All the wrong people are dying.

[zotz]

As well as hearing some sad news from a friend, I've also just heard of the deaths of Nikki Sudden, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Stanislaw Lem. All a bit of a downer, really.

Comments

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

Nikki Sudden? That was unexpected. They're not giving the cause I see.

[zotz]

Indeed. If I had to guess I'd suggest it's because they don't know yet. He could turn out to be yet another one marked off to a dodgy heart.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Richard Fleischer (directed Tora Tora Tora) is gone too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4846622.stm

[zotz]

Ah. I saw that, but only Conan was mentioned in the headline. If they''d mentioned Tora^3 or the Vikings, I'd have been more interested. Yes, very sad. Remineds me a bit of hearing about Kurosawa's death - he worked on Tora too, of course.

[devalmont.livejournal.com]

I knew about Lem, but the rest is new to me. I remember that on the DVD commentary of Solaris they talk about how he was still alive, and that they were trying oget a copy to him so that he could say what he thought. I wonder if they did. And I'm very curious as to what he would have thought of the film.

[zotz]

The new one? He did comment on it - broadly quite positivly, although he did comment that he didn't remember having written Solaris to be about the romantic problems of space travellers. He thought Soderbergh had managed to make a good and intelligent film, though, which he said was apparently quite a difficult thing to do in Hollywood.

Sudden fronted an odd punk band called the Swell Maps, and then had a solo career for twentysomething years, including working with people like Lydia Lunch and Rowland Howard, both sometime associates of Nick Cave. Talented bloke.

Finlay was a poet, and also kept a very well-regarded garden, Little Sparta, not very far from here.

Suddenly I'm Sad

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

I never saw Nikki Sudden play live, but I kept running into him at gigs in odd places at one time. Nice guy. He was hit hard when his brother (Epic Soundtracks) died I believe.

[missfairchild.livejournal.com]

Nikki? Oh no. I loved him. Did he have the same heart condition that saw off poor Epic?

[zotz]

No idea, I'm afraid. Apparently he'd been unwell for a while, but I don't know what of. A relatively sudden death after being well enough to perform a day or two earlier makes me think of heart problems, but that's just a guess.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

I'm a bad person, I suppose, but I'm taking solace in the death of Cap the Knife.

[zotz]

I guess there are many bad people in the world, then.

[sulis-minerva.livejournal.com]

Ian Hamilton Finlay's dead? D'you know what's happening with Little Sparta?

[zotz]

I've not seen anything about that, I'm afraid. At a guess it'll be preserved on some basis. Hopefully.