Actor Justin Mentell, known for his role in US television drama Boston Legal, died February 1st in a road accident in rural Wisconsin.  He was aged 27.

Iowa County Sheriff’s Department, who confirmed the death, stated that Mentell was driving without wearing a seatbelt when he crashed his 4 X 4 vehicle into two trees placed on an embankment. He was killed in the collision at 0300 local time.

One of the roles that Justin Mentell played was Garrett Wells in Boston Legal in 2005 and in 2006. William Shatner, who also appeared in the programme, paid tribute to the actor on his Twitter page on Wednesday. He wrote: “I’m deeply saddened to hear about Justin Mentell. There’s no telling how far up the ladder he may have climbed. My sympathies to his family.”

Source: Wikinews

Photo of Justin taken by me for the Creative Commons at the premiere of Palo Alto in April 2007.

Jim Carroll, author of the Basketball Diaries, which was made into a 1995 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has died of a heart attack at the age of 60.  I last saw Jim in 2007, when he posed for me at the Brooklyn Book Festival in a photo that was instantly unpopular with his fans, as his emaciated appearance started rumors that something was terribly wrong with the iconic poet raconteur.

(post continues below)

The photo above was the best out of a series of three that I took at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival (the 2009 festival ironically occurred just yesterday).  Carroll was fascinating. He had a wide variety of notes and things he had written that he wanted to talk about, but he was part of a panel and he ran out of time, never really having given much of a presentation.

As he fumbled through a complicated series of notes and papers, he refused to give up the microphone.  After begging him to give it up, the festival cut Carroll’s mic, which upset him immensely.   I will never forget fellow panelist Joe Meno staring, sitting next to a towering Halloween Jack of a Carroll, gesturing wildly, as he protested for more time (photo below).  The whole thing had been a wash.

On September 20, 2007, I wrote the following on Wikinews:

One of the featured panels on “soon-to-be-published works of groundbreaking authors” that included Jim Carroll, The Women of Brewster Place author Gloria Naylor and playwright and music journalist Joe Meno, ran into problems. The panel was the final program and started half an hour late. Naylor failed to show, reportedly due to a death in the family. In the middle of Carroll’s presentation he was asked to stop speaking so they could close the courtroom where the event was held in the Borough Hall. Carroll was visibly upset. He asked the audience if they wanted to hear one song, to which they enthusiastically cheered until the festival organizers cut off his microphone to keep to a schedule that required they vacate the premises by a certain time.

Jim Carroll in 2005 - the image that replaced the 2007 one above, out of fan request.

Here is an accurate, detailed re-telling of that day.

I approached Jim in the atrium of Brooklyn Borough Hall and asked if I could take a few shots of him for Wikipedia, and he was happy to do so.  Unfortunately, his appearance and expressions were not flattering, despite a few polite suggestions.  It was as if he was fine with my photographing, but not present for the activity.

This image was instantly unpopular with Carroll’s fans. I received e-mails through MySpace and Gmail begging me to take it off his Wikipedia page because his fans were concerned that he looked terrible. The photo above started rumors that Carroll was again using drugs; whereas his fans protested that he had just been sick the week before, which was why he looked so gaunt.

At their request, I removed it from his Wikipedia article after the 2005 image to the right was made available on December 3, 2007.  The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE:  According to Ron Silliman’s blog, the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival was Carroll’s second-to-last public appearance, the last being the 2008 Poetry Project New Year’s Marathon.

Budd Schulberg, screenwriter, novelist and producer, has died in his home in Westhampton, New York, aged 95.  He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay for A Face in the Crowd.

Budd Schulberg, 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, New York City

Schulberg encountered political controversy in 1951 when screenwriter Richard Collins, testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee, named Schulberg as a former member of the Communist Party. Schulberg testified as a friendly witness that Party members had sought to influence the content of What Makes Sammy Run and “named names” of other alleged Hollywood communists.

Just a few days ago brother Malachy McCourt said Frank did not have long.  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes died today from metastatic melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, according to Susan Moldow of McCourt’s publisher, Scribner.

I met Frank and took this shot of him at a tribute to Benedict Kiely (who had recently died) at Housing Works Bookstore Café in March 2007.   He was 76 and in good spirits.  I was very shy at the time, almost embarrassed, to take photographs of people I respected so much.  My camera was a cheap, 2.3 megapixel Fuji my sister Cheryl bought me for my birthday; it certainly didn’t look serious.  I had no confidence.  When Frank asked me why I was taking the shots, I told him it was for Wikipedia and he brightened.  We talked about the site, and he asked why we didn’t just use PR photographs.  I explained to him that we could only use work whose copyright was Creative Commons.

“David,” he said, “you mean to tell me you give all your photography away?  And don’t make a penny?  My mother might say you were a fool!”   He laughed to show he meant the comment good-natured.

I explained to him that I wasn’t a professional, but that the photography gives me a substantive excuse to go out and do things like meet him.

“Mr. McCourt,” I said, and he quickly corrected me to use Frank as I continued, “my life is far richer for moments like this, with you, than the $10 I would chase to have it published, which would only cheapen the experience.  This camera has given me an interesting life, but only because I’ve shared it.”

Colum McCann, Christy Kelly, Christopher Cahill and Frank McCourt by David Shankbone, March 2007

He looked at me for a moment, and then asked if I was going with the other writers, including Christopher Cahill and Colum McCann, on a bar crawl after the reading to celebrate the Irish poet Kiely (everyone was invited).  I was staying away from drinking at the time and told him my stomach didn’t feel right, so I would miss it.  Then he clasped my shoulder, and said:

“Too bad, it would be interesting to hear more.  Society has become so possessive.  People keep things that have no value unless they are shared.  That’s very respectable that you do what you do.”

Then I took a couple of shots, and he continued to mingle.  It was moments like that which fueled my energy to eventually photograph over 500 of the biggest names found on Wikipedia, and my confidence climbed.  Thank you, Frank.  Later that year I would photograph Malachy McCourt in his Manhattan apartment, where we got into heavy philosophical discussions that have never left me.   The McCourt family had a good impact on me at a time when it mattered, and I am thankful to them.

The portrait of Frank above, like all my photography, is licensed Creative Commons and available for reproduction.  Click on it to download a higher resolution version.

Here is the New York Times obituary.

It was exactly one month ago that Gail Shister entered the race to be “first” to call Walter Cronkite’s pending death.  I almost wrote a blog post last week wondering whether Shister felt at all macabre that the “most trusted man in America” was still alive, until I realized it would conflict with an earlier post I wrote.

NPR has an excellent obituary that I recommend you read. Also, check out Haikuku’s ode to Cronkite.  I’ve missed journalists of his caliber for years, so my mourning is tempered.

McCourt giving a reading at Housing Works bookstore in New York City in 2007.

According to his brother Malachy McCourt, celebrated author Frank McCourt is suffering from meningitis and has as little as a couple of weeks or less to live.  He has been admitted to a New York hospital. Earlier this year McCourt was diagnosed with melanoma.

UPDATE 7/19:  Frank McCourt has died.

“He’s not too good at the moment,” said Malachy, an actor, author and politician who ran for Governor of New York in 2006. “He was doing fine, but he got meningitis two weeks ago and it turned the whole thing topsy-turvy.”

The 78-year-old McCourt was 66 when in 1996 he debuted his memoir Angela’s Ashes, which detailed his growing up poor and adolescence in Limerick, Ireland.  McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930, but his family returned to Ireland in 1934.

The photo above, taken with a very cheap camera, is one in a series I did of McCourt for Wikipedia in 2007 at the Housing Works bookstore.  I would later photograph his brother Malachy for Wikipedia at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which was an inspiring and interesting experience.

Yesterday I walked over to one of my favorite mini-restaurants, Snack Dragon, to buy a couple of carne asada tacos.  The topic of Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths were already on the lips of the two ladies eating rice and beans.  We all started talking about it.  Suddenly, one of the women said, “And then Liza Minnelli, too!  I can’t believe it!”

“Liza Minnelli?!” I replied, mouth agape.

“Yeah – you didn’t know about that?  They just announced she died today, too.”

“Holy shit,” I said, “the drag queen mascara is going to be running in the streets of Chelsea this gay pride.”  We all talked about June 25th, and the deaths of so many amazing people on one day.

I had earlier broken the news about Jackson to my mother.  She was floored.  When I returned home with tacos in hand, I called her immediately and said, “And did you hear about Liza Minnelli?!”

Of course, Liza Minnelli is alive and well.  It was only after I told my mother–”This is starting to feel like a terrorist attack!“–that I looked for information on Google about Minnelli and found nothing.

It turns out that the celebrity death rumor mill was in full swing yesterday, as pranksters preyed on the shock and raw grief of unassuming people.  The New York Daily News reported that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum death rumors were circulating:

The rumors of Goldblum and Ford’s untimely deaths turned out to be false, and were in fact well-known Internet pranks that once made similar claims of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.

“Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue,” said the actor’s publicist in a statement Thursday night. “He is fine and in Los Angeles.”

According to Snopes.com, these stories are automatically generated with fake scenarios via prank websites. Users simply plug in any name – which in this case were Goldblum and Ford.

For Goldblum, it was suggested he fell to his death while filming a movie in New Zealand. Ford supposedly disappeared while on a boat in the French Riviera.

This kind of prank first appeared online in 2006, and targeted Hanks. Cruise was similarly reported “dead” in 2008.

It’s amazing how the Internet is reshaping our society in such a way that things like pulling pranks in the wake of tragic deaths are now completely common.  It’s true: nothing is sacred anymore.  We all better learn to live in that kind of world.

Michael Jackson Wikipedia article

This image on Wikipedia was dedicated to editor Realist2, who has worked hard at creating high quality articles on the entire Jackson family. Click on the image to see where it is used on Wikipedia.

The Michael Jackson Wikipedia article is one of the better biography articles on Wikipedia, and it is directly-related to the efforts of editor Realist2. On June 25th, 1.4 million people hit it.

I have no doubt that Michael Jackson knew that this editor was keeping the article as close to the core Wikipedia policy of “Neutral Point of View” as possible.  Realist2 is an example of the amazing work that happens on that site.  He took an interest in popular culture and turned himself into a scribe of popular culture.  That’s pretty cool.

Realist has worked on the articles about all of the Jacksons, and they owe him a debt of gratitude.  We all do.   I dedicated the image of a Michael Jackson impersonator at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival celebration of the 25th anniversary of Thriller in Realist’s honor.  Also pictured are cast members of the television program Step It Up and Dance!, who put on a show at the festival with the original choreographer of the Thriller video.

With its dedication, Realist2 was inducted into the Wikimedia Hall of the Greats, along with other people who have greatly improved the quality and scope of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The wrangling over the Wikipedia biography of Walter Cronkite and what is apparently his failing health has begun.  Wikipedia editors often get this kind of news early, as people rush to update Wikipedia articles the moment they learn something.

Gail Shister at Mediabistro blog TVNewser is responsible for the rumor, quoting unidentified sources inside CBS.  The network has officially declined to confirm reports that the news legend is in poor health.

In an interview with Shister in 2006, the now 92-year-old Cronkite was asked if he ever thought about death:

“When you get to be 89, you have to think about it a little bit. It doesn’t prey on me, and it doesn’t keep me awake nights. Occasionally, when I’m upset about something else, I think, ‘My gosh, I don’t know if I should do this or that because I’m not sure I’ll be here that long to enjoy it.’”

This story presages the inevitable “Death of News” stories that will follow when Cronkite passes.  He and Edward R. Murrow are the two historical news figures that most symbolize a perceived golden era when American news was there to inform, and not entertain.  Yes kids, they predate Fox News.

Update 7/18:  Walter Cronkite has died.

When I was thirteen, I found a boy my age in the woods who shot himself in the head.  It’s in a little “about me” narrative I wrote a few years ago found on this blog.  It used to say his full name, and eventually both his girlfriend at the time of his death and his sister found me.  It was an incredible experience.  There is a finite number of people who, like me, felt consequences from that moment.

I won’t condemn a person for taking their own life, but I will condemn them for the method they employ to do so.  There are other people involved than just the suicide, and in my case I was hapless.  A kid cutting through the woods to go to the Lane Drugs to buy candy.

Once we overcome the initial, “ZOMG! they’re dead and that’s sad!” reaction to a celebrity death, what are we left with?  To try to figure out what our knowledge of, and interest in, that person means to us now that he or she is gone.  It’s a natural process.

However, there is a knee-jerk reaction to people ruminating about the celebrity life-and-death cycle: give the family privacy.  If nothing is sacred, shouldn’t at least the respect for the privacy of a celebrity’s family be? goes that thinking.

The death of Paul Newman was cause for such hand-wringing.  Lisa Fayed of About.com typified the mock anguish the media, and readers, sometime express when they contemplate the end of a famous person’s life:

I cannot imagine while going through chemotherapy or radiation, people commenting on my prognosis based on how bad or good I looked on any given day. How hurtful those comments must be, whether you are a celebrity and accustomed to the tabloid gossip or just “average Joe”.

I say we give Paul Newman a break. He has lived a wonderful life, giving so much to others through his Newman’s Own Foundation. He deserves privacy, just like we all do.

Leave aside the assumption that the dying are googling themselves, celebrities don’t deserve that kind of privacy.  In other words, the privacy that people are not going to discuss you.  Fascination is not a faucet.  Celebrities have cultivated the public, usually over decades, to breach that privacy with them.

Many commonalities most of us can’t imagine strangers would care to learn about in our lives, tantalize us in the famous.  We follow their clothing, their loves, their friendships, their careers, their thoughts, drug problems, marriages, divorces, awards and causes.  In fact, if the public loses interest in the life of a celebrity, it might be the death of their career.

We examine our own lives through them, but suddenly we are all supposed to avert our eyes when they are dying or dead?  The warm helpings of chastisement when we do not are myopic. They are logically flawed and insult the media machine that has been effective in getting all of us to think about that person, sometimes nonstop, sometimes shaping our entire lives around her.

When David Carradine dies in a bizarre way, bringing to light a sexual practice few of us knew existed before Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, people are going to be interested.   Most of the general public neither knew about the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation nor can they contemplate wanting to try it.

Human mortality and the fragility of life is something we all think about, and how people die and the reasons are cause for scrutiny that have implications for ourselves.  Celebrity deaths are often how we think about our own, and whether we would want to go the same way.

Lucy Gordon – tragic but heartless?

It has been almost a month since Lucy Gordon committed suicide and the answers to this mystery may never come to light.  Why did the rising English actress do it?  I am surprised at how much I have thought about it, and it is not because I photographed her.

I won’t begrudge a person for wanting to kill herself.  Life is difficult for many of us, and nobody should be forced to live in their own skin by a person or government who does not have to do so.

But how a person commits suicide is another story.  All evidence is that Lucy Gordon had family that loved and cared about her.  There are no reports coming out from anyone that she had anything but a loving family.  Lucy also had a boyfriend, the cinematographer Jerome Almeras.   She professed, recently, that she was in love with him.  Even his teenage daughter liked her.

Exacerbating the issue is that Lucy just had a friend commit suicide, which upset her terribly.  So she knew exactly the pain her death would cause for those she left behind.   The night she killed herself, she and Almeras had a spat, according to neighbors.   After he went to bed, she then hung herself in their apartment.

Almeras, the man she loved, woke the next morning to find her hanging and went running down the street screaming in anguish after having to cut her down.  ‘Call the police – my friend has hung herself!’ he cried over and over.  Now, he is left with one of his last experiences with her a quarrel.

There appears to be no evidence of mental instability–outside of the suicide–that could have flagged anyone.  Her father, sister, agent and all of her friends were left groping for answers and signs that things were not okay.  They couldn’t come up with any.

This is a stunning way to end your life, knowing well the pain that you will cause; ensuring the man you love finds you when he wakes and has to cut you down; and nobody having any idea why you did it.

Suicide may not be a selfish act, at least no more so than the desires of people who want you to go on living in pain so that you can inhabit their lives, but how you do it has implications for the sort of person that you are.  How you leave it for people to find you, and the answers you give them, are an indication of whether your death was a selfish act or not.

That  boy I found in the woods has never left me. In the case of Lucy Gordon, I think it was a heartless way to go.

There has been a lot of news about photographs published by the Thai Rath tabloid that reportedly show David Carradine as he was found after his death.  Word is going around the Internet that they are fake, or a reenactment.

Below is the front page of the Thai Rath tabloid with what appears to be a dark-haired man hanging in a closet that they purport to be Carradine:

According to the New York Daily News, friends say that Carradine enjoyed autoerotic asphyxiation, a sexual practice that often involves tying a rope around the neck.  On TMZ.com, Brenty Turvey, a forensic psychiatrist, said that it is easy to bind yourself:

Turvey says it’s simple for someone to tie rope around his/her hands, by loosely tying the hands in front — then raising them up to tighten.

Turvey says undoing the knot is easy as well, allowing for a quick escape.

That would make the photo consistent with accidental erotic asphyxiation.  However, according to the Thaindian News:

The photographs displayed by the Bangkok tabloid show a man with dark skin and black hair, naked and suspended by a rope tied around his wrists and attached to a clothes bar inside what appears to be a cheap closet. A bed is less than one meter away from the closet and the room has a wooden floor – all hardly the stuff of a suite in a prestigious hotel such as the Swissotel Nai Lert Park.

Police reports have said Carradine was found with a shoelace tied around his penis and a rope around his neck. An earlier claim that the dead actor’s hands were tied has been refuted by Thai police.

Carradine’s representative stated that his hands were tied not above his head, but behind his back.

The photographs might not be real.  Carradine’s family strongly dispute that idea that he may have committed suicide and they also reject the autoerotic asphyxia theory.

The small glimpse of the room layout does not look like the Swissotel Nai Lert Park rooms, except that they do share similar dark paneling and light shades next to the bed: