Image: Hollie Stevens, via Flickr.

The alt-adult performer known as Hollie Stevens (Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Wikipedia, MySpace) has died of breast cancer.

In addition to her work in indie pornography (including "clown porn", NSFW link), she was also a model for, and contributor to, the weirdo horror-rotica zine Girls and Corpses.

From an early account of Hollie's story by Vanessa Pinto at SF Weekly, it sounds like the lack of access to affordable health care (and health insurance) was a significant factor in the case of Hollie, a freelance creative based in San Francisco:

She was no different than a lot of us when we were young who believe we're invincible. So when this very young healthy woman noticed a lump on her breast, she let it go at first.

"I noticed it and paid attention to it, but going to the doctor is hard when you don't have insurance," says Stevens.

The lump didn't go away.

More from Vanessa Pinto, this time writing Hollie's obituary one year later:

Read the rest

Wired's Geeta Dayal got a lovely remembrance of Maurice Sendak from Neil Gaiman. Sendak died yesterday.

As a parent, I read Where the Wild Things Are to my children. But [my daughter] Holly’s favorite was Outside, Over There, and I must have read it to her hundreds of times, perhaps thousands of times, marveling at Sendak’s economy of words, his cruelty, his art...

“What I loved, what I always responded to, was the feeling that Sendak owed nothing to anyone in the books that he made. His only obligation was to the book, to make it true. His lines could be cute, but there was an honesty that transcended the cuteness.

Too many parents and too many writers of children’s books don’t respect the fact that kids know a great deal and suffer a great deal.

I was 11 or 12, and had been given a small allowance by my parents to buy my littlest sister, who did not read, books, if I would read them to her. I loved books and reading aloud. It was liberating, transgressive and a dream come to life: I understood the nakedness, could not understand why all the chefs were Oliver Hardy but loved that all the chefs were Oliver Hardy. Years later I discovered Little Nemo in Slumberland, and In The Night Kitchen came into focus.

Remembering Maurice Sendak

David Stutz has posted a small collection of obituaries for Alan Turing after he was hounded to suicide as a punishment for being gay. Here's my favorite:

“For those who knew him here [at Sherborne] the memory is of an even-tempered, lovable character with an impish sense of humour and a modesty proof against all achievement. You would not take him for a Wrangler, the youngest Fellow of King’s and the youngest F.R.S. [Fellow of the Royal Society], or as a Marathon runner, or that behind a negligé appearance he was intensely practical. Rather you recollected him as one who buttered his porridge, brewed scientific concoctions in his study, suspended a weighted string from the staircase wall and set it swinging before Chapel to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth by its change of direcction by noon, produced proofs of the postulates of Euclid, or brought bottles of imprisoned flies to study their “decadence” by inbreeding. On holidays in Cornwall or Sark he was a lively companion even to the extent of mixed bathing at midnight. During the war he was engaged in breaking down enemy codes, and had under him a regiment of girls, supervised to his amusement by a dragon of a female. His work was hush-hush, not to be divulged even to his mother. For it he was awarded the O.B.E. He also adopted a young Jewish refugee and saw him through his education. Besides long distance running, his hobbies were gardening and chess; and occasionally realistic water-colour painting.

In all his preoccupation with logic, mathematics, and science he never lost the common touch; in a short life he accomplished much, and to the roll of great names in the history of his particular studies added his own.” — The Sherbornian, Summer Term 1954

obituary quotations

Antinous sez, "RIP Bill Hinzman, the actor who played the first zombie in Night of the Living Dead." Mr Hinzman died of cancer at the age of 75.

Hinzman was working on the movie as an assistant cameraman when Romero spotted him and knew he'd found his zombie muse. "We'd like to tell the story that it was a hard audition session," said Russ Steiner, who co-produced the film and played Johnny. "But Bill was there and old enough and thin enough and he had an old suit." Hinzman (whose name is spelled "Heinzman" in the credits of Living Dead) remained in Romero's orbit for years, working in a variety of functions on There's Always Vanilla, Hungry Wives, and The Crazies, as well as the equally chilling 1974 TV sports documentary O. J. Simpson: Juice On The Loose.

He’d largely drifted out of the business by the time Romero's post-Living Dead career really began in earnest with Martin and Dawn Of The Dead, but by the late 1980s, his cult status was secure, and he found himself lured back to appear in a number of low-budget horror pictures where his presence served as an instant in-joke. (For example: In 2006’s Shadow: Dead Riot—starring Night Of The Living Dead remake lead—Hinzman’s character is billed as "Romero the Zombie".)

R.I.P. Bill Hinzman, Night Of The Living Dead's original zombie

Jacob "Jack" Goldman, the founder of Xerox PARC, died Tuesday at 90. In the New York Times's obit, John Markoff describes how Goldman's vision convinced a copier company to invest in the future, even if it had no idea what to do with the returns: "PARC researchers designed a remarkable array of computer technologies, including the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet office network, laser printing and the graphical user interface. ... Years later, Dr. Goldman explained Xerox’s failure ... as part of a large corporation’s unwillingness to take risks."