[Elspode]

Middle age is hard on us humans, isn't it? Not only for us, but for our icons of comparable cumpleanos. Passings of pop culture figures are occurring faster than I can download their music, movies and writings in order to relive some of the pleasure they've given me over the years.

This morning's drive to work (the first such drive in four months for me) was concurrent with the notice that 80's Style-Rocker Robert Palmer had died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 54. Although best known for the rock video/fashion shows of "Didn't Mean to Turn You On" and "Addicted to Love", I actually had been familiar with Palmer back in the 70's, when he released the groovily ahead of its time "Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley". I think more than anything else, coolness is Palmer's legacy to the music world. There are, always have been, and always will be relative forms and quantities of coolness, but Palmer immediately set a yardstick for the rest of the fashion-obsessed 80's with his videos on MTV (videos which, not coincidentally, were produced by a fashion photographer). Imitations were rampant for a time. Women scurried to emulate the anemic (and probably bulimic) models who gyrated in near-kabuki embellishment, blank looks of terminal boredom (which apparently equated to coolness in the 80's) on their faces as they mimed playing their instruments.

But for me, it was never the look, it was what was in the man's music. Robert Palmer knew a stone groove when he wrote one, and few have ever done it better than he. His songs were infectious, impossible to get out of your head, and tailor-made for the (as Bowie would say) F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-Fashion!able dance clubs of that decadent decade. Fine musicians passing on so young deprive the world of the possibility of yet another trend, yet another groove, and that always saddens me.

Of equal note is the passing of the effite and oh-so-cultured author George Plimpton. The original participative journalist, Plimpton was best known for "Paper Lion", possibly the first completely inside look at the NFL. Certainly, one could argue that he is a progentior of the current fascination with "reality" programming. "Paper Lion" was made into a film which is my first recollection of later M*A*S*H star Alan Alda on screen. Plimpton's experiences getting his butt kicked by much larger and more athletic men than he made him quite famous, and his dapper manner and eloqution kept him in the public eye for nearly forty years. There was even a period in which he was a quite sought-after pitchman for a certain class of products in television ads, if memory serves me.

Plimpton was an intellectual, came from a pampered background; a real Ivy-Leaguer. Somehow, he managed to reach every strata of American with his writing, and rarely did one hear anything truly nasty about him or his subject matter.

If nothing else, we can remember him as the man who was walking in front of Bobby Kennedy the night he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. How few of us are ever present at such a historical moment, much less gifted with the ability to relate it to others in an articulate fashion?