Category: people

“[Billy] McFarland, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges in March, was charged with an additional count of wire fraud and money laundering late Tuesday afternoon. Prosecutors say the scheme to sell tickets to exclusive events … was a fraud from the start, and one which specifically targeted people who had fallen for the Fyre Festival.”

“He left no diaries. No memoirs. No letters besides the occasional plea for patronage. His most substantial contemporary biography, no more than a few paragraphs in all, reveals little beyond the human capacity for understatement. … The entirety of his known painterly philosophy amounts to six words: to produce ‘die meeste ende die natureelste beweechlickheyt‘ — or ‘the greatest and most natural movement’ — a phrase whose precise meaning remains hotly contested to this day. In the annals of art history, there are those whose stories remain shrouded by the passage of time. And then there is Rembrandt.”

“Once called ‘the Camelot of jazz rooms,’ the Village Vanguard hosted Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, to name just a few of the legendary talents who’ve graced its tiny stage. In 1935, Lorraine Gordon’s late husband Max opened the club on the site of a former speakeasy; she inherited her role as its honored caretaker when he passed away 54 years later. She became almost as much a fixture as the club itself.”

Playwrights Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina were unhappy with the state of Russian theatre in the early 2000s. Then they went to London. There, “they learned about documentary theater — the use of interviews, oral history and journalistic sources to create works for the stage. Ms. Gremina and Mr. Ugarov embraced the technique, brought it to Moscow and in 2002 established Teatr.doc, a theater company that presented shockingly raw accounts of life in post-Soviet Russia.”

Duncan, who had lived near Cannes since the 1960s, “became close to Picasso, gaining rare access and capturing the Spanish artist in relaxed and playful poses at his home and studio, with one of the most emblematic showing him eating a fish clean off the bone in his kitchen.”

Gordon took over the Village Vanguard in 1989 and ran it with fierce protectiveness. “She fell in love with jazz as a teenager in the 1930s, listening to it on WNYC radio. The music pierced her soul, she said, ‘like a spike in my heart.’ It was the start of a lifelong romance.” She’d made her first trip to the club in 1940.

Berlin persistently wrote about slavery’s varied effects across the years, but he never lost sight of the cruelty. “In books like Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974) and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998), Dr. Berlin, a longtime professor at the University of Maryland, upended simplistic notions of how slavery was practiced and what happened after it ended.”

“The books deliberately avoid interviews with celebrities. Terkel wanted to talk with ‘ordinary people’ — to show that there are no ordinary people. … The radio programs, by contrast, despite his occasional trips, dealt mainly with people of extraordinary abilities or achievements, and especially with show business eminences, whether in music, theater, literature, or other arts. Chicago has its own famous acting, singing, and writing accomplishments, but it is also a crossroads where famous people came to perform — and Studs dearly loved a performance. His politics made him celebrate noncelebrities, but his heart always tugged him toward the footlights.”

“[He] was widely considered one of the finest photojournalists of the 20th century. In Life magazine photo essays, television specials and about two dozen books, he captured the seemingly incongruous subjects of war and art, traveling from the front lines of battle to the treasure troves of the Kremlin in Moscow and the French studio of Pablo Picasso.”