Laura Miller: “Instead, the Lynch of [the new memoir] Room to Dream lives a bit like a medieval peasant, in a realm of signs and portents, a cosmos whose ultimate design he cannot grasp but devoutly trusts.”
Category: people
Claude Lanzmann, Director Of ‘Shoah’, Dead At 92
While he had an extensive career as journalist, editor, public intellectual, and lover of Simone de Beauvoir, it was with Shoah, a 9½ oral history of the Holocaust widely considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made, that Lanzmann gained world renown. He never retired: his final film, Napalm (about his youthful affair with a nurse in North Korea), and his miniseries The Four Sisters were both completed last year.
Philippe De Baleine, Journalist And Inspiration For Character In ‘Tintin’, Dead At 96
In an astoundingly prolific career, de Baleine wrote some 50 books, ranging from reportage from West Africa and Southeast Asia to detective novels published under a pseudonym, and was editor-in-chief of several magazines including Paris Match, Marie Claire, and Sciences et Vie.
The 21st-Century Americans Trying To Revive The Medieval Knights Templar
“It is Memorial Day weekend and we are in a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, where about 350 members of the autonomous Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem have gathered to mark the 900th birthday of the Knights Templar. Members of the charitable organization, known by the unwieldy abbreviation SMOTJ, regard themselves as spiritual descendants of the original Templars.”
The Elusive, Enigmatic, Entirely Indispensable Véra Nabokov
As the great illustrator Saul Steinber once put it, “It would be difficult to write about Véra without mentioning Vladimir. But it would impossible to write about Vladimir without mentioning Véra.” Miranda Popkey looks at how and Véra remains so fascinating, despite her strenuous attempts to erase herself.
World’s Oldest Conductor Dies At 101
Edward Simons apparently became the world’s oldest active conductor when he took up the baton at age 100 to conduct Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings on Sept. 10, during the “2017 Annual Concert for Remembrance, 9/11,” at Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack. Guinness World Records currently lists Spain’s Juan Garcés Queralt, who conducted a concert at age 99 and 311 days, as the oldest, but is reviewing an application to recognize Simons’ achievement.
Liliane Montevecchi, Who Fled American TV And Movies For The Stage (And Won A Tony), Has Died At 85
She was 50 when she was cast in Nine, which was based on Fellini’s movie 8 1/2. “The role of the movie producer had been written for a man, but the character was reworked so Ms. Montevecchi, who didn’t fit anywhere else in the show, could be cast. In ‘Folies Bergère,’ her big number, she reveled in the joys of the good old days of show business, stopped to chat flirtatiously with audience members and ended up gloriously wrapped in a 30-foot-long black feather boa.”
‘CATS’ Choreographer Gillian Lynne Has Died At 92
Lynne began as a ballet dancer but became famous as a choreographer for the West End and Broadway, where she worked closely with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Cats and Phantom of the Opera. “Lloyd Webber paid tribute to Dame Gillian on Twitter, writing: ‘Farewell dearest Gillie, three generations of the British musical owe so much to you.'”
Norman Lebrecht, Confessor Of The Music World
[The gossip] is the human comedy, that’s what I like. I came into music because nobody was writing about it in a way that interested me. Musicologists were writing arcane and abstruse things which had no relation to who the composer was, where he or she was at that particular time in her life. They weren’t answering the questions of, “Why is this piece meaningful to me, why is this phrase meaningful to me?” In the way that you’d ask in every other human transaction from the restaurant to the bedroom. And so I started asking those questions.
The Woman Who Was Kidnapped And Forced To Impersonate Aretha Franklin Before Thousands Of People
In 1969, Mary Jane Jones, a 27-year-old single mother in Petersburg, Virginia with a big, spectacular voice for gospel, was tricked – by a small-time James Brown impersonator – into traveling to Florida, where he threatened and bullied her into giving a series of performances that he sold to the black public in then-segregated cities as appearances by the Queen of Soul herself (who was the same age). Then Aretha, who was singing in Miami, found out – and so began a strange series of events that ended up with Jones performing (as herself) with Duke Ellington.