Warhol Muse and Beat Poet Taylor Mead Dies at 88: VIDEO

Beat poet, actor, and Warhol friend Taylor Mead died on Wednesday in Colorado at the age of 88.

The film critic J. Hoberman called Mr. Mead “the first underground movie star.” The film historian P. Adams Sitney called one of Mr. Mead’s earliest films, “The Flower Thief” (1960), “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.”

“The Flower Thief,” directed by Ron Rice, stars Mr. Mead as a bedraggled mystic wandering the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco with open-mouthed wonder. He carries with him his three prized possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag and a teddy bear.

Check out the following clip shot by Craig Highberger in which Mead talks about Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, Max's Kansas City and getting beat up (and rejected by the hospital) for being gay in the 60's.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

Special Effects and Animation Pioneer Ray Harryhausen Died: VIDEO

Stop-motion pioneer and legend Ray Harryhausen died yesterday at 92:

In the pre-computer-generated-imagery era in which he worked, Harryhausen used the painstaking process of making slight adjustments to the position of his three-dimensional, ball-and-socket-jointed scale models and then shooting them frame-by-frame to create the illusion of movement. Footage of his exotic beasts and creatures was later often combined with live action.

Let's take a moment to stare in awe at the skeleton scene from Jason and the Argonauts as well as a longer highlight reel.

Check it out, AFTER THE JUMP...

I pretty much reacted like this too when I first saw those skeletons as a child:

DJ Peter Rauhofer Dies After Battle with Brain Tumor

DJ Peter Rauhofer, whom we reported recently was battling a brain tumor, has died, according to a message posted on his official Facebook page by his manager, Angelo Russo:

Today the music industry has lost one of it's true heroes.

With a heavy heart I must now report that Peter Rauhofer has lost his battle with brain cancer.

He passed quietly today and is survived by his mother, Helga, who resides in Austria.

She will transport Peter back home to his final resting place there, but to all that knew Peter, his heart will always be in New York City.

It makes me sad, not only that I have lost a friend, but that the world has lost an amazing talent and that future generations will never get to understand the magic that Peter created night after night all over the world.

He is gone too soon but we will always have the vast body of music that Peter left for us.

Through his music, Peter will live forever. The brightest stars always burn out too soon. Peter, you were loved and you will be terribly missed. Goodbye my friend. Please rest in peace knowing that you have brought so much joy to so many of us. I ask that his true fans keep his legacy alive by sharing his music with anyone who may not have had the opportunity to experience it for themselves.

Rauhofer was 48.

Our thoughts go out to his friends and family.

Margaret Thatcher's Funeral, from Above: PHOTO

From the dome of London's St. Paul's Cathedral (click to enlarge)

The two red chairs at the front are The Queen and Prince Philip's. More on the funeral, which has an estimated cost of £10m, here.

It was not without its protests:

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Dead at 87

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died from a stroke, her press spokesman Lord Bell told news outlets this morning. Thatcher was the longest-serving prime minister of the UK of the 20th Century

Bell's statement according to the Press Association: "It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning. A further statement will be made later."

NYT:

Lady Thatcher had been in poor health for months. She served as prime minister for 11 years, beginning in 1979. She was known variously as the ‘Iron Lady,’ a stern Conservative who transformed Britain’s way of thinking about its economic and political life, broke union power and opened the way to far greater private ownership.

The Daily Beast's Tom Doran details her gay rights legacy:

Here, as with most of her achievements, it's a mixed bag. As a member of Parliament (MP) in the 1960s, she was one of only a handful of Conservatives to vote for the decriminalization of homosexuality, a truly forward-thinking and brave gesture that she deserves a great deal of credit for.

Sadly, as Prime Minister, she would squander much of that credit (ironically enough, for a politician who put such stock in thrift) by lending her support to one of the nastiest anti-gay measures of modern times: the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which forbade schools from teaching "the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship". This was despite the open secret (among Westminster insiders, at least) that several prominent members of her government were themselves gay, albeit in reinforced-steel closets.

More on the repeal of Section 28 here.

RIP.

Film Critic Roger Ebert Dead at 70

Film critic Roger Ebert has died at 70, the Sun-Times reports:

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December, and would be taking “a leave of presence.” In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote “I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.”

RIP.