Category: people

Dame Alicia Markova, one of the UK’s most influential prima ballerinas, has died aged 94. She died in a nursing home in Bath on Thursday morning, the day after her birthday.

After 17 years, Sacramento Bee film critic Joe Baltake is quitting. For what? To do nothing. “That’s what’s so strange,” Baltake told Bites, fresh from reviewing Christmas with the Kranks, a film he suggested makes retiring from film criticism that much easier. “Whenever I tell somebody what my plans are–and I’ve been talking about this for a year now–the inevitable question is, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ And I say, ‘Nothing.’ I guess the work ethic is so pronounced in this country that the idea of doing nothing seems almost a crime, or a sin or some kind of blasphemy.”

“Journalist, author, pundit, personality — for more than 50 years Pierre Berton dominated print and broadcast media in Canada.” The author of 50 books and countless newspaper and magazine columns died yesterday at age 84, and his legacy as author, commentator, and benefactor to other writers is being celebrated across the country. How important was Berton to Canadians? The CBC’s flagship evening newscast devoted the first ten minutes of its program to him last night, relegating a major visit by the American president to page 2 status.

“Widely recognised as the greatest theatre director to have emerged since the Second World War, Peter Brook will be 80 next March. He’s a man who – in mid-life and at the pinnacle of success with his historic white-box-and-trapezes A Midsummer Night’s Dream – kicked away the careerist ladder, turned his back on England and moved to France in search of working conditions conducive to profound, long-term theatrical research. The veteran director is currently celebrating his 30th year at the Bouffes du Nord, the wonderful disused music hall with the mysterious proportions of a mosque that he discovered and reopened in all its battered beauty in 1974.”

Lore has it that Dylan Thomas died of heavy drinking. But a new biography disputes the popular notion. “The book discloses that Thomas was found to be suffering from pneumonia by doctors who examined him when he was admitted in a coma to the New York hospital where he died in November 1953 shortly after his 40th birthday.”

Artist Ed Paschke, a supremely influential Chicago artist who helped lead the city’s surrealist/pop-based art movement of the 1960s, died this past week. “His visual world was rooted in a variety of American subcultures (as captured in commercial art and magazines), and it also was powerfully influenced by the electronic media.”

“Arthur Hailey, the bestselling author who plucked characters from ordinary life and threw them into extraordinary ordeals, died in his home in the Bahamas, his wife said yesterday. He was 84.”

Italian director Franco Zeffirelli is being awarded a British knighthood. Though Zeffirelli is being commended for his “valuable services to British performing arts”, his knighthood will further tighten already close relations between Tony Blair’s government and that of Silvio Berlusconi.

AJ blogger Terry Teachout has just been confirmed by the US Senate as a member of the National Council on the Arts. As the most voracious consumer (and connoisseur) of art we’ve ever met, the honor is well deserved. Congratulations Terry.

Nevad’s official Poet Laureate hasn’t performed an official function for years. So the Nevada Arts Council wants to appoint a new poet to the job. Some disagree with the idea. “Norman Kaye may be an 82-year-old real estate agent who gave up the showbiz life more than 40 years ago. He may be completely ignorant of poetic sensibility and device. He may be unable to travel, to communicate with the kiddies about the importance or even the structure of poetry. But Norman Kaye is rightfully a legendary Nevadan who, in desperately clinging to some modicum of past glory by fighting for his right to stay poet laureate, embodies the poetry of this place.”