Category: people

“Spalding opened the door for hundreds of artists to make live events out of their own experience; he gave permission for the theater of Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Dael Orlandersmith, and so many others. It was a theater of identity—personal politics—a way to unearth stories that had not been told. Now we take the solo performance form as a fact, but Spalding was the original. The master. Sliding down his own slippery slope of a life, taking us with him.”

Veronica Freeman, a popular cellist with the Kansas City Symphony since 2000, died Thursday, one week after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. She was 30.” The orchestra described Williams as “the heart and soul of the band … the uniting factor of the orchestra.”

Vilayat Khan was a pioneer sitar player of Indian classical music, “he was one of the first sitar players to take his music overseas. Khan came from six generations of musicians, and taught and performed Indian classical music in the United States.”

Joan Kroc was a dream philanthropist. “The maverick salvationist proved to be a maverick philanthropist, too. She gave away money the way the non-rich fantasize it should be done: no fanfare or foundations, no red tape or robber baron formality. Just the unexpected personal proffer of $1 million to prevent nuclear war, $3 million for a homeless shelter, $100 tips to the immigrants at the drive-through inquiring if she’d like fries with that . . . All the better if the lady in the blue Mercedes got away with her Filet-O-Fish (and a burger for her King Charles spaniel) without being identified.”

James Roos was the classical music critic for the Miami Herald for 31 years before being diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was a tough critic who didn’t much like to be edited. “Jim was notorious for going to the composing room after the evening edition to restore his pieces to their pre-edited state. Consequently, he was banned from the composing room. That was a long time ago.”

Neil Strauss, longtime pop music critic for the New York Times, has resigned after signing a deal to “ghostwrite porn star Jenna Jameson’s memoirs without telling his superiors first.”

Helen Hennessy Vendler has been chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver this year’s Jefferson Lecture. Vendler is “a leading interpreter of English language poets, a professor at Harvard for nearly 25 years, and has written extensively on William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney and John Keats.”

Rwandan musician Simon Bikindi has been arraigned before a UN tribunal in Tanzania, charged with inciting genocide in his native country through the lyrics of his music. Prosecutors claim that Bikindi’s music was designed explicitly to promote solidarity among the Hutu of Rwanda, and to stir up ethnic hatred against the minority Tutsi. Bikindi has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Spalding Gray had been depressed for some time before he disappeared a few months ago: “It’s another rocky time. I’m still limping from the car accident. My skull was fractured in the car accident, my hip was broken and my sciatic nerve was almost severed. The hospital they sent me to was not very good. There was no medicine they could find that was very helpful. It’s depressing. I can’t swim. I’m not cross-country skiing. I’m not hiking the way I used to. It’s ragged time. I’m just not whole.”

Spalding Gray was an artist all about self-absorbtion. “He called himself a poetic journalist, and the rhyme scheme went something like: Me-Me-Me-Me-Me.”