Oh dear.... that is the thing about getting old....

People just start dying off. Christof Schlingensief passed away.

The name won't say anything to anyone abroad, but he was one provocative wild artist.

He provoked German society from the Sixties up to his death a few days ago, and drove the right into frenzies of anger. And the Church, AND the GLBT which didn't really exist there then, And the media, and just about every politician...

From Guerilla theater in the late Sixties up to a few weeks ago, he always managed to irritate everyone, but make them think. We rented a tee-vee in Salzburg for the winter months in '72, and the tee-vee guide said his first film would be shown, and there was this terrible uproar in the media. The title was, 'It is not homosexuals who are perverse, but the situation in which they live', and I thought, 'Oh, what now?' He might has well have set off car bombs in some cities with that.

Well, our channel was broadcast from Bavaria, which is arch-catholic, so there was a change of programme in our region. They showed some dippy Fifties 'happy' number with cute teens at the time you have also never heard of.

I did catch up with it decades later, and it was 'yawn', but for the time, he went after all sides, and took no prisoners. Some things you have to see in historical perspective.

He was very entertaining in a sort of Kasperl sort of way, but had depth.

He'd been battling cancer, so he did a media blitz tour, and trashed Rome. 'They never recognised 'the other' in me.' And was very serious.

Too bad to know he's gone. He was always thought-provoking.

There is a link here where you can see some highlights of his career. If you understand German, that is. Good ones from early to not very long ago. Maybe you don't have to understand... He was a force to be reckoned with in our part of the world.