Category: people

“In 1946 Li Tianbing stole his grandmother’s cow and bought a camera with the proceeds. Some 300,000 photos later, he is being feted as one of his country’s most influential artists… For Li, it is a hobby and a job, rather than art. But his evocative images of a China that was thought to have passed without visual record have upstaged some of the most provocative installations and performances of the country’s growing avant-garde movement.”

Fugitive philanthropist Herbert Axelrod, accused of tax fraud and under investigation for overcharging the New Jersey Symphony on the 2003 purchase of a collection of valuable instruments, is appealing his extradition from Germany, and will likely not be returned to U.S. custody for weeks or even months. Axelrod had been scheduled to appear in federal court this Friday – that court date has been canceled.

“Former opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, 69, is to give singing lessons in his home town in Italy. The tenor, who retired from his opera career last year, will tutor students on a two-year singing course at a music conservatory in Modena.”

The UK’s poet laureate is a kindly gentleman named Andrew Motion, but the poet who best defines Brit culture today may just be a man who has refused all the trappings of the aristocracy, told the queen to “stick it,” and encouraged his countrymen to “stop going on about the empire. Let’s do something else.” The poetry of Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is a fascinating blend of high culture and hip-hop, and he has become a legitimate star with the type of audience that most poets shy away from: the working class.

“Herbert Axelrod, the fugitive philanthropist who sold suspect violins to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and fled the country to avoid tax fraud charges, will soon land back in New Jersey to stand trial. Federal authorities are completing extradition proceedings against Axelrod, 77, who has been jailed in Germany since his arrest June 16 at a Berlin airport on a U.S. warrant.”

Eliot Feld is one of the dance world’s stars, and yet, he has been without a company since the Ballet Tech Foundation shut down last year. These days, he’s working with six young dancers in a collaboration that he refuses to call the beginnings of a company, and seems perfectly happy to be working outside the traditional realm of the choreographer.

American soprano Deborah Voigt has withdrawn from a Vancouver Opera production, citing hurricane fatigue. Voigt lives in Vero Beach, Florida, which was hit hard by the recent series of hurricanes, and had been scheduled to be on the road until Christmas.

Benjamin Britten lived his entire life obsessed with the concept of family, and was known for creating surrogate units around himself wherever he went. “There were families that Britten devised and then depended on to facilitate and fulfil his work: the companies that staged his works, and in particular the managements of the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh festival. But there were many times in the later 1940s and 1950s when the conduct of these surrogate families was overshadowed by frustrations, jealousies and even thinly disguised homophobia.”

In a major embarrassment for the Scottish Executive, the new poet laureate signed an infamous declaration calling for Scotland to secede from the UK hours before one of his poems was to have been read before the British Queen. Edwin Morgan, “who was yesterday given a £5000-a-year stipend for being the national poet, or makar, said his sympathies were very much with the republicans.”

Marlon Brando was a brilliant actor, but his various eccentricities turned him into something of a walking caricature late in life, and his death this year did little to dispel the popular vision of him as a Hollywood joke. But now, “some of the people closest to the actor, who was known for protecting his privacy, have begun to speak publicly about his life, partly to correct the notion, fostered by tabloid stories, that he died a recluse, almost penniless and deeply in debt.”