Category: people

“Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other outré practices that he would come to call ‘body play.’ After years of conducting these activities in secret, away from society’s judgmental gaze, he changed his professional name and became a performance artist and passionate body-play advocate.”

Leonardo appears to have been unhappy with his handiwork, periodically refining the painting, started in 1503, until shortly before his death. Maybe that’s the biggest reason Leonardo lives so durably in the culture some five centuries after his death. He clearly saw himself—and, by extension, us—as an eternal work in progress.

In many ways, the Bernstein family’s experience mirrored that of other Jewish immigrants to the Boston area in the early 20th century. This was the immigrant experience — ups and downs, hopes and disappointments — on steroids.

Jimmy O. Yang says that even his Uber job – a job he got after buying a car with the money he made doing three days of filming for the show Silicon Valley – helped him prep to be a comedian. “There were some stupid drunk people every now and then but, for the most part, people were very nice, and I’m a people person. In a way, I was just kind of running my stand-up material on some of these people, just chatting them up.”

Llort, whose mosaics on San Salvador’s cathedral marking the end of a major civil war were destroyed by the Catholic Church in a “renovation” (for which the Church later apologized), was mourned by El Salvador’s president on social media: “His charisma, masterful works and affection for our people capture the cultural identity and the development in peace and harmony of our nation.”

Silver received a diagnosis of advanced breast cancer in 2004. She “wrote lyrical verse that gave readers an exquisite, intimate and sometimes angry account of her illness,” and she said that nothing focused her mind like cancer.

Moritz was a child star, so she grew up under a fame microscope – but her siblings helped her, as they went through their own struggles to come out, something that helped her as she starred in the new movie The Miseducation of Cameron Post . “I definitely struggled with, ‘Who am I? And what am I?’ My brothers, being marginalized their entire lives, were the first people to try and help me find my voice and my identity. And that’s the beauty of the L.G.B.T. community.”

Sir Vidia “exempted neither colonizer nor colonized from his scrutiny. He wrote of the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the colonizers, yet exposed the self-deception and ethical ambiguities of the liberation movements that swept across Africa and the Caribbean in their wake. He brought to his work moral urgency and a novelist’s attentiveness to individual lives and triumphs.”

According to Hungarian news site Parameter.sk, the woman, identified only as Eva N, played a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ non-stop, in her house with on speakers full blast, from morning until night. Parameter.sk says that the homeowner in the southern town of Sturovo played the music for years to drown out a neighbour’s loud barking dog, and had simply continued doing it.

She took that role in the first U.S. version of Nutcracker, in 1944 at San Francisco Ballet. She was a founding member of that company, and she led her fellow dancers in raising the cash to save it from bankruptcy in 1974; she later spent 20 years teaching at the company school.