Category: people

Self-styled “comedy terrorist” Aaron Barschak has been convicted of throwing paint on Jake Chapman at a gallery in London earlier this year. “The 37-year-old splattered red oil paint over Chapman and one of his artworks at the Modern Art Oxford gallery. Witnesses said Barschak gatecrashed a talk by the brothers on May 30 this year and hurled the paint at Chapman shouting ‘Viva Goya’. Barschak, from Golders Green, north London, told the police that he was making his own piece of art in the same way the Chapmans had adapted another artist’s work.”

“The controversy surrounding the private life of one of the 20th century’s leading conductors, Sir Eugene Goossens, has resurfaced in Australia as legal action is threatened to stop the performance of a play about his life. The new play, The Devil is a Woman, by the Sydney-based writers Mandy Sayer and Louis Nowra, tells the story of the scandal that ruined Goossens… At Sydney airport in March 1956, customs officers intercepted his luggage and found more than 1,000 pornographic photographs, films and books, along with three rubber masks. The ensuing scandal destroyed Goossens’ career, marriage and reputation in a matter of weeks.”

“Franco Corelli, the Italian tenor whose powerhouse voice, charismatic presence and movie-star good looks earned him the adoration of opera fans from the 1950’s until his retirement in 1976, died yesterday in Milan. He was 82 and lived in Milan.”

Stage designer Louise Campeau has won Canada’s 2003 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, the richest art prize in the nation. Campeau, who has designed sets for some 14 companies in Montreal, will receive CAN$100,000, 25% of which she must give to a protégé of her choice.

Michael Kaiser, president of Washington’s Kennedy Center and recently the foremost star of the arts management world, does not surprise easily. But somehow, his friends and supporters managed to pull off a massive surprise party for Kaiser’s 50th birthday this week. “The entertainment was provided by Barbara Cook, Harolyn Blackwell, Patti LuPone and dancers from the Alvin Ailey troupe and American Ballet Theatre. The 136 guests included [Stephen] Sondheim, Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and lots of other A-list political, business and diplomatic bigwigs.”

Canadian author Stephen Williams claims that he is being persecuted by Ontario authorities for the act of having written a couple of books about infamous Canadian serial killers and the botched police investigation which allowed them to go uncaptured for so long, and which will allow one of them to shortly be released from prison. The authorities insist that the 97 charges which they have laid against Williams are legit, in reaction to his accidental posting of two banned victims’ names on his web site. Lynn Coady says that it’s about time that the public got outraged on the author’s behalf.

Robert Hughes is back, three years after a crippling car accident in Australia. “The dreadful accident in Western Australia has not extinguished Hughes’s old habits of incidental invective and capsule tirade. I have seen his prose characterized as of the Muscle Beach school, which, transposed to the higher cultural tone of Sydney’s Bondi Beach, seems fair enough. He has done the workouts to get himself into shape, and, if he turned a few handstands and kicked sand at a few ninety-pound weaklings, his pleasure in his own strength and suppleness of mind and pen was infectious.” And thus a new book on Goya…

Jack Valenti is 82, and he still runs the Motion Picture Association of America with consummate skill, just as he’s done for 37 years now. “What’s remarkable is he’s managed to hold all the companies together even though we’re often fractious among each other and competitive and have heavily divergent issues — some of us have networks, some have cable companies, some have theme parks, some have the Internet. We’re all often truly impossible to deal with. Jack has held us together.”

Hard to believe composer Ned Rorem is 80. “His masterpiece is his artistic personality. He’s an extremely acute observer and a master of paradox, which is very French. He was able to import French culture while remaining a thoroughly American figure. In an era of dumbing-down and slipping standards, he really does stand for something.”

Orwell outed those he believed were communists to the government. His list is contained in a notebook that is about to be released. “The final list contained 38 names of journalists, scholars and actors, including film comic Charlie Chaplin, actor Michael Redgrave, historian E.H. Carr and left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg. Its discovery earlier this year was proof that Orwell, after conscientious second thoughts and deletions, had sent the Foreign Office some names from his notebook drafts.”