Category: people

Last month, Ms. Horne, 72, was immersed in preparations for the yearly festival when, as she explained recently, she was “blindsided” by the news of her illness. “I heard the words ‘pancreatic cancer’ and thought the worst, as most people do,” she said. “But I’m taking a drug that was approved just this November. It’s the latest treatment, and I have a very hopeful situation.

Nobel-winner Gabriel García Márquez has retired from writing. “I’ve stopped writing. 2005 was the first year in my life that I didn’t write a line. With all the practice I’ve got, I’d have no problems writing a new novel. “But people do notice if you haven’t put your heart into it.”

The Orange County Performing Arts center has named Terrence Dwyer as its new director. Dwyer was managing director of La Jolla Playhouse for 12 years before departing in 2004 for Houston’s Alley Theatre. “As president of OCPAC, Dwyer will be in charge of a diversified, $35- to $40-million-a-year operation that dwarfs the regional and off-Broadway theaters he has previously led.”

The Canadian firebrand “was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982 and again in 1983, and won Italy’s Petrarch Prize for Poetry in 1993. A gifted lyricist, he considered himself a “romantic with a sense of irony” in both words and actions, and his confidence was matched by his talent, which he used to fight uniformity and puritanism.”

“At 67, pianist McCoy Tyner plays solos that can be as intense as they were when he was part of the fiery music the Coltrane quartet conjured on a nightly basis. But he has also grown more subtle and more reflective over the decades. No matter his stylistic approach to the keyboard at any given moment, Tyner remains downright magisterial. Sometimes spiritual, sometimes whimsical and often both, he makes powerful jazz.”

“More nonsense has been written about Mozart than almost any historical figure except Jesus Christ.” He was poisoned by a jealous rival, he was a musical manifestation of God, he was an offensive and boorish idiot savant – the myths abound, and they are all demonstrably false. “Every generation has admired Mozart, but some more than others and in remarkably different ways. The changing perceptions of the man and his music are themselves almost a small social history.”

In his latest audio message to the world, Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden singled out a certain left-wing Washington historian as being worthy of praise. You might think that having the world’s best-known terrorist as a fan would be a nightmare scenario for such an author. But 72-year-old William Blum isn’t running from the endorsement: in fact, he says he’s quite pleased.

“In a classic soul era largely defined by crooners and shouters, [Wilson Pickett, who died last week at 64,] was a screamer, a throat-shredding force of nature who always seemed about to bust a gut or blow a gasket. He called what he did ‘grits music,’ and it could scald a listener or fire up a fan’s imagination.”

Mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne has localized pancreatic cancer and is undergoing treatment that offers an excellent chance for full recovery, her manager said Thursday. Horne, 72, was diagnosed in mid-December…

Tom Levine is an artist. As the brother of conductor James Levine, though, he’s not the artist who gets most of the attention in the family. “For the last 15 years or so, Levine has been working the grid. He often takes multiple canvases, some square, some rectangular, and attaches them in back to create a larger, human-size painting surface. He works along the borders of the smaller, latched-together squares most of the time, effectively painting within the boxes. These oils remind people of windows, though Levine says that is not intended.”