Category: people

Pianist Bobby Short was the best at what he did. “To dismiss Mr. Short, as some did, as a plaything of the rich and the chic is to overlook his contribution to jazz and to New York cultural life. He was one of the last exponents of an ebullient dusk-till-dawn nightclub culture that flourished in Manhattan until it was done in by television, rock ‘n’ roll and its own inflationary pressures.”

“The size and prominence of the commissions for Thomas Mayne’s firm, based in Santa Monica, Calif., and called Morphosis, have increased dramatically in the last decade, from private homes and restaurants in Los Angeles to public, educational and commercial buildings in the United States, Europe and Asia.” But he’s not broken in to star ranks until his Pritzker win. “It’s a really serious reward and I take it with huge humility and honor. My career has been so much outside the mainstream that I can’t help but view it as a vindication of what I’ve tried to do.”

Well, he won this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture. “Thom Mayne’s taste tends to the shocking; if he were a filmmaker, he would be Roger Corman. His buildings have jagged, fractured forms and haphazard compositions that make them look, at first glance, as if they were not quite finished—or were falling apart. This is a subterfuge, of course, since they are solidly built and carefully detailed, but their appearance leaves the distinct impression of chaos.”

New Jersey philanthropist Herbert Axelrod, who pled guilty to tax evasion and has been accused of defrauding the New Jersey Symphony in the $17 million sale of a collection of supposedly rare string instruments, will be sentenced for his crimes on Monday, and faces a possible 3-year prison sentence. The 77-year-old Axelrod fled the U.S. shortly after being indicted, and was eventually captured in Germany.

“Years before Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) gained worldwide acclaim for his children’s books, he honed his craft making cartoons for other young minds: American soldiers. Racy and suggestive, the animated films are enough to shatter one’s innocent appraisal of such Seuss titles as “The Seven Lady Godivas,” “Hop on Pop” and — say it isn’t so — “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket!” The short military-training cartoons, along with disturbing propaganda films that Seuss also worked on, were shown to troops during and shortly after World War II.”

Composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies got in trouble with police recently when he reported a dead whooper swan near his property and prepared to eat it. The birds are protected, and even though Davies didn’t kill the swan himself, police still paid a visit. “Naturally, I’ve informed Buckingham Palace. Now I’m just hoping I’ll still be a free man – and not locked up in the Tower of London – at the time of my first big concert as Master of the Queen’s Music.”

France is the latest country to take a poll to rank the country’s most important person of all time. But the Top 11 list has many funing: “What the hell were they thinking?” asked Le Parisien, noting that film director Luc Besson (91) beat writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (96).

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin has weighed in on a report done by reporter David D’Arcy. D’Arcy was dismissed for it. “The original report did not, in my opinion, fully and accurately present all of the facts. Nor did it present MoMA’s position on the ownership question. The painting has been in federal custody for years, and MoMA’s position is that the Austrian courts must decide the painting’s legal owners, since the painting was in the United States only as part of a loan arrangement. Most important, in an issue of journalistic fairness, the report did not give MoMA a chance to respond to specific and direct charges leveled against it by numerous critics. The original report was wrongly framed, and NPR was right to air a clarification in early January.”

Attorney Randol Schoenberg disputes Dvorkin’s criticisms: “You wrote “the original report did not, in my opinion, fully and accurately present all of the facts.” No doubt this is true of Mr. d’Arcy’s story — as it is true of each and every story aired on NPR. No 5-minute story “could fully and accurately present all the facts” of a historical case concerning events 65+ years ago, the litigation of which has lasted now for over seven years and generated no less than six court opinions concerning complex legal issues beyond the ken of even NPR’s above-average listeners. So your comment, while true, is hardly a criticism. Notably, you fail to mention any inaccuracies in the report. If there are any, they are certainly minor.”

You know of the sneeches and grinches and cats in the hat. But his long, long career was much wider than that. For the good Dr. Seuss may have been quite a wag, but he had a grown-up side that could make you gag. There’s bare breasts and butts, propaganda galore, in the little-known films you can’t buy in the store.