Category: people

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce: “The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a historical record of entertainment figures past and present. Once installed, the stars become part of the historic fabric of the Walk of Fame, a ‘designated historic cultural landmark,’ and are intended to be permanent. The stars only commemorate the recipient’s professional accomplishments.”

City Arts & Lectures began in 1980, and Goldstein ran it for 37 years, before turning it over to her daughter and Holly Mulder-Wollan in July 2017. The series at Nourse Theater offers more than 50 programs a year before a live audience of up to 100,000 annually.

“The Hollywood redemption machine is always ripe for satire, since its formula is so depressingly simple. Take one once-beloved artist, add a bottled statement of apology, give them just long enough for their worst misdeeds to fade somewhat from public memory, and combine with the industry’s never-ending desire to use great artistry as an antidote to past sins.”

The murder victims were the artist’s uncle (1678-1739), who lived in a neighbouring street in Sudbury, and his cousin (1709-39), who then worked in London. Both were also named Thomas. Biographers of the artist since the mid-19th century had failed to note these murders in the family.

“In addition to helping bring the Skywalker stories to the big screen, Kurtz produced American Graffiti and The Dark Crystal. His career was closely aligned with that of George Lucas, but the two parted ways after the troubled production of The Empire Strikes Back.”

Abramović was just leaving a book-signing at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence when Vaclav Pisvejc approached her with a framed portrait he painted of her. She thought he was bringing her a present; instead, he lifted it high, smashed it over her head, and said, “Boom!” When Abramović, unhurt (there was no glass over the frame) asked Pisvejc why he would do this, he replied, “I had to do it for my art.” (includes video)

David DiChiera belongs on the Mount Rushmore of contemporary Detroit. With his beloved city at its nadir in the 1970s and ’80s, he dared to imagine a future that was audaciously optimistic and inextricably linked to the arts and downtown Detroit. He promised to build an opera house and a major opera company from scratch in a city better known for producing Chevys than “Carmens.” Most people thought he was nuts. But then he accomplished everything he said he would do.

Indeed, the French New Wave filmmaker is still a sort of “punk monk” despite failing eyesight and difficulty walking. Varda says not to patronize her: “I am still alive, I am still curious. I should not be treated like an old piece of rotting flesh!”

As a matter of fact, Raisin has had the odd effect of making the playwright famous, and obscuring the realities of who she was. “She was a feminist before the feminist movement. She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. She was an anti-colonialist before independences had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.”

Writer and actor Simon Callow looks at the relationship between the playwright and publisher, two wildly different men who were each other’s benefactors — financially, professionally, personally — for forty years.