Category: people

“Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, a poet who documented the fight against communism, has died aged 93. His best known work was The Captive Mind, which looked at the treatment of intellectuals under communist rule.”

Leon Golub, an “American painter of expressionistic, heroic-scale figures that reflect dire modern political conditions,” died Sunday in New York

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has a strict routine for writing: “The 39-year-old Dan Brown gets up and starts writing each day at four in the morning. He writes with an antique hour glass on his desk and at the end of each 60 minute period he does sit-ups, stretches and push-ups. He also confesses to wearing gravity boots.”

Donald Justice, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Midwestern poet whose works were renowned for their precision of style, has died following a stroke. “Mr. Justice was acclaimed as both a poet and a teacher. His poetry followed an unusual trajectory over the decades, starting out in a traditional way, diverting into the experimental and surreal, and returning to meter and rhyme in the end.”

Photographer Helmut Newton was already in the late stages of setting up a foundation in his name in Berlin when he was killed in an auto accident earlier this year. He did not live to see the opening of the foundation. “But now more than ever it has become his memorial, and an eye-catching one at that. Where stern portraits of bewhiskered generals once presided over the foyer of the officers’ club at Jebensstrasse 2, near the Berlin Zoo station, five of Newton’s trademark ‘Big Nudes’ now proclaim his place as a pioneer of erotic fashion photography.”

“Fay Wray, an actress who appeared in about 100 movies but whose fame is inextricably linked with the hours she spent struggling, helplessly screaming, in the eight-foot hand of King Kong, died on Sunday at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 96.”

W. Jerome Frautschi is a man of his word, and it’s a good thing for the city of Madison that he is. When Frautschi offered to pay the full cost of constructing Madison’s Overture Center for the Arts, that cost was projected to be $50 million. Instead, the final price tag was $205 million, and Frautschi’s gift is now believed to be the largest amount ever given to a single arts organization by a single donor.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino is impressed with Susan Hartnett, the woman he named last years as the city’s arts czar. “I’ve gotten more kudos for making Susan director of this new department than I have for anything I’ve done in a long time.”

Conductor Seiji Ozawa returns to Tanglewood and talks about life post-Boston Symphony. Ozawa says the creation of the new opera company for Japan will realize the last of his major career goals, “apart from teaching, and that is something I hope will never end.”

Clive Gillinson is a “singular” arts administrator who turned around the fortunes of the London Symphony Orchestra. “He persuaded a bunch of perfectly understandably cynical musicians that what they went to musical college to study, and the art form that they pursue, is central and worthy and necessary and should be performed at the highest level for the sake of itself.”