Category: people

“Until his downfall, Anatoly Sukhanov, at 56, was one of the officially privileged and powerful. He had a spacious apartment, a chauffeured limousine and two children with assured futures in diplomacy and journalism, respectively. In charge of Moscow’s principal art magazine, he has enforced the shining-face uplift of Socialist Realism, and dealt out turgidly reasoned warnings about the decadence of Western modernism and postmodernism.”

Elliott Carter’s music is “still more highly regarded across Europe than in the US, yet he has always been in an important sense an American composer. He has regularly drawn inspiration from US writers such as Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery and Hart Crane…”

Roy Bowen, known as “Mr. Theater” in Columbus, Ohio, has died of pneumonia in New York City. “Bowen led Players Theatre Columbus and Ohio State University’s theater program for about a decade each, when those institutions represented just about the only games in town.”

Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech was critical of the UK and US. But to have more impact, he might have looked at Dario Fo’s Nobel talk a few years earlier. “By equating the modern farceur with the jesters of the middle ages, Fo made it clear that ideas have always been dangerous — and that artists who entertain by rattling those in power continue a noble tradition. Art, truth and politics will always be in conflict. Fo made this point using laughter, and because of this, his Noble lecture was an extension of his art. Pinter’s lecture is not. His Nobel speech stands in opposition to his plays, the best of which exhibited the power of few words and silence.”

“Perhaps the key to his longevity and the feeling of constant rejuvenation in his music lies in his attitude to writing it. ‘I go to bed every night, and just before I go to sleep I read one or two pages of Proust. This gives me a great deal of pleasure, so one of the things about music is that I want to write something that gives me pleasure. I would never write anything that didn’t say something to me that I thought was important or interesting’.”

Yorkshire-born guitarist Derek Bailey, who “has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers – or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.”

Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s most famous writer. Turkish authorities now say he will “not face charges over saying in an interview with a German newspaper that Turkey’s military was sometimes a threat to democracy. “He is already on trial under Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code for remarks made to a Swiss newspaper earlier this year about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds. Article 301 makes it an offence to insult the ‘Turkish identity’ or state institutions, including the armed forces.”

“The former personal secretary of Salvador Dali, who was embroiled in scandals involving the surrealist Spanish painter’s works, has died aged 86… During the time he worked as the painter’s confidant, [John Peter] Moore amassed an important collection of works that became the subject of controversy after the artist’s death in January 1989. In October 2004 a court in Figueras, Dali’s birthplace, convicted Moore and [his wife] of violating intellectual property rights by changing the title of a Dali work displayed in their art centre… In November 2004 a Barcelona court ruled that Moore suffered from senile dementia and was incapable of standing trial on charges of falsifying and selling unauthorised reproductions of Dali’s works.”

McClellan was a music critic for the Washington Post over three decades. “Joe was a gentle, inquisitive and compassionate man, and those qualities were reflected in his criticism. ‘I’ve never attended a concert without reminding myself that at least one person in the room knows more about that music than I do.’ Sharply negative reviews were rare, and Joe was aware that he was sometimes viewed as a cheerleader. (He dismissed that charge with a laugh: ‘I don’t know how to twirl a baton and would look dreadful in a skirt.’) Instead, he likened his role to that of a gardener.”

Iryna Vidanava edits Student Thought, “perhaps the most edgy and professional publication left in Belarus,” where the government has been ruthlessly shutting down all independent media. “Last month, the government seized all but a handful of copies of the magazine. And now Vidanava is under investigation for financial crimes and infractions against the country’s draconian press laws. If charged, the 27-year-old editor could face a huge fine and up to six years in prison. But it’s hard to know exactly what’s happening with her case in Belarus. One investigator is on vacation; another has given no word on where things stand.”