David Carradine, best known for his work in the 1970s television series Kung Fu and more recently in the movie Kill Bill, has been found dead in his hotel in Thailand.

The initial police report indicated that Carradine had committed suicide by hanging himself (see Lucy Gordon); he was found by a hotel maid sitting in a wardrobe with a cord around his neck, body and “other body parts.”  Now it has been re-thought since nobody, including Carradine’s ex-wife, would ever think the actor would take his own life.

The best guess now is that it was autoerotic asphyxiation (see details in this Wall Street Journal blog post).  That would make the suicide accidental.  Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunand, a Thai forensic pathologist and Director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science, said the circumstances indicated an autoerotic fatality.

Carradine was in Bangkok to shoot his latest movie, Stretch, but the film crew were aware of his absence only when they went to dine out at a restaurant on June 3.

In 2000 I met Carradine when I lived in Austin, Texas.  I went to one of Austin’s few film premiere parties and Carradine attended, as he was in the film (something on cable, I think).

Nobody was talking to Carradine, and as I drank more scotch, I became more emboldened.  I eventually drank way too much scotch and stumbled up to Carradine, who was standing by himself in the middle of the room.  He had an unfriendly, sourpuss expression on his face.  The following is a true story:

“Heeeey, Mr. Carradine!  You sure look like you are having a good time!” I said.  He cracked a smile.

“I hate these things, I guess it’s obvious,” he replied.  I didn’t have a follow-up to the introduction, so I grasped at straws.

“I have a question,” I slurred.  “What if nuclear winter came, and by some miracle it is only you and all of the animals left on the planet.  You still have lions, ferrets and chickens running around.  You decide to build a walled-in complex, a kingdom, both out of boredom and necessity.  Tell me, Mr. Carradine, what animal would you choose first to populate your new animal kingdom?”

He looked at me like I might be crazy, but then he gave a toothy grin.  A big one.  Someone later that night went up to my date, Mary Levy, daughter of former Texas Monthly publisher Michael Levy, and said that her date was the only one all night who was able to get David Carradine to smile.

“Well…” Carradine started off, massaging the back of his neck with his hand as he weighed his options, “…I guess it would have to be something I could procreate with.  Some kind of primate, maybe?”  When he said that, my eyes grew big and I was unable to hide my drunkenness when I replied.

“You mean, like, you’d fuck a gorilla?  Like Jane Goodall?”  Carradine laughed at me, and then asked me what I would choose.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, as if I had thought about it for ages.  “I would choose a giraffe.”  My eyes glazed from booze as I considered the beauty of the giraffe.  “They are so majestic and peaceful, and they make no sounds because they lack vocal chords.”

“Does any animal have vocal chords?” replied Carradine.  That tripped me up, since perhaps the term ‘vocal chords’ was only applicable to humans.  It’s not, but in my state I thought he might have had a point.

“I dunno,” I said, “but I know they can’t make any sounds.”

At that, David Carradine walked away without saying another word.  I stumbled outside to have a cigarette, and when I was finished I chucked it and almost hit the artist Julie Speed with the flying ember.  That’s when I knew it was time to go home.

Rest in peace, Mr. Carradine.

According to TorrentFreak, the following list of movies were the most downloaded movies in the last week using BitTorrent, which is one of the most common protocols for sharing large files, and by some estimates it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire Internet.  It is, essentially, the way people download pirated movies.

The most illegally downloaded movies this week are:

1. Twilight
2. Role Models
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Valkyrie
5. Bolt
6. Gran Torino
7. Australia
8. Transporter 3
9. The Reader
10. The Day the Earth Stood Still

Baz Luhrman’s Australia received particularly mixed criticism, with Salon.com’s Stephanie Zachrek writing that, “Luhrmann’s attempt to pull off a wartime weeper… is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure.”

Bleach Portrait of Steve Martin, Tribeca Film Festival, April 2008

A running photography feature on this site is called “Overexposed”.  At large premieres and events there are sometimes hundreds of photographers; when enough of them shoot simultaneously their flashbulbs can completely bleach out the subject.  Even when space was running out on my card, I did not delete these because there was something interesting to me.  It might be the featureless familiarity.  An image of  déjà vu.

They are all natural, completely untouched by Photoshop.  What you see is the extreme amount of light produced at one moment.  My photo of Brendan Fraser was directly after he talked about how he was going to start having seizures from the flashbulbs.  Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys does not allow flash photography when he appears at events because he has epilepsy.  The Red Carpet can be a challenge; the bleach portrait above would have been a better lead un-bleached than the one I used to illustrate Steve Martin (although it’s not a bad one).

Bleach portraits tend to only occur for the biggest celebrities, the ones who draw enough photographic interest to make so many flashbulbs spasm continuously at once.  Everyone involved is simply there to do a job.  Photographers do not want bleached shots and discard them quickly; so the red carpet is the only natural place for one to be created.

Click above to see the portrait that came from the shoot that found its way on the subject’s Wikipedia article.  (Steve Martin dislikes the Red Carpet).