Mourning Roundup: March 28, 2012

MARCH 28, 2012 TAGS: OBITS, LEGACY ADD A COMMENT

-Two new biographies of Fred Astaire occasions a gleeful reevaluation. Astaire breezed into the talking picture era like no one else.

-A wonderful life story by Caleb Crain that reflects on the work of Czech playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel. Here's Havel writing to his wife Olga on the power of the avant-garde:

“A single performance for a few dozen people,” he wrote to Olga, “can be incomparably more important than a television serial viewed and talked about by the entire country.”

-A former intern for the veteran boxing journalist, Bert Sugar, remembers the fedora'd eccentricities of the old stalwart:

"I figured Bert was the kind of newsman who was pleased that he wrote about someone who wanted to punch him out. A job well done."

-Matthew Ygelsias at Slate on Murray Lender's legacy of mediocre bagels.

-Art critic Hilton Kramer held a deep disdain for the fads of the art world. Here's him on Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"The career of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the hoaxes of the 1980s art boom.. An artist of social consciousness, dealing with greed, racism, the inhumanity of American society, and so on. This is the key to the way Basquiat is going to be marketed for the 1990s. It's all pure baloney."