Hilary Evans, British picture librarian and author died he was , 82.

Hilary Evans and Mary Evans

Hilary Agard Evans  was a British pictorial archivist, author, and researcher into UFOs and other paranormal phenomena  died he was , 82. .

(1929 – 27 July 2011)

Biography

Evans was born in Shrewsbury, United Kingdom.^[1] and educated at St George’s School at Harpenden. After National Service in Palestine he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, to read English, followed by a Master’s at Birmingham University. He then spent some time as a private tutor before joining Mather & Crowther advertising agency as a copywriter in 1953.
In 1964 he and his wife Mary Evans (1936-2010) founded the Mary Evans Picture Library,^[3] an archive of historical illustrations.^[4] In 1981 he co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.^[5][6]
Evans was an exponent of the Psychosocial Hypothesis of UFOs as culturally shaped visionary experiences.^[7]

Books published                        

• Intrusions: Society and the Paranormal. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
• The Evidence for UFOs. Wellingborough, Northampton, England: Aquarian Press, 1983.
• Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors. Wellingborough, Northampton, England: Aquarian Press, 1984.
• Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians. Wellingborough, Northampton: Aquarian Press, 1987.
• Alternate States of Consciousness: Unself, Other-self, and Superself. Wellingborough, Northampton: Aquarian Press, 1989.
• Frontiers of Reality, Aquarian Press, 1989
• Evans, Hilary, and John Spencer, eds. Phenomena: Forty Years of Flying Saucers. New York: Avon Books, 1989.
• Evans, Hilary, and Dennis Stacy, eds. UFO 1947-1997: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers. London: John Brown, 1997.
• Evans, Hilary, and Robert Bartholomew, eds. Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behaviour. San Antonio, Texas: Anomalist Books, 2009.

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Charles Gittens, American Secret Service agent, first black appointed to that position died he was , 82.

Charles LeRoy Gittens was an American United States Secret Service agent. Gittens joined the Secret Service in 1956, becoming the agency's first African American agent died he was , 82..





(August 31, 1928 – July 27, 2011)

Gittens was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 31, 1928, as one of his family's seven children.^[1][2] His father was a contractor who had immigrated to the United States from Barbados.^[3] He left his highs chool before graduation in order to enlist in the United States Army.^[1][2] He was promoted to lieutenant within the Army and was stationed in Japan during the Korean War.^[2] Gittens earned his GED while serving in the Army.^[2] Following the end of the war, Gittens earned a bachelor's degree from present-day North Carolina Central University.^[1] He became bilingual in both English and Spanish.
Gittens taught at a school in North Carolina for one year. He was encouraged to take the civil service exam, which resulted in his recruitment into the United States Secret Service.^[2] He began his career at the agency's office in Charlotte, North Carolina.^[1] He then became an investigator at the Secret Service's field office in New York City, where he served for ten years.^[3] He was assigned to a "special detail" Secret Service unit, which investigated bank fraud and counterfeiting.^[1][2] Gittens was then transferred to the Secret Service's field office in Puerto Rico, where he guarded New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller during his 1969 to the Caribbean and Latin America.^[3]
Gittens was promoted to the head of the Secret Service's field office in Washington, D.C. in 1971.^[2][3] He retired from the agency in 1979.^[1]
He then joined the United States Department of Justice, where he led investigations of Nazi war criminals who were residing in the United States at the Department's Office of Special Investigations.^[1][2]
Charles Gittens died of complications from a heart attack at the Collington Episcopal Life Care Community, an assisted living facility in Mitchellville, Maryland, on July 27, 2011, at the age of 82.^[1][2] He had moved to the facility from Fort Washington, Maryland, in 2010.^[2] His first wife, Ruthie, with whom he had one daughter, died in 1991.^[3] He and his second wife, Maureen, divorced.^[3]

 

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Hideki Irabu, Japanese baseball player (Chiba Lotte Marines, New York Yankees, Montreal Expos), suicide by hanging died at the age of 42.

Hideki Irabu was a Japanese professional baseball player of Okinawan and American mixed ancestry. He played professionally in both Japan and the United States.

(May 5, 1969 – July 27, 2011)

Early life

Irabu was born on May 5, 1969 in Hirara^[1], Okinawa, then administered by the government of the United States. His father was an American service member whom Hideki never knew. Hideki's mother, Kazue, a native Okinawan, later married a restaurateur, Ichiro Irabu, from Osaka. Irabu raised Hideki as his son in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture.^[2][3]

Career

Irabu pitched for the Lotte Orions, who later became the Chiba Lotte Marines, of the Pacific League from 1988 to 1996. He was known as a high-speed pitcher and in 1993, he threw a 158 km/h (98 mph) fastball against Kazuhiro Kiyohara of the Seibu Lions. This was the fastest clocked pitch in all of Japanese Professional Baseball (NPB) until 2005, when the record was broken by Marc Kroon of the Yokohama BayStars. It remains the Pacific League record.^[4][5]
Irabu led the Pacific League in wins in 1994 (15) and in ERA in 1995 and 1996 (2.53 and 2.40, respectively). He also led the Pacific League in strikeouts in 1994 and 1995 (239, 239 and 167 respectively).^[6] In 1997, the San Diego Padres purchased his contract from the Chiba Lotte Marines. The criticisms of this sale from other MLB teams, who wished to bid on Irabu, led to the creation of the posting system currently used by Japanese and MLB teams.^[7] Irabu, however, refused to sign with the Padres, saying he would only play with the Yankees. For the negotiating rights to Irabu, the Yankees offered the Padres a choice of one from a list of players including Brian Boehringer, David Weathers, Chris Cumberland, Andy Fox and Matt Luke. The Padres would eventually include him as a player-to-be-named-later in a trade that involved Homer Bush and Irabu going to the New York Yankees in exchange for Rafael Medina, Ruben Rivera and $3 million in cash.^[8] The Yankees signed him to a $12.8 million, four-year contract, and after only eight minor league games, the Yankees put him in their rotation.
Irabu made his highly publicized debut on July 10, 1997, drawing almost twice as many fans that night as they averaged for weeknight games.^[9] He played with the Yankees from 1997 through 1999, winning two World Series rings (1998, 1999) despite only pitching in one postseason game and having no postseason decisions. George Steinbrenner publicly expressed disgust at his weight, at one point calling him a "fat pussy toad" after he failed to cover first base on a ground ball during a spring training game. Steinbrenner refused to let Irabu accompany the team to Los Angeles, but two days later, Steinbrenner apologized and allowed Irabu to join the team.^[10]
1998 was Irabu's best season in MLB, featuring career bests in games started (28), complete games (2), innings pitched (173), wins (13) and ERA (4.06).^[11]
After the 1999 season, he was traded to the Montreal Expos for Ted Lilly, Christian Parker and Jake Westbrook.^[12] He started only 14 games for the Expos in 2000 and 2001, pitching 71⅓ innings with a 6.69 ERA and only 2 wins against 7 losses.^[11] In 2002, he signed as a free agent to pitch for the Texas Rangers as a closer.^[11] At the end of the year, Irabu moved back to Japan to pitch in the Hanshin Tigers' starting rotation for the 2003 season, helping the team win the Central League pennant for the first time since 1985. When Major League Baseball opened its 2004 season in Tokyo, he pitched against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Over the course of six MLB seasons, Irabu's career totals are 126 games, 514 innings, 34 wins, 35 losses, 16 saves, 405 strikeouts and a 5.15 ERA.^[11] His Japanese totals for eleven seasons are 273 games, 1,286 1/3 innings, 72 wins, 69 losses, 11 saves, 1,282 strikeouts and a 3.55 ERA.
In April 2009, Irabu had come out of retirement and made a contract with Long Beach Armada of the independent Golden Baseball League. He posted a 5–3 record in 10 starts, with an ERA of 3.58. In 65 innings Irabu struck out 66 batters while walking just 19. In August, he announced his intention to return to the Japanese professional leagues,^[13] and began playing for the semi-professional Kōchi Fighting Dogs.^[3]

Personal life

On August 20, 2008, Irabu was arrested on the suspicion of assaulting the manager of a bar in Umeda, Osaka. He was upset that his credit card was not accepted in the bar. At the time of the suspected assault, Irabu had consumed at least 20 glasses of beer. Irabu admitted to the assault, the bartender sustained no injuries, and Irabu paid the bill with another credit card.^[14]
Irabu was arrested for DUI on May 17, 2010, in Redondo Beach, California.^[15] The press release of his arrest states he resided at the time in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Death

Irabu was found dead in his home near Los Angeles on July 27, 2011, in an apparent suicide. He was reported to have hanged himself.^[16] He left behind his wife and two children.^[17] Irabu, who an autopsy showed was inebriated at the time of his death, was reportedly despondent because of his wife and children leaving him.^[18]

 

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Jerome Liebling, American photographer, filmmaker, and he died when he was and academic (Hampshire College) died he was , 87

Jerome Liebling  was an American photographer, filmmaker, and teacher died he was , 87.
He studied photography under Walter Rosenblum and Paul Strand, and joined New York's famed Photo League. In the same period, he became involved with motion-picture production and worked as a documentary filmmaker.

(April 16, 1924 – July 27, 2011)

While a professor of film and photography at the University of Minnesota, Liebling began a longtime collaborative relationship with filmmaker Allen Downs; together they produced several award-winning documentaries, including Pow Wow, The Tree Is Dead, and The Old Men.
Liebling received numerous awards and grants, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Photographic Survey Grant, and a fellowship from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Liebling was a professor emeritus of Hampshire College. He was the younger brother of David Liebling and Stan Liebling, and he is the father of five children, including Minnesota politician Tina Liebling and film director/producer Rachel Liebling.

 

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Agota Kristof, Hungarian-born French novelist, died at the age of 75.

Ágota Kristóf  was a Hungarian writer, who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook (1986). She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008.^[2]

(October 30, 1935 -July 27, 2011)

Biography

Kristof was born in Csikvánd, Hungary on October 30, 1935 and died July 27, 2011. At the age of 21 she had to leave her country when the Hungarian anti-communist revolution was suppressed by the Soviet military. She, her husband (who used to be her history teacher at school) and their 4 month-old daughter escaped to Neuchâtel in Switzerland. After 5 years of loneliness and exile, she quit her work in a factory and left her husband. She started studying French and began to write novels in that language.

Works

Agota Kristof's first steps as a writer were in the realm of poetry and theater (John et Joe, Un rat qui passe), which is a facet of her works that did not have as great an impact as her trilogy. In 1986 Kristof’s first novel, The Notebook appeared. It was the beginning of a moving trilogy. The sequel titled The Proof came 2 years later. The third part was published in 1991 under the title The Third Lie. The most important themes of this trilogy are war and destruction, love and loneliness, promiscuous, desperate, and attention-seeking sexual encounters, desire and loss, truth and fiction.
Agota Kristof received the European prize for French literature for The Notebook. This novel was translated in more than 30 languages.
In 1995 she published a new novel, Yesterday.
Agota Kristof also wrote a book called L'analphabète (in English The Illiterate) and published in 2004. This is an autobiographical text. It explores her love of reading as a young child, and we travel with her to boarding school, and over the border to Austria, and then to Switzerland. Forced to leave her country due to the failure of the anti-communist rebellion, she hopes for a better life in Zurich.
Her latest work is a collection of short stories entitled C'est égal that was published in 2005 in Paris. The majority of her works were published by Editions du Seuil in Paris.
She has two new short stories published at Mini Zoe collection entitled "Ou es-tu Mathias" and "Line, le temps". The names Mathias and Line are from her previous novels.
She died on 27 July 2011 in her Neuchâtel home.

Influence

The video game Mother 3 was influenced by The Notebook's major themes. Main characters Lucas and Claus are named after the book's narrators. The game's designer, Shigesato Itoi, a published author in his own right, compared the novel favorably to an RPG.^[3]
Brucio nel vento (I burn in the Wind, 2002) is a film based on the novel Hier (Yesterday), directed by Silvio Soldini.^[4] Le Continent K. (1998) and Agota Kristof, 9 ans plus tard ... (2006) are two short documentaries about Agota Kristof directed by Eric Bergkraut.^[5]

Bibliography

• 1986: Le grand cahier / The Notebook
• 1988: La preuve / The Proof
• 1991: Le troisième mensonge / The Third Lie
• 1998: L'Heure grise et autres pièces
• 1995: Hier / Yesterday
• 2004: L'analphabète
• 2005: C'est égal
• 2005: Où es-tu Mathias?
• 2007: Le Monstre et autres pièces

English translations

• The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels, Grove Press (June 23, 1997). ISBN 978-0-8021-3506-3
• Yesterday, Random House of Canada (1997). ISBN 978-0-09-926807-9

 

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Rei Harakami, Japanese musician, died from cerebrovascular disease he was , 40.

Rei Harakami  was a Kyoto-based electronic musician from Hiroshima, Japan  died from cerebrovascular disease he was , 40. He composed and mixed on two Roland SC-88Pro sound generators, at times supplemented by the Roland SK-88Pro keyboard model. He suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage on 27 July 2011.

(10 December 1970 – 27 July 2011) 

Rei released his debut album in 1998 on Sublime Records. Follow-up albums, opa*q in 1999 and red curb in 2001 showcased his skills as an artist and producer. Rei's growing reputation resulted in his becoming in demand as a producer and collaborator for artists such as UA, Great 3 and Coldcut. His recent collaboration as an artist and producer was on Akiko Yano's 2004 album, Honto no Kimochi ("True feelings"), and resulted in widespread recognition in Japan.
Rei regularly performed at some of Japan's big festivals such as Fuji Rock Festival, Rising Sun Rock Festival, and Sonar Sound Tokyo. Rei had also actively participated in several music showcases in France and Germany and in Sonar 2005 in Barcelona, Spain where he appeared with Shiro Takatani (from performance unit, "Dumb Type", as a visual collaboration).
His fourth album in 2005, lust, quickly gained popularity in a variety of music scenes. In 2006, Harakami released new and past works on the compilation album Wasuremono ("Forgotten Items") and a project CD Colors of the Dark for the Planetarium. In 2007, he composed the music for the film Tennen Kokekko ("A Gentle Breeze in the Village") based on Fusako Kuramichi's novel of the same name, centered around a group of teenagers in rural Japan. Harakami also started a project with Akiko Yano, called yanokami, which debuted in 2007.

 Discography

• Unrest (1998) Sublime Records
• Opa*q (1999)
• Red Curb (2001)
• lust (2005)
• Wasuremono (2006)
• Color of the Dark (2006)
• Tennen Kokekko, original soundtrack (2007)

 

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Polly Platt, American film producer (Say Anything...), died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis she was , 72 .

Mary Marr "Polly" Platt was an American film producer, production designer and screenwriter died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis she was , 72 ..

(January 29, 1939 – July 27, 2011)

Early life

Platt was born Mary Marr Platt in Fort Sheridan, Illinois on January 29, 1939, later using the name Polly.^[1][2] Her father John was a colonel in the army while her mother Vivian worked in advertising; she has a brother, John.^[1] She moved to Germany at the age of six as her father presided over the Dachau Trials.^[1] Platt later returned to the US and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology.^[1][2]

Career

Platt worked in summer stock theatre as a costume designer in New York and there met Peter Bogdanovich, whom she would later marry.^[1][2] She co-wrote with Bogdanovich his first movie Targets (1968), conceiving the plot outline of a "Vietnam veteran-turned-sniper" and served as the production designer on the film.^[2] She was also production designer on his film The Last Picture Show (1971), recommending Cybill Sheppard for her first film role,^[3] and despite the breakdown of their marriage, had the same role on What's Up Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973).^[1][2] Platt had suggested Bogdanovich make Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show into a film.^[2] Bogdanovich commented that: "She worked on important pictures and made major contributions. She was unique. There weren't many women doing that kind of work at that time, particularly not one as well versed as she was. She knew all the departments, on a workmanlike basis, as opposed to most producers who just know things in theory."^[1] Platt was the first female member of the Art Directors Guild.^[1] She was also production designer on A Star Is Born (1976).^[2]
She wrote the screenplays for Pretty Baby (1978), on which she was also an associate producer,^[2] as well as Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979), and A Map of the World (1999).^[4] She wrote the screenplay for the 1995 Academy Award-winning short film, Lieberman in Love, which was based on a short story by W. P. Kinsella.
Platt worked extensively with James L. Brooks throughout her career. She was the executive vice president of his production company Gracie Films from 1985 to 1995.^[1][2] Platt was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction for Brooks' film Terms of Endearment (1983).^[1] She also co-produced many of the films he worked on, which Gracie made, including Broadcast News (1987), The War of the Roses (1989) and Bottle Rocket (1996), as well as producing Say Anything... (1989).^[1][2] Platt gave Brooks the nine-panel Life in Hell cartoon "The Los Angeles Way of Death" by cartoonist Matt Groening. She suggested that the two meet and that Brooks produce an animated TV version of Groening's characters; the meeting spawned a series of short cartoons about the Simpson family, which aired as part of The Tracey Ullman Show and later became The Simpsons.^[1][2][5][6]
In 1994, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award.^[7] Brooks said that Platt "couldn't walk into a gas station and get gas without mentoring somebody. Movies are a team sport, and she made teams function. She would assume a maternal role in terms of really being there. The film was everything, and ego just didn't exist."^[1]
In 2003, she appeared in the BBC documentary film Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Platt was working on a documentary about the filmmaker Roger Corman at the time of her death.^[1]

[edit] Personal life

Platt was married to Philip Klein until his death in a car accident in the 1960s, eight months after they married.^[2] Platt was married to director Peter Bogdanovich from 1962 to 1971.^[2] They divorced after Bogdanovich left her during the filming of The Last Picture Show for its lead actress Cybill Shepherd.^[1][2] Platt and Bogdanovich had two children: Antonia and Sashy.^[1] Platt later married prop maker Tony Wade; they remained married until his death in 1985. She was stepmother to his children Kelly and Jon.^[1][2]
The 1984 film Irreconcilable Differences, starring Ryan O'Neal, Shelley Long and Drew Barrymore, was reportedly loosely based on her marriage to Bogdanovich, and their divorce.^[8]
Platt died aged 72 on July 27, 2011 in New York, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.^[1]

 

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