Tag: Dies

Categories
Health

Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Who Studied the Dreaming Mind, Dies at 88

Dr. J. Allan Hobson, Who Studied the Dreaming Brain, Dies at 88

“In the psychoanalytic world, there has been this tendency to assume that everything is psychodynamic,” he added, noting that some doctors reflexively blamed mothers for their children’s behavior.

But dr. Hobson tempered his views in his later years.

“He came to believe that psychoanalysis could be useful in treating mental disorders,” said Dr. Lydic, “but he did not believe in rigid symbolism when interpreting dreams.”

For the most part, Dr. Hobson still, as the saying goes, a cigar is just a cigar.

John Allan Hobson was born on June 3, 1933 in Hartford, Conn. His mother Ann (Cotter) Hobson was a housewife. His father, John Robert Hobson, was a lawyer.

John attended Loomis School, now the Loomis Chaffee School, in Windsor, Connecticut, where he graduated in 1951. He spent a year abroad, then returned to study at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he majored in English and graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1959.

In 1956 he married Joan Harlowe; they divorced in 1992. In the mid-1990s he married Dr. Rosalia Silvestri, and she outlives him.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Hobson’s four sons, Ian, Christopher, Andrew, and Matthew; his brother Bruce; and four grandchildren.

After studying medicine, Dr. Hobson did a two year internship at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. Instead of military service, he served in the Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health.

Categories
Politics

Michael Enzi, Former Senator From Wyoming, Dies at 77

Michael Enzi, Former Senator From Wyoming, Dies at 77

According to Mr. Enzi, Mr. Simpson encouraged him to run for mayor of Gillette, the city to which he had moved only a few years earlier.

“On the way home from that Cody meeting while my wife was driving, I told her what Senator Simpson had said, and that I was thinking maybe I should run for mayor,” Mr. Enzi said in his retirement speech. “It must have come as quite a shock, because she ended up swerving into the barrow pit and then coming back up onto the road.”

At the time, Mr. Enzi said, Gillette was a place where recent discoveries of oil, gas and coal were drawing more and more people — and putting a strain on municipal services. The city, he said, was in need of three things that would become a recurring theme in Mr. Enzi’s political career: budgets, agendas and planning.

“Not the most exciting topics,” he said in his retirement speech.

Mr. Enzi was elected mayor in 1974 and served two four-year terms, during which time he also traveled to and from Washington as a member of the Coal Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Interior and served as the president of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities.

He soon set his sights on state politics, joining the Wyoming House of Representatives in 1987, and the Wyoming State Senate in 1991. He was first elected to the United States Senate in 1996. He led the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions from 2005 to 2007, and was the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee from 2015 to 2021.

In 2009, Mr. Enzi was a member of what came to be known as the Gang of Six, a group of Senate Finance Committee members — three Democrats and three Republicans — who held lengthy negotiations on a health care overhaul. The talks dragged on, and Republicans ultimately backed away from those compromise efforts amid protests from their constituents. The Affordable Care Act would pass in 2010, without support from Republicans in Congress. Mr. Enzi had sought to repeal the legislation.

In 2017, Mr. Enzi was one of 22 senators who signed a letter asking President Donald J. Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Categories
Health

Purnell Choppin, 91, Dies; Researcher Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Struggle

Purnell Choppin, 91, Dies; Researcher Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Fight

In addition to his daughter, his wife Joan also survived.

After taking over the Hughes Institute, Dr. Choppin likes to tell his colleagues a story about meeting their famous reclusive benefactor. In 1938, Hughes, an accomplished aviator and industrialist, stopped at Baton Rouge to refuel, and Arthur Choppin took 9-year-old Purnell and his brother Arthur Jr. to see him. They shook hands, but his main memory was that Hughes was “very tall.”

Dr. Choppin graduated from high school at the age of 16 and went to LSU, where he also attended medical school. He received his PhD in 1953 and completed his residency at Washington University. From 1954 to 1955 he served in the Air Force in Japan.

He began as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and was promoted to professor in 1959. He later moved into administration and was vice president and dean of studies when he was hired by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Howard Hughes founded the institute in 1953 and later transferred all of his shares in the Hughes Aircraft Company to it for tax reasons.

Just a few weeks before Dr. Choppin, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $ 5.2 billion, immediately making it one of the richest philanthropists in the country.

In 1987 the president of the institute had to resign after a financial scandal and was replaced by Dr. Chopin replaced. Over the next decade, he built it into a premier source of funding for biomedical research, distributing approximately $ 4.5 billion to hundreds of scientists and elementary and high school science education.

Categories
Entertainment

Vladimir Menshov, Shock Russian Oscar Winner, Dies at 81

Vladimir Menshov, Surprise Russian Oscar Winner, Dies at 81

Vladimir Menshov, a prolific Soviet actor and director whose film “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980 and surprised many American critics, died on July 5 in a Moscow hospital. He was 81.

Mosfilm, the Russian film studio and production company, said the cause was complications from Covid-19.

“Moscow doesn’t believe in tears”, a soapy, melodramatic crowd puller, attracted around 90 million moviegoers in the Soviet Union even after it was broadcast on television shortly after it was released in 1980. His theme song “Alexandra”, written by Sergey Nikitin and Tatyana Nikitina, became one of the most popular film music pieces in the country.

Still, when “Moscow”, only the second film directed by Mr. Menshov, won the Oscar, many moviegoers and critics were amazed at the competition this year. It was voted ahead of François Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” and Akira Kurosawa’s “The Shadow Warrior” as well as Spanish director Jaime de Armiñán’s “The Nest” and Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s “Confidence”.

“There was more condescending benevolence behind the Oscar for ‘Moscow’ than aesthetic discrimination,” wrote Gary Arnold of the Washington Post when reviewing the film, which was released in the United States after it won an Oscar.

The film follows three girls, who were quartered in a Moscow hotel for young women in the late 1950s, in search of male company and revisits them 20 years later. It played Vera Alentova, the director’s wife and the mother of her daughter Yuliya Menshova, a television personality. Both survive him, along with two grandchildren.

Mr. Arnold noted that Mr. Menshov’s film “revived a genre that Hollywood couldn’t sustain, reliably it seems: the chronicle of provincial girls, usually a trio pursuing careers and / or friends in the big city” – a Genre that at the time ranged from “Bühnentor” (1938) to “Valley of the Puppets” (1967).

Vincent Canby of the New York Times admitted that the film was “played properly” but wrote that after two and a half hours it “appears endless”.

“From time to time there are allusions to social satire, “wrote Mr. Canby,” but they are so mild that they could only surprise and interest an extremely prudish, unconstructed Stalinist. “

Although he found it understandable that “Moscow” was one of the most successful films in the Soviet Union, Mr. Canby concluded: “You can also believe that part of Mr. Menshov’s biography (included in the program) that reports that he was in the first three years failed. “at the Cinema Institute in Moscow and was not much more successful as an acting student at the Moscow Art Theater.”

He added sharply, “I assume we are being told these things to underscore the insignificance of these early failures which, however, appear to be summed up in his Oscar-winning actress.”

Vladimir Valentinovich Menshov was born on September 17, 1939 to a Russian family in Baku (now Azerbaijan). His father Valentin was an officer in the secret police. His mother, Antonina Aleksandrovna (Dubovskaya) Menshov, was a housewife.

As a teenager, Vladimir worked as a machine worker, miner and sailor before entering the Moscow Art Theater School. After graduating from school in 1965 and from the Gerasimov Institute for Cinematography in 1970, he worked for the Mosfilm, Lenfilm and Odessa Film studios.

He had more than 100 credits as an actor, including the hit “Night Watch” (2004) and was also a screenwriter. He made his directorial debut in 1976 with the film “Practical Joke”.

Categories
Health

Dr. Paul Auerbach, Father of Wilderness Drugs, Dies at 70

Dr. Paul Auerbach, Father of Wilderness Medicine, Dies at 70

Dr. Auerbach said it was imperative never to get too comfortable when dealing with the whims of nature. “You have to be afraid when you go into work,” he said. “You have to stay humble.”

Paul Stuart Auerbach was born on Jan. 4, 1951, in Plainfield, N.J. His father, Victor, was a patents manager for Union Carbide. His mother, Leona (Fishkin) Auerbach, was a teacher. Paul was on his high school wrestling team and grew up spending summers on the Jersey Shore.

He graduated from Duke in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in religion and then enrolled in Duke’s medical school. He met Sherry Steindorf at U.C.L.A., and they were married in 1982. (In the 1980s he worked part-time as a sportswear model.) Dr. Auerbach studied at Stanford’s business school shortly before joining the university’s medical faculty in 1991.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Brian and Daniel; a daughter, Lauren Auerbach Dixon; his mother; a brother, Burt; and a sister, Jan Sherman.

As he grew older, Dr. Auerbach became increasingly devoted to expanding the field of wilderness medicine to account for the uncertainties of a new world. In revising his textbook, he added sections about handling environmental disasters, and, with Jay Lemery, he wrote “Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health,” published in 2017.

Last year, shortly before he received his cancer diagnosis, the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold, and Dr. Auerbach decided to act.

“The minute it all first happened, he started working on disaster response,” his wife said. “Hospitals were running out of PPE. He was calling this person and that person to learn as much as he could. He wanted to find out how to design better masks and better ventilators. He never stopped.”

Categories
Entertainment

Graham Vick, Director Who Opened Opera’s Doorways, Dies at 67

Graham Vick, Director Who Opened Opera’s Doors, Dies at 67

LONDON — Graham Vick, a British opera director who worked at prestigious houses like the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala while also seeking to broaden opera’s appeal by staging works in abandoned rock clubs and former factories and by bringing more diversity to casting, died on Saturday in London. He was 67.

The cause was complications of Covid-19, the Birmingham Opera Company, which he founded, said in a news release.

Mr. Vick spent much of the coronavirus pandemic in Crete, Greece, and returned to Britain in June to take part in rehearsals for a Birmingham Opera production of Wagner’s “Das Rhinegold,” Jonathan Groves, his agent, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Vick was artistic director at the company, which he saw as a vehicle to bring opera to everyone. His productions there, which were in English, often included amateur performers. And he insisted on keeping ticket prices low so that anyone could attend, and on hiring singers who reflected the ethnic diversity of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city. His immersive production of Verdi’s “Otello” in 2009 featured Ronald Samm, the first Black tenor to sing the title role in a professional production in Britain.

The company never held V.I.P. receptions because Mr. Vick believed that no audience member should be seen as above any other.

“You do not need to be educated to be touched, to be moved and excited by opera,” he said in a speech at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards in 2016. “You only need to experience it directly at first hand, with nothing getting in the way.”

Opera makers must “remove the barriers and make the connections that will release its power for everybody,” he added.

Oliver Mears, the Royal Opera House’s director of opera, said in a statement that Mr. Vick had been “a true innovator in the way he integrated community work into our art form.”

“Many people from hugely diverse backgrounds love opera — and first experienced it — through his work,” he said.

Graham Vick was born on Dec. 30, 1953, in Birkenhead, near Liverpool. His father, Arnold, worked in a clothing store, while his mother Muriel (Hynes) Vick worked in the personnel department of a factory. His love of the stage bloomed at age 5 when he saw a production of “Peter Pan.”

“It was a complete road-to-Damascus moment,” he told The Times of London in 2014. “Everything was there — the flight through the window into another world, a bigger world.”

Opera gave him similar opportunities to “fly, soar, breathe and scream,” he said.

Mr. Vick studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, intending to become a conductor. But he turned to directing and created his first production at 22. Two years later, he directed a production of Gustav Holst’s “Savitri” for Scottish Opera and soon became its director of productions.

With Scottish Opera, he quickly showed his desire to bring opera to local communities. He led Opera-Go-Round, an initiative in which a small troupe traveled to remote parts of Scotland’s Highlands and islands, often performing with just piano accompaniment. He also brought opera singers to factories to perform during lunch breaks.

Some of his productions received mixed or even harsh reviews. “Stalin was right,” Edward Rothstein wrote in The Times in reviewing “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in 1994, calling Mr. Vick’s production “crude, primitive, vulgar,” just as Stalin had done with Shostakovich’s original. Just as often they were praised, however.

Despite Mr. Vick’s success at traditional opera houses, he sometimes criticized them. “They’re huge, glamorous, fabulous, seductive institutions, but they’re also a dangerous black hole where great art can so easily become self-serving product,” he told the BBC in 2012.

Mr. Vick’s work at the Birmingham Opera Company, which he founded in 1987, was celebrated in Britain for its bold vision. Its first production, another “Falstaff,” was staged inside a recreation center in the city; other productions took place in a burned-out ballroom above a shopping center and in an abandoned warehouse.

Mr. Vick decided to use amateurs after rehearsing a Rossini opera in Pesaro, Italy, in the 1990s. It was so hot and airless one day, he recalled in a 2003 lecture, that he opened the theater’s doors to the street and was shocked to see a group of teenagers stop their soccer game and watch, transfixed.

“To reach this kind of constituency in Birmingham, we decided to recruit members of the community into our work,” he said. People who bought tickets should see reflections of themselves onstage and in the production team, he added.

Mr. Vick kept returning to Birmingham because, he said, it was only there, “in the glorious participation of audience and performers,” that he felt whole.

The company was praised not only for its inclusivity. Its 2009 staging of “Otello” “gets you in the heart and the guts,” Rian Evans wrote in The Guardian. And Mark Swed, in The Los Angeles Times, called Mr. Vick’s production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Mittwoch aus Licht” in 2012 “otherworldly.” (It included string players performing in helicopters and a camel, and was part of Britain’s 2012 Olympic Games celebrations.)

“If opera is meant to change your perception of what is possible and worthwhile, to dream the impossible dream and all that, then this is clearly the spiritually uplifting way to do it,” Mr. Swed added.

Mr. Vick, who died in a hospital, is survived by his partner, the choreographer Ron Howell, as well as an older brother, Hedley.

In his speech at the Royal Philharmonic Society awards, Mr. Vick urged those in the opera world to “get out of our ghetto” and follow the Birmingham example in trying to reflect the community where a company is based.

People need to “embrace the future and help build a world we want to live in,” he said, “not hide away fiddling while Rome burns.”

Categories
Health

Erin Gilmer, Incapacity Rights Activist, Dies at 38

Erin Gilmer, Disability Rights Activist, Dies at 38

Erin Gilmer, a disability rights attorney and activist who campaigned for medical privacy, lower drug prices, and a more compassionate health system when faced with a cascade of illnesses that left her unable to work for long periods of time or even left her in bed, died Jan. July in Centennial, Colorado. She was 38 years old.

Anne Marie Mercurio, a friend who had given Ms. Gilmer a power of attorney, said the cause was suicide.

First in Texas and later in Colorado, where she ran her own law firm, Ms. Gilmer pushed for legislation that would better tailor health care to patient needs, including a 2019 state bill that would allow Colorado pharmacists to avoid certain drugs current prescription if the patient’s doctor cannot be reached.

She has been a frequent consultant to hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical companies, bringing with her extensive knowledge of health policy and even more extensive first-hand experience as a patient.

At conferences and on social media, she used her own life to illustrate the humiliations and difficulties she believed were inherent in the modern medical system, where she believed that patients and doctors alike were treated like cogs in a machine.

Her conditions included rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, borderline personality disorder, and occipital neuralgia, which causes severely painful headaches. Her long medical record challenged doctors who were used to approaching patients on 15-minute visits, and she said it was often dismissed as “difficult” just for trying to stand up for herself.

“Too often patients have to ask themselves: ‘Will they believe me?'” She wrote on Twitter in May. “’Will you help me? Will they cause further trauma? Will they listen and understand? ‘”

She often spoke of her financial troubles; Despite her law degree, she is dependent on food stamps. But she admitted that her breed gave her the privilege of cutting curves.

“In the months when I couldn’t make ends meet, I dressed up in my pretty white girls’ clothes and went to the salad bar and asked for a new plate as if I had already paid for it,” she said in a speech to a medical doctor in 2014 Conference at Stanford University.

“I’m not proud of it, but I’m desperate,” she added. “It’s about survival of the fittest. Some patients die trying to get food, medicine, shelter, and medical care. If you don’t die on the way, you honestly wish you could because it’s all so exhausting and frustrating and humiliating. “

It could be violent, especially when people presumed to explain their problems to her or offer a quick fix. But she also developed a following among people with similarly complicated health conditions whom she saw as both allies and inspiration and showed them how the system worked for them.

“I used to think I had no choice,” said Tinu Abayomi-Paul, who became a disability rights activist after meeting Ms. Gilmer in 2018, over the phone. “She was the first to show me how to address medicine as an institution and not be written off as a difficult patient.”

Ms. Gilmer emphasized the need for trauma-informed care and urged the medical system to recognize not only that many patients enter the private parts of an already traumatized doctor’s office, but also that the health care experience itself can be traumatizing. Last year she wrote a handbook entitled “A Preface to the Legal Profession: What You Should Know As a Lawyer,” which she made available online for free.

“She expected the system to fail,” said Dr. Victor Montori, an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic and founder of Patient Revolution, an organization that supports patient-centered care. “But she tried to make it so that the system wouldn’t let other people down.”

Erin Michelle Gilmer was born on September 27, 1982 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver and grew up near Aurora. Her father, Thomas S. Gilmer, a doctor, and her mother, Carol Yvonne Troyer, a pharmacist, divorced when she was 19 and she became estranged from them.

In addition to her parents, Mrs. Gilmer also leaves her brother Christopher.

Ms. Gilmer, a competitive swimmer as a child, began developing health problems in high school. She had jaw and rotator cuff surgery, her father said in an interview, and she also developed signs of depression.

A star student, she graduated with enough credit to skip a year of college at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studied psychology and economics and graduated in 2005 with summa cum laude.

She decided to continue her education at the University of Colorado law school to keep her student health insurance – “a cruel joke,” she said in a 2020 interview with Dr. Montori. She focused on health law and human rights and trained as both a policy expert and an activist; She later mentioned health as a human right on her blog.

She graduated in 2008 and moved to Texas where she worked for the state government and a number of health care nonprofits. In 2012 she returned to Denver to open her own practice.

At this point, her health began to deteriorate. Her existing condition worsened and new ones emerged, exacerbated by an accident in 2010 in which she was hit by a car. She found it difficult to work a full day, and eventually most of her advocacy was virtual, including through social media.

For all her mastery of the intricacies of health policy, Ms. Gilmer said the system needed more compassion.

“We can do this on a large scale by introducing trauma-informed care as a way to practice,” she said in an interview with Dr. Montori. “And we can do that on the small micro level by just saying, ‘How are you today? I am here to listen I’m glad you’re here. ‘”

If you have thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). For a list of additional resources, see SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

Categories
Entertainment

Biz Markie, Hip-Hop’s ‘Only a Pal’ Clown Prince, Dies at 57

Biz Markie, Hip-Hop’s ‘Just a Friend’ Clown Prince, Dies at 57

Biz Markie, the innovative yet proudly goofy rapper, D.J. and producer whose self-deprecating lyrics and off-key wail on songs like “Just a Friend” earned him the nickname Clown Prince of Hip-Hop, died on Friday. He was 57.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Jenni Izumi, who didn’t provide a cause.

He had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his late 40s and said that he lost 140 pounds in the years that followed. “I wanted to live,” he told ABC News in 2014.

A native New Yorker and an early collaborator with hip-hop trailblazers like Marley Marl, Roxanne Shanté and Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie began as a teenage beatboxer and freestyle rapper. He eventually made a name for himself as the resident court jester of the Queensbridge-based collective the Juice Crew and its Cold Chillin’ label, under the tutelage of the influential radio D.J. Mr. Magic.

On “Goin’ Off” (1988), his debut album, Biz Markie introduced himself as a bumbling upstart with a juvenile sense of humor — the opening track, “Pickin’ Boogers,” was about exactly that — but his charm and his skills were undeniable, making him a plausible sell to an increasingly rap-curious crossover audience.

With direct, often mundane lyrics written in part by his childhood friend Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie was a hip-hop Everyman whose chief love was music, a journey he broke down over a James Brown sample on his first hip-hop hit, the biographical “Vapors”; Snoop Doggy Dogg later adapted the song for his own 1997 version.

“When I was a teenager, I wanted to be down/With a lot of MC-D.J.-ing crews in town,” Biz Markie rapped. “So in school on Noble Street, I say, ‘Can I be down, champ’/They said no, and treated me like a wet food stamp.”

But Biz Markie soon outpaced his peers commercially, becoming a pop sensation with the unlikely 1989 smash “Just a Friend,” from “The Biz Never Sleeps,” which was released by Cold Chillin’ and Warner Bros. Over a plunked piano beat, borrowing its melody from the 1968 song “(You) Got What I Need,” recorded by Freddie Scott and written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Biz Markie raps an extended tale about being unlucky in love.

But it was his pained, rough-edged singing on the song’s chorus — along with the “yo’ mama” jokes and the Mozart costume he wore in the music video — that made the song indelible: “Oh, baaaaby, you/You got what I neeeeeed/But you say he’s just a friend/But you say he’s just a friend.”

Writing in The New York Times, the critic Kelefa Sanneh called Biz Markie “the father of modern bad singing” and wrote, “His bellowed plea — wildly out of tune, and totally unforgettable — sounded like something concocted after a day of romantic disappointments and a night of heavy drinking.”

Biz Markie has said he was never supposed to be the vocalist handling those notes. “I asked people to sing the part, and nobody showed up at the studio,” he explained later, “so I did it myself.”

“Just a Friend” would go platinum, reaching No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart and No. 9 on the all-genre Hot 100. He said he realized how big it had gotten “when Howard Stern and Frankie Crocker and all the white stations around the country started playing it.” And although Biz Markie would never again reach the heights of “Just a Friend” — he failed to land another single on the Hot 100 — he brushed off those who referred to him dismissively as a one-hit wonder.

“I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I know what I did in hip-hop.”

Marcel Theo Hall was born April 8, 1964, in Harlem. He was raised on Long Island, where he was known around the neighborhood as Markie, and he took his original stage name, Bizzy B Markie, from the first hip-hop tape he ever heard in the late 1970s, by the L Brothers, featuring Busy Bee Starski. Always known as a prankster, he was said to have once given his high school vice principal a cake laced with laxatives.

He honed his act as a D.J. and beatboxer at Manhattan nightclubs like the Roxy, although his rhyming remained a source of insecurity. By the mid-1980s, he had fallen in with the Juice Crew, whose members began featuring him on records and eventually working with him on his lyrics and delivery.

“When I felt that I was good enough, I went to Marley Marl’s house and sat on his stoop every day until he noticed me, and that’s how I got my start,” he said.

In 1986, Biz Markie appeared on one of his earliest records, “The Def Fresh Crew” by Roxanne Shanté, providing exaggerated mouth-based percussion. That same year, he released an EP produced by Marley Marl, “Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz,” calling himself the Inhuman Orchestra.

“When you hear me do it, you will be shocked and amazed,” he rapped on the title track, which would also serve as a single from “Goin’ Off,” his official debut. “It’s the brand-new thing they call the human beatbox craze.”

But after the success of his first two albums, Biz Markie’s third would become a part of hip-hop history for nonmusical reasons, which would nonetheless reverberate through the genre: a copyright lawsuit.

After the release of that album, “I Need a Haircut,” in 1991, Biz Markie and his label were sued by representatives for the Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan, who said eight bars of his 1972 hit “Alone Again (Naturally)” were sampled without permission on Biz Markie’s “Alone Again.” A lawyer for Mr. O’Sullivan called sampling “a euphemism in the music industry for what anyone else would call pickpocketing”; a judge agreed, calling for $250,000 in damages and barring further distribution of the album.

That ruling would help set a precedent in the music industry by requiring that even small chunks of sampled music — a cornerstone of hip-hop aesthetics and studio production — must be approved in advance. A market for sampling clearance took hold, which remains a key part of the economics behind hip-hop.

“Because of the Biz Markie ruling,” one record executive said at the time, “we had to make sure we had written clearance on everything beforehand.”

In 1993, Biz Markie responded with a pointed new album, “All Samples Cleared!” But his popularity had waned, and it would be his last release for a major label. A decade later, he returned with “Weekend Warrior” (2003), his fifth and final album, though he maintained cultural relevance as a big personality with an enduring smash in “Just a Friend.”

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Biz Markie made appearances on the big and small screens, usually as a version of himself. He was seen in the movie “Men in Black II,” heard as a voice on “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and appeared on “Black-ish” and as the beatboxing pro behind “Biz’s Beat of the Day” on the children’s show “Yo Gabba Gabba!” He also became a dedicated collector of rare records and toys, including Beanie Babies, Barbies and television action figures.

But even as a novelty throwback presence, he remained jovial, calling himself “one of them unsung heroes” and comparing himself to a McRib sandwich (“when I do pop up they appreciate everything they see”) in a 2019 Washington Post interview.

“I’m going to be Biz Markie until I die,” he said. “Even after I die I’m going to be Biz Markie.”

Michael Levenson contributed reporting.

Categories
Politics

William H. Regnery II, 80, Dies; Bankrolled the Rise of the Alt-Proper,

William H. Regnery II, 80, Dies; Bankrolled the Rise of the Alt-Right,

Mr. Regnery attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied political science and joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative student organization co-founded by Mr. Buckley. He left before graduating to work on Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.

In the 2017 interview with Buzzfeed, one of the few times he spoke to the news media, he claimed that his efforts on behalf of Mr. Goldwater included what he called “Operation Dewdrop,” in which he attempted to deter Democratic voters in Philadelphia by hiring a plane to seed the skies with dry ice, in the hopes of making it rain. He failed — though, he recalled, he burned his fingers on the ultracold dry ice containers.

Mr. Regnery later returned to Chicago, where he worked for Joanna-Western Mills. He became the company’s president in 1980 but was ousted a year later, after several quarters of poor financial performance. According to his own account, he spent the rest of his career in a variety of businesses, while also dabbling in Illinois politics.

In his memoir, he recounted how he first began to turn against the Republican Party after listening to a speech in 1993 in which the economist Milton Friedman declared that the end of the Cold War meant that the free-market economic doctrines of the Reagan era had won. In an early sign of that break, according to a 2017 profile in Mother Jones, Mr. Regnery ran unsuccessfully for Illinois secretary of state in 1994 on the Term Limits and Tax Limits Party ticket

Five years later, he convened a Who’s Who of white supremacists for a conference in Florida, where he delivered a speech, “For Our Children’s Children,” in which he said the only way to save America’s white identity was for it to break up into several smaller countries, one each for the country’s various ethnic groups.

His racism grew more explicit. He announced plans in 2004 to start a whites-only dating site. It never happened, but he continued to worry that white people were in danger of extinction: In 2006 he delivered a speech in Chicago in which he said, “The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity.”

By then he had severed most of his ties with mainstream Republicans, and they with him. T hat same year the leadership of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which he had joined in college, removed him from its board.

Categories
Entertainment

Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.

She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.

She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.

“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”

Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.

Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.

Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.

“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”