RIP

[Kobi]

Ron Glass, the actor best known for his work on “Barney Miller” and “Firefly,” died Friday, November 26. He was 71.

Glass played the intellectual Det. Ron Harris on the sitcom “Barney Miller” from 1975 – 1982. The show was hailed by critics and police officers for its realistic depiction of police work while also delivering consistent laughs. Much of the humor for his character stemmed from his dapper fashion sense and dreams of becoming a writer. He was nominated for an Emmy for supporting actor in 1982.

Years later he was part of another ensemble show, the sci-fi adventure series “Firefly” (2002). Although the series lasted less than one season it developed a cult following and a film, “Serenity” was released in 2005. Glass played Shepherd Derrial Book, a spiritual leader and moral guide to the rest of the crew of the spaceship Serenity. However, there are frequent references to the character’s less wholesome past.

Glass was born July 10, 1945 in Evansville, Indiana. He studied Drama and Literature at the University of Evansville and made his stage debut at the famed Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He then moved to Los Angeles where he made his first television appearance in an episode of “Sanford and Son” in 1972.

After “Barney Miller” Glass was tapped in 1982 to play neat-freak Felix Unger in an updated version of “The Odd Couple” called “The New Odd Couple.” The series featured an African-American cast and often re-used scripts from earlier Tony Randall/Jack Klugman series. It lasted for one season.

Glass worked consistently in film and television and was a frequent guest star on many popular shows. He played Ross Geller’s divorce lawyer, Russell, on “Friends” and made recent appearances on “CSI” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

[Kobi]

Fritz Weaver, a stage, film, and television actor whose credits include the TV miniseries "Holocaust," died Saturday. Weaver was 90.

Weaver's earliest acting roles were on TV during the 1950s. He appeared on "The Twilight Zone," both in the original series and the 1985 reboot, and he played characters on "Dr. Kildare," "Mission: Impossible," "Rawhide," and "The Big Valley." Fans of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" may remember Weaver's role in "Tribunal," an episode of the show.

In the 1970s, Weaver acted in the made-for-TV movies "The Legend of Lizzie Borden" and "Holocaust," receiving an Emmy Award nomination for the latter.

Although he was a frequent character actor on TV, Weaver showed theatrical talent as well. He won a Tony Award for the 1970 Broadway play "Child's Play." He received a second Tony nomination for "The Chalk Garden." His theater credits also include "Baker Street," "Love Letters," and "The Crucible."

[~ocean]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Ron Glass, the actor best known for his work on “Barney Miller” and “Firefly,” died Friday, November 26. He was 71.

Glass played the intellectual Det. Ron Harris on the sitcom “Barney Miller” from 1975 – 1982. The show was hailed by critics and police officers for its realistic depiction of police work while also delivering consistent laughs. Much of the humor for his character stemmed from his dapper fashion sense and dreams of becoming a writer. He was nominated for an Emmy for supporting actor in 1982.

Years later he was part of another ensemble show, the sci-fi adventure series “Firefly” (2002). Although the series lasted less than one season it developed a cult following and a film, “Serenity” was released in 2005. Glass played Shepherd Derrial Book, a spiritual leader and moral guide to the rest of the crew of the spaceship Serenity. However, there are frequent references to the character’s less wholesome past.

Glass was born July 10, 1945 in Evansville, Indiana. He studied Drama and Literature at the University of Evansville and made his stage debut at the famed Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He then moved to Los Angeles where he made his first television appearance in an episode of “Sanford and Son” in 1972.

After “Barney Miller” Glass was tapped in 1982 to play neat-freak Felix Unger in an updated version of “The Odd Couple” called “The New Odd Couple.” The series featured an African-American cast and often re-used scripts from earlier Tony Randall/Jack Klugman series. It lasted for one season.

Glass worked consistently in film and television and was a frequent guest star on many popular shows. He played Ross Geller’s divorce lawyer, Russell, on “Friends” and made recent appearances on “CSI” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

I feel sad for Anthony Geary, he was Ron Glass' lover ~ they were a very happy couple.

[CherylNYC]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/ar...ies-at-84.html

Pauline Oliveros, Composer Who Championed ‘Deep Listening,’ Dies at 84
By STEVE SMITHNOV. 27, 2016


"Pauline Oliveros, a composer whose life’s work aspired to enhance sensory perception through what she called “deep listening,” died on Thursday at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her spouse, Carole Ione Lewis, a writer and performance artist known as Ione.

Early in her career in the 1960s, Ms. Oliveros avidly adopted cutting-edge technologies, working with magnetic tape and prototype synthesizers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Already active as an improviser, she approached electronic music with a performer’s instincts; to make “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965), which John Rockwell, The New York Times music critic, called “one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music to emerge from the 60s,” she manipulated a recording of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly” on a turntable, augmenting its sounds with oscillators and tape delay.

The resulting piece, Ms. Oliveros wrote, “bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex.”

Gender inequality would be a theme that she addressed repeatedly and tenaciously. An essay she wrote for The Times in 1970 started with a provocative question – “Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers?” – and then enumerated reasons, including gender bias and societal expectations of domestic compliancy.

Ms. Oliveros said in a 2012 Times profile that in 1971, after a period of intense introspection prompted by the Vietnam War, she changed creative course, eventually producing “Sonic Meditations,” a set of 25 text-based instructions meant to provoke thoughtful, creative responses.

“Native,” the most commonly cited example, is also the most succinct: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Embedded within that poetic instruction and the other meditations was a substantial proposition: a total inclusivity, meant to free music from elite specialists and open it up to everyone, regardless of status, experience, or ability.

“All societies admit the power of music or sound. Attempts to control what is heard in the community are universal,” Ms. Oliveros wrote in a preface to the meditations. “Sonic Meditations are an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone, and within groups especially for humanitarian purposes; specifically healing.”

Ms. Oliveros never quit composing, but from the 1970s favored improvisation, adapted elements of ceremonies and rituals encountered in her studies of Native American lore and Eastern religion, and conducted meditative retreats to share her artistic discipline.

One more turning point came in 1988, when Ms. Oliveros and two colleagues — the trombonist, didgeridoo player and composer Stuart Dempster and the vocalist and composer Panaiotis — descended into an extraordinarily resonant disused cistern in Port Townsend, Wash. Their drone-based improvisations were recorded, and selections issued on CD under the title “Deep Listening” in 1989.

Beyond a self-evident pun referring to music played 14 feet underground, “Deep Listening” signified Ms. Oliveros’s emerging aural discipline: a practice that compelled listening not just to the conventional details of a given musical performance — melody, harmony, rhythm, intonation — but also to sounds surrounding that performance, including acoustic space and extra-musical noise.

The process lent its name to a working ensemble, Deep Listening Band, for much of its duration a trio comprising Ms. Oliveros, Mr. Dempster and the keyboardist and composer David Gamper, who died in 2011. Over time, the Deep Listening banner would extend to cover retreats, workshops and lectures in which Ms. Oliveros shared her artistic discipline.

In 2005 Ms. Oliveros rechristened her Pauline Oliveros Foundation the Deep Listening Institute, defining as its mission “creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and nonmusicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages.”

Among other projects, the institute supported the design of software that would allow children with severe physical or cognitive disabilities to improvise music. In 2014, the institute merged with the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

In her final decades Ms. Oliveros formed close bonds with groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble, which brought her work closer to the mainstream canon with performances at Lincoln Center, Miller Theater at Columbia University and elsewhere.

“I’m not dismissive of classical music and the Western canon,” Ms. Oliveros said in 2012. “It’s simply that I can’t be bound by it. I’ve been jumping out of categories all my life.”

Pauline Oliveros was born on May 30, 1932, in Houston to John Oliveros and Edith Gutierrez. Her childhood was accompanied by the sounds of piano lessons taught by her mother and grandmother, bird song and buzzing cicadas, and the curious special effects used on favorite radio serials like “Buck Rogers” and “The Shadow.”

Taking up the accordion as her principal instrument, she also learned to play violin, piano, French horn and tuba.

At 20 Ms. Oliveros moved to California in search of a compositional mentor. She found one in Robert Erickson, a prominent composer, who as the music director of KPFA-FM, a Berkeley radio station, introduced Bay Area listeners to the latest trends in European avant-garde composition.

She explored free improvisation with colleagues like the composer Terry Riley and the bassist and koto player Loren Rush in the late 1950s, and joined Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick at the trailblazing San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962.

When the center was absorbed by Mills College in 1966, Ms. Oliveros served for a year as its director. In 1967 she joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught until 1981. From 2001 she served as distinguished research professor of music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include a John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

In addition to her spouse, Ms. Oliveros is survived by three stepchildren, Alessandro Bovoso, Nico Bovoso and Antonio Bovoso; a brother, John Oliveros, and eight grandchildren.

Correction: November 30, 2016
An obituary on Monday about the composer Pauline Oliveros misstated part of the name of the organization that presented her with the John Cage Award. It is the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, not the Foundation of Contemporary Arts."

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Pauline Oliveros was an out lesbian throughout her long musical career. She was a very courageous artist. I heard her work in performance several times here in NYC. I once spied her hanging out at the back of the concert hall and got up the nerve to introduce myself, but I got anxious and promptly beat a hasty retreat after she smilingly gave me her attention. I'm quite sad to read that she passed.

[Kobi]

Grant Tinker, who brought new polish to the TV world and beloved shows to the audience as both a producer and a network boss, has died. He was 90.

Though he had three tours of duty with NBC, the last as its chairman, Tinker was perhaps best-known as the nurturing hand at MTM Enterprises, the production company he founded in 1970 and ran for a decade.

Nothing less than a creative salon, MTM scored with some TV's most respected and best-loved programs, including "Lou Grant," ''Rhoda," ''The Bob Newhart Show" and, of course, the series that starred his business partner and then-wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

In 1981, Tinker flourished with that low-key approach in a last-ditch effort to save NBC, which was scraping bottom with its earnings, ratings, programs and morale. Five years later, when Tinker left to return to independent production, the network was flush thanks to hits such as "The Cosby Show" and "Hill Street Blues."

Tinker, who had come to NBC as a management trainee in 1949 with legendary founder David Sarnoff still in charge, left the company for the last time at the end of an era, as NBC, along with its parent RCA, was about to be swallowed by General Electric.

In 2005, he won a prestigious Peabody Award honoring his overall career. In receiving his medallion, he called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." He also had received the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Born in 1926, the son of a lumber supplier, Tinker had grown up in Stamford, Connecticut, and graduated from Dartmouth College before his first short stint at NBC.

Then he moved into advertising. At a time when ad agencies were heavily responsible for crafting programs its clients would sponsor, Tinker was a vice president at the Benton & Bowles agency when he helped develop "The Dick Van Dyke Show" for Procter & Gamble. There he met, and fell for, the young actress the whole country was about to fall in love with: Mary Tyler Moore.

Soon after the new CBS sitcom had begun its five-season run in fall 1961, Tinker returned to NBC, this time as vice president of West Coast programming.

Meanwhile, he and Moore became TV's golden couple and, in 1962, they wed.

Tinker stayed at NBC until 1967, after which he had brief stays at Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.

Then, with an itch to run his own shop, Tinker founded MTM and began developing its first series: a comedy to revive the flagging career of his wife.

The pilot for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" rated poorly with test audiences. The heroine was dismissed for being over 30 and unmarried. Neighbor Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) was deemed too annoying, best friend Rhoda (Valerie Harper) "too New Yorky and brassy (read: Jewish)," as Tinker wrote in his 1994 memoir, "Tinker in Television."

But the show, which premiered on CBS in fall 1970, was a critical and popular smash for seven seasons and became the flagship series of a studio whose mewing kitten (parodying the MGM lion) came to signify some of TV's best.

Along the way, MTM became an incubator for some of TV's best writers and producers, many of whom — like Steven Bochco, James L. Brooks and Tom Fontana — continue to excel in TV and films.

By 1981, Tinker's stewardship of MTM had ended (as had his marriage to Moore) when he returned to NBC, where, he recalled in his book, "the company had lost its credibility with every important constituency — affiliates, advertisers, the press, the general public and its own employees."

Under Tinker's regime, NBC enjoyed a remarkable recovery. "The Cosby Show" was an overnight hit, but thanks to Tinker, slow starters such as "Hill Street Blues" (which was from MTM), "Family Ties" and "Cheers" were allowed to find their audience and became hits, too.

Tinker left NBC in 1986, shortly after the announcement of its purchase by G.E.

He formed another independent studio, GTG Entertainment, in partnership with Gannett Newspaper Corporation, but its few series flopped and the company was dissolved.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...130-story.html

[Kobi]

Michael "Jim" Delligatti, who created McDonald's iconic Big Mac sandwich, died Monday. He was 98.

Delligatti invented the sandwich in 1967 at one of his McDonald’s franchise restaurants in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He decided that his customers would like to eat a larger sandwich. He was right, and the sandwich became hugely popular at all of his 48 locations.

Delligatti said he labored for two years to come up with the right combination for his "special sauce." The burger with two beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun was added to McDonald’s menu nationwide in 1968. McDonald’s has never changed the recipe for his Big Mac.

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I miss being able to eat Big Macs.

[Kobi]

Don Calfa, a prolific character actor who appeared in “Weekend at Bernie’s,” died Thursday, December 1, 2016, of natural causes in Palm Springs, California, according to The Associated Press. He was 76.

Calfa appeared in dozens of films and TV shows over the course of his more than 40-year career. One of the most successful was the 1989 comedy “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which he played Paulie the hitman.

Perhaps his most beloved role was as mortician Ernie Kaltenbrunner in the 1985 cult film “The Return of the Living Dead.” The horror-comedy helped to popularize the idea of zombies feeding on brains. Of all the roles he played, that one seemed to resonate the most with audiences and he made appearances at fan conventions for many years.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 3, 1939, Calfa dropped out of high school to join a theater workshop and pursue his love of acting. He got his first professional work on the New York stage, eventually appearing on Broadway in “Mating Dance” in 1965.

He made his screen debut for underground director Robert Downey, Sr. in “No More Excuses” (1968). He played small roles in the films of several notable directors, including Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” (1977), Blake Edwards’ “10” (1979), and Seven Spielberg’s “1941” (1979).

On television he appeared as a number of different characters over the run of “Barney Miller,” and had short recurring roles on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

[Kobi]

Alice Drummond, a prolific character actress nominated for a Best Featured Actress Tony in 1970 and known for appearances in films like Awakenings, Synecdoche, New York, and Ghostbusters among many others died on November 30 from complications following a fall in her home. She was 88.

Born in 1928 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Drummond was a 1950 graduate of Pembroke College (now Brown University). She began her acting career following a move to New York with her husband, Paul Drummond whom she married in 1951. (The couple divorced in 1976). A regular on Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s, Drummond was nominated for a Tony for her performance in Murray Schisgal’s The Chinese.

Drummond also held a slew of memorable and sometimes iconic character roles on film and television. Among them, in the 1960s she appeared on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, in the role of Nurse Jackson; as a New York City librarian in the beginning of the original Ghostbusters; and as a a patient in the 1990 Robin Williams film Awakenings. She was a regular on the CBS soap Where the Heart Is, appearing on the show until it ended its run in 1973, and later appeared briefly on As the World Turns, another CBS soap.

Among many television guest spots, she appeared on Spin City, Boston Legal, Ed, Law & Order, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and Grace Under Fire.

Her most recent film appearance was in the family comedy Furry Vengeance in 2010.

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Wonderful and versatile actress.....and fellow native Rhode Islander.