Category: people

Avedon’s legacy is one of unbending realism cloaked in the language of high fashion: he once described his work as a “series of no’s leading to a yes.. I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.” His portraits were sophisticated but brutal, and over time, they became a barometer of social importance to those who posed. “An Avedon portrait brought an instant aura of importance and legitimacy to its subject; the picture said you matter now, because you’re news, or because you’re something people either like to stare at or talk about, but quietly so. If Avedon was taking your portrait, then you’d arrived. Even if you milked cows for a living.”

If she wanted to, Rachel Barton Pine could be the very definition of a struggling musician. Raised in a tough Chicago neighborhood, she became her family’s primary income-earner at 14, while striving towards her dream of becoming a professional musician. At age 20, her violin strap caught in the closing doors of a subway train, and she was dragged under, where her legs were crushed. Nearly a decade later, Barton Pine isn’t looking for pity: instead, she’s dedicated her life and career to spreading classical music to audiences that don’t ordinarily give a rip. To get people interested, she’ll happily whip out a few heavy metal tunes on her Strad, before launching into Paganini.

“Portrait photographer Richard Avedon suffered a brain hemorrhage Saturday while in Texas for The New Yorker, and has been hospitalized, a spokeswoman for the magazine, Perri Dorset, said yesterday.”

Opera is a tradition-bound enterprise, and there may be no more traditional radio audience than the 10 million fans who tune in each Saturday for live broadcasts of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. So the retirement of Peter Allen, the Voice of The Met for the last 29 years, has caused no small amount of hand-wringing. This week, the Met introduced its new voice: Margaret Juntwait, a classical music host at WNYC radio.

Back in 2000, artist Tom Muller set out to bring the world closer together by creating World Passports which could be ordered from any of several “world embassies” around the world. While completely useless in traditional border-crossing situations, Muller describes the passports as sending “a holistic kind of message, but using bureaucratic attitudes and ways to get there.” Unfortunately for the artist, purchasing passport-making equipment turned out to be a great way to attract the attention of the world’s law enforcement agencies in the months after the 9/11 attacks.

“A barber, a high school debating coach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a farmer and a ragtime pianist are among the 23 recipients of $500,000 ‘genius awards’ being announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This is one of the few years women and nonacademics have dominated the list since the annual awards program began in 1981.”

“There aren’t many directors who would feel equally at home staging the nostalgic ABBA songfest Mamma Mia! as well as the futurist opera based on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” In fact, crossing between the worlds of opera and musical theater at all tends to be frowned on, but somehow, director Phyllida Lloyd seems to have won over the finicky devotees of each. Having engineered the current Toronto production of Handmaid, her next project is the English National Opera’s Ring Cycle.

Filmmaker John Cassavetes never really won over the public during his lifetime, and even some prominent critics gave him a continuous cold shoulder. “Like Orson Welles, he didn’t always play well with others and he didn’t make all that much money for the movie industry. The other reason for the discomfort, I think, is that he called himself an artist. Many critics prefer their art with subtitles or not at all.” But a new box set of his work provides a window into the mind of a man who inspired a generation of better-loved filmmakers, even if his own work often went unappreciated by the powers that be.

Russ Meyer, who deserves a large share of the credit (or blame) for taking the porn industry mainstream, has died in Los Angeles, aged 82. “Meyer directed only one major studio release, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but it was his 23 sexploitation movies featuring large-busted women, pastiche violence and stilted dialogue that left his mark on Hollywood… They hardly ever showed graphic sex and were always humorous self-parodies… In recent years they even earned him the reputation of a respected auteur with numerous film festivals around the world celebrating his strange vision. Respected universities like Yale and Harvard studied his movies.”