Category: people

Creeley wrote, edited or was a major contributor to more than 60 books, including fiction, essays and drama. He belonged to a group of poets – beginning with Modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and continuing through the Beats and the Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson – who tried to escape from what they considered the academic style of American poetry, with its European influences and strict rhyme and metric schemes.

In an era when cultural institutions are growing and building at an unprecedented rate, arts consultant Adrian Ellis can be counted on for some straight talk. “His sobering message may not be what museums with big dreams want to hear. But Mr. Ellis’s clients say his unvarnished advice is not unwelcome. “He’s a reality check,” said Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery in London. “I think it’s healthy for every institution to have a good reality check.”

Mr. Johannesen was a sensitive player who was more interested in exploring musical byways that fascinated him than in repeating the warhorses of the repertory, and as a teacher, he advised his students to follow a similar path.

Susan Sontag was a complicated and difficult person. “A good part of her characteristic ‘effect’ – what one might call her novelistic charm – has not yet been put into words. Among other things, Sontag was a great comic character: Dickens or Flaubert or James would have had a field day with her. The carefully cultivated moral seriousness – strenuousness might be a better word – co-existed with a fantastical, Mrs Jellyby-like absurdity.”

Singer Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) has had a rough year. “In September last year he was escorted off a flight from London to Washington and grilled by the FBI, which then deported him as a security threat. Since then, he has been wrongly accused of supporting terrorist groups by the Sunday Times and the Sun, who were last month forced to pay damages. “Ever since I became a Muslim, I’ve had to deal with attempts to damage my reputation and countless insinuations seeking to cast doubt on my character and trying to connect me to causes which I do not subscribe to,” he grumbled after the out-of-court settlement.”

Harriet Klausner is Amazon’s most prolific book review. “In terms of productivity (8,649 reviews as of mid-March) and the ability to turn out what the site calls helpful information, Ms. Klausner is in a league of her own.” She reads four or five books a day, and publishers have taken to sending her everything they publish in hopes of getting a thumbs-up…

Two years ago, Herbert Axelrod was known as a selfless philanthropist and a hero to mid-Atlantic arts groups. These days, he is painted as a villain who played fast and loose with the tax code and defrauded an orchestra. Reality may lie somewhere in between. “Axelrod, 77, is a big-time donor in the arts sector, which last time I checked is not exactly overflowing with big-time donors. The arts community will be counting the days until his release, all too happy to help Axelrod rehabilitate his reputation… After all, it is possible to have a fabulous way with vintage wallpaper and have participated in obstruction of justice. It is possible to have been a star football player and have murdered (probably) your wife. In fact, it’s likely. Life is complex.

Jazz pianist Billy Taylor seemed to resist the passing of time like the ageless standards he’s always loved to play. But in December 2001, he awoke one morning unable to blink. He has been working his way back ever since, recovering from the stroke that affected the right side of his body, including the right hand that once danced across the keys like Astaire.”

It’s not so much that Edward Hopper was a product of the city he loved. It’s more that Hopper’s paintings of New York took on such a life of their own that it is almost impossible to conjure up a mental picture of the Big Apple without at least a little bit of Hopper in it. “Nearly four decades after his death, and many decades after he created some of his most evocative works, Hopper sites and Hopper moments can still be found everywhere in this city of steel bridges, concrete walls, asphalt roadways, old warehouses, empty roofs, brick buildings and small rooms.”

Acclaimed soprano Deborah Voigt, fired from a production of Ariadne auf Naxos by a London opera company last March because she was too fat to fit into the costume that had been designed for her character, underwent gastric bypass surgery in June 2004, and has since lost 100 pounds. Voigt had made the decision to have the procedure done before she was sacked by the Royal Opera House, a public humiliation compounded by the fact that Ariadne is her signature role. The surgery was not without risk: “Opera singers who lose significant amounts of weight have been known to lose vocal luster as well, Maria Callas being the most notable example.” But Ms. Voigt has been performing regularly in the months since her recovery, and has been continued to garner rave reviews.