all of Winston's footage. I wanted to say something special about Winston last week, you might remember, and I'd still like to but I still don't have the right words and I probably won't. It's good to know he was listening to music he loved, and that he was close to his friends and family in his last few days. There's probably not much more any of us can ask for. Last week I was distracted. I don't suppose I have that excuse today. I'm not sure I have any excuse at all today.

Is this a tip of the hat or just a bit of emptiness. Not even a video to show off the respective works of these two titans: you've seen them, or everyone else has them on their blogs already. Though that didn't keep me from putting up three Harvey Korman videos when he passed on.

I don't know what else to say, so I'll stop.