Category: people

Thanks to the fatwa issued against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini following the 1989 publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie will never be just another writer. “Forced to go underground for several years and travel everywhere with a phalanx of bodyguards, Rushdie was given a reprieve of sorts in 1998, when a reformist Iranian government distanced itself from the previous ruling… Despite this, Rushdie has not settled into a life of hedonistic comfort. He has been active in American PEN, speaking out vigorously on issues that affect writers around the world. And in his latest novel, the critically well-received Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie has taken on terrorism in the best way he knows how: by exploring the personal nature of fanaticism and how it has made the planet a more dangerous place.”

“Robert Wise, a conscientious craftsman in many movie genres who twice received Academy Awards as best director, died yesterday at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 91… His career soared with West Side Story, the 1961 filming of the landmark Broadway musical, for which he shared an Oscar as best director with the choreographer Jerome Robbins. He received a second Academy Award as producer when the film was voted best picture. He gained his third and fourth Oscars with The Sound of Music, the lavish 1965 adaptation of the musical stage hit, in which he was again cited as best director and as producer of the best film.”

It’s been 55 years since Irish-born playwright George Bernard Shaw died, but the mark he left on theater and society as a whole has scarcely begun to fade. Shaw, “whose exceptionally long and fecund career as a center of London theatrical and political life is being celebrated beginning tomorrow in a festival of talks, readings and performances at the New York Public Library, titled ‘Man or Superman?'”, was also a particular enigma for fans and detractors alike. “Shaw was cutting a calculated, irresistibly dangerous figure as a firebrand critic, polemicist and soapbox orator long before his plays were first produced in London. It was a fire-breathing persona, stoked over seven decades, that expected, nay demanded, to be caricatured.”

You need only say the name Mae West to conjure up a world of images remniescent of a particular era in Hollywood’s (and America’s) history. And while she may be remembered today primarily for some of her more acerbic and sexually-charged quips, West was a constant crusader for the right of artists to push the boundaries of society’s moral code, as well as a cutting-edge “social critic, satiriser of the age-old battle of the sexes and advocate of the primacy of the surviving woman. Even bedecked with gems, as Diamond Lil, she remained a model for all those who felt that her sassy rebellion against conventional morality was a precious gift in a prudish, harsh world, which soon plunged into the Depression.”

Four suspects have now been arrested in the murder of Kansas City Symphony bassist Steven Peters. At least one of the suspects has been charged with second-degree murder in the case.

The Baltimore City Paper reports that Baltimore Sun architecture critic Edward Gunts owns considerable property in areas of the city he writes about. “According to the most recently available city and state property-tax records, Gunts currently owns seven residential properties in Mount Vernon and one in Bolton Hill. In the past 18 months he has sold eight additional residential properties in Bolton Hill for more than $2 million—$1.1 million above their purchase price. Since joining The Sun in 1984, Gunts has written extensively about both neighborhoods, often praising their architecture.”

Sterling Dorwin Weed, the nation’s oldest known active bandleader, whose Weed’s Imperial Orchestra played dates from the early 1930s to this summer, has died. He was 104.

Exotic Puerto Rican soprano Scheherazade Pesante is making her London debut. “Now in her mid-thirties, Pesante approached opera back to front. Last year, she sang Carmen for the semi-professional AAC opera. She is about to start her fourth year of vocal studies at the Guildhall School of Music (conveniently situated next door to her flat), and harbours a yearning to sing Violetta in La Traviata. Before this, however, she spent a couple of riotous decades in cabaret and fringe theatre in New York, interspersed with bouts as a female wrestler, an artist’s model and a part-time truck driver delivering Heinz ketchup.”

Attorneys for Garrison Keillor have shut down sales of T-shirts being sold by a Minnesota blogger that say “A Prairie Ho Companion,” claiming the shirts infringe on Keillor’s trademark. Keillor’s attorney said the cease and desist order is meant to protect the name of Keillor’s ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ public radio show and upcoming movie by the same name. He’s got a copyright interest in the name and he just wants to protect it — nothing personal”

“Top-dog architects have to be showmen, but it can be an awkward marriage: his angular, challenging architecture, such as Berlin’s Jewish Museum, sits uneasily with appearing on Oprah. Their bond? Emoting: he wants his buildings to stir your heart.”