Category: people

Robert Storr has been named dean of the Yale School of Art. “Storr will have a five-year appointment, Yale said in a statement yesterday. He is a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a contributing editor at Art in America magazine. Next year he will be the first American commissioner of the Venice Biennale.”

The investigation of UK Culture Minister Tessa Jowell and her husband has widened beyond its initial scope, which was focused on a bribe alleged to have been paid to the couple by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The newly broadened inquiry will also now focus on a “secretive offshore investment fund” in which the Jowells had invested as much as £400,000. At issue is not only whether the couple’s financial activities were legal, but whether they adhered to the UK’s code of conduct for elected officials.

Over the course of his long career, Miles Davis went from the embodiment of traditional jazz to its antithesis, becoming a psychedelic free-form musician bent on dragging the world along with him. “But Davis was always more than a mere trumpet stylist with an eye for a trend. He was a conceptualist, with a clear vision of how jazz works and how it should relate to the popular pulse. He pulled around him a succession of musicians, arrangers and producers who understood jazz to be a collective process, making him, if nothing else, an organiser of great innovative bands. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that the trumpet sound and phrasing techniques he had been honing and experimenting with for decades became ubiquitous.”

Well-known British playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn has suffered a stroke and is recuperating in a hospital. “The 66-year-old’s best-known works include The Norman Conquests trilogy and A Chorus of Disapproval.”

“Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment. She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted “genius grants” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.”

“Milton Katims, a central figure in Seattle’s musical life for nearly a quarter of a century, died Monday. He was 96… As music director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from 1954 to 1976, he helped transform a part-time, modestly professional orchestra into a major regional ensemble that became a symbol of pride for the city… In addition, Katims was a nationally recognized violist, who continued to perform and record in conjunction with his conducting.”

UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell is not exactly receving a full vote of confidence from her boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as she attempts to clear herself and her husband of charges that a bribe from Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi was used to pay off their mortgage. “Tony Blair has been burnt before by leaping to the defence of his closest cabinet colleagues – most recently David Blunkett – only to find them forced to resign as further damning evidence seeps out… The limited support also reflects the difficulties in getting to the bottom of [Jowell’s husband’s] byzantine and controversial business dealings.”

“An investigation by The Sunday Times has established that UK Culture Minister Tessa Jowell signed a mortgage document that enabled her husband to bring an alleged bribe of £350,000 into Britain. Italian prosecutors claim the money was paid by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, for help from Jowell’s husband in two corruption hearings against the politician.”

David Mamet can be a hard playwright to love, especially for those who have met him. But despite the difficulty of some of his plays, and his notoriously prickly persona, Mamet has become a bona fide icon. Still, he can’t resist playing the victim: “I think basically people hate artists,” he says. “They observe or they intuit that the artist is having a great time, that the artist doesn’t have to work, that the artist gets the girls, the boys, the adulation, the money. And it’s true. Once a studio executive or a journalist does that math, they are, of course, enraged.”

“The London hotel hosting the event, Grosvenor House, has asked for an ‘exclusion zone’ between two of the shortlisted authors, Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, on account of their now legendary personal feud having erupted into fisticuffs at a previous ceremony two years ago.”