Category: people

“Republicans are calling for film-maker Michael Moore to be prosecuted for offering prizes of noodles and underwear to encourage voting. The Michigan Republican Party accuses the director of bribery on his speaking tour to encourage students to vote.”

Comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who built an extremely lucrative film and performing career on a single catchphrase (you know what it is,) has died of complications from heart surgery. Dangerfield’s act was exceedingly personal, and consisted mainly of one-liners at his own expense, delivered with a chuckle and a sad-sack shake of the head. He got his first big break on the Ed Sullivan Show, and acted in more than 20 movies. Dangerfield was 82.

“Vernon Alley, the most distinguished jazz musician in San Francisco history, died Sunday after a long illness. He was 89. A man who broke down many racial barriers in his lifetime and played with the greatest musicians of his generation, Alley could have become one of the most famous names in jazz, but the bassist chose instead to spend his career in his beloved hometown.”

Composing may still be a predominantly male profession, but the individual who had arguably the greatest impact on the American musical landscape of the 20th century was a woman, Nadia Boulanger, with whom more than 130 American composers studied their craft. “Unlike Schoenberg, she did not try to create followers who hewed to a set style or compositional approach. That is clear from the diversity of her students, ranging from famed atonalist Elliott Carter to Joe Raposo, who wrote music for Sesame Street.“

Pierre Boulez, the iconoclastic composer/conductor who, in his youth, delighted in savaging his contemporaries and disdaining his predecessors, seems to be mellowing in his old age. How can you tell? Well, he recently admitted to being occasionally wrong.

“An unusually bitter dispute has broken out betweenthe family of Graham Greene and Norman Sherry, the man he entrusted to write the definitive account of his life. Relatives have been angered that Professor Sherry, whose third and final volume of Greene’s official biography will be published this week, dwells extensively on the writer’s sexual conquests at the expense of his literary career.” The family is likening Sherry to the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, while the author fires back that the objections are “bloody nonsense.”

Leonard Bernstein’s legacy looms large over the American musical landscape. Not only a revered composer and conductor, Bernstein is also justly famous for having been one of the few individuals able to connect children to serious music in an age when pop culture had begun to dominate the cultural sphere. A new radio documentary series examining Bernstein’s role in American culture begins this week, and “after some throat-clearing about the nature of Bernstein’s genius, the show becomes suddenly addictive. The radio format does what no biography can: superimpose the voices against a torrential background of music, most of it as jaunty, optimistic, vigorous and full of bravado as Bernstein was himself.”

Ken Danby could be considered the Canadian answer to Thomas Kinkade – a stunningly prolific artist (650 original works in a 40-year career) who inspires revulsion in the art world for his nostalgic simplicity and his willingness to mass market his work, even to the extent of signing machine-made reproductions. Still, “Danby’s clientele know what they like and they are legion. His 1998 show at the Carrier Gallery attracted, he says, 10,000 visitors and sold $1.25 million-worth of pictures.”

Novelist Graham Greene, who would have turned 100 this weekend, will enjoy a posthumous resurgence this fall, thanks to a bevy of reissues put together for the occasion. The timing couldn’t be better, as Greene’s work seems to have a new relevance to modern events: “The Western world finds itself in international turmoil, in situations similar to those of Greene’s slumming characters, where it’s not always clear that one is doing the right thing. And we find ourselves trying to divvy up the world into categories of absolutes — Good and Evil — when our everyday existence, as echoed by Greene’s protagonists, tells us that things are much more complicated than that.”

Noted portrait photographer Richard Avedon has died in Texas of complications from a brain hemorrhage. Avedon’s pictures were sometimes controversial, sometimes difficult to look at, but they were always uniquely memorable, and his work “revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive.”