Category: people

Forman’s direction of Cuckoo’s Nest put him “in the front rank of those who struggled to make big, commercial films with countercultural sensibilities. His sympathy for the odd man out was always apparent, even as his movies grew in scope.”

The classic Chicago accent is heard less often these days because the white working class is less numerous, and less influential, than it was in the 20th century. It has been pushed to the margins of city life, both figuratively and geographically, by white flight, multiculturalism and globalization: The accent is most prevalent in blue-collar suburbs and predominantly white neighborhoods in the northwest and southwest corners of the city, now heavily populated by city workers whose families have lived in Chicago for generations.

He founded the choir, the Boston Symphony’s resident ensemble, at the BSO’s summer home in 1970 and directed it until he retired in 2015. In addition, “he led his own John Oliver Chorale and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 32 years. He also was a faculty member and choral director at Boston University.”

“For at least a dozen years, she was ‘all-powerful, during a remarkably fertile time for stand-up comedy – the 1970s and early ’80s – when many of today’s comedy stars showed up in L.A. to go onstage at the only place that mattered.'”

“The author of eight volumes of poetry, Mr. McClatchy was considered one of the country’s foremost men of letters. He was also a prolific editor, anthologist, translator and critic, as well as the author of a string of acclaimed opera librettos, among them Our Town, for Ned Rorem’s setting of Thornton Wilder’s enduring drama of village life, and the Metropolitan Opera’s condensed English-language production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, designed by Julie Taymor.”

“She matured as an artist in the 1950s, in the heyday of ‘experimental art’. Her disobedient aesthetic sense helped her to become one of the first British admirers of Jackson Pollock. With Pollock in mind, but also instinctively, she formed pools of colour and spread-out lines, dashes and bravado meanderings. House paint was used on hardboard and her long formats resembled panels or friezes.”

Casa Verdi is “a sumptuous neo-Gothic mansion built in central Milan by Verdi. Completed in 1899, the building was created as a sanctuary for musicians who found themselves poverty-stricken in old age, “Old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving,” as Verdi wrote in a letter at the time.”

Much of the media focus has been on the size of the salary gaps. But what really tells the story about ingrained gender inequality is the disparity in bonus pay (men receive 67% more than women at Warner Bros., 88% at Live Nation, 68% at Turner Broadcasting) and the disproportion of men — usually in the region of 70% — in the upper quartile of earners.

“He performed with modern-dance pioneers Martha Graham and José Limón while still in his teens. At 21, he formed his own dance company, whose members included such renowned figures as Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell and Eliot Feld. [He] also choreographed several early works that have become acknowledged as modern-dance classics.” In 1974 he directed and choreographed Raisin, a musical adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, for which he received two Tony nominations; he received further nominations for choreography for Doctor Jazz (1975) and Sophisticated Ladies (1981).

“The National Arts Stabilization Fund, a consortium of private and corporate philanthropies … , grew out of her collaboration, beginning in the late 1950s, with a Ford vice president, W. McNeil Lowry, to create incentives for symphonies, ballet companies, theaters and other arts groups to liquidate their deficits and build working capital reserves. The model’s disciplined, businesslike approach inspired Congress to subsidize the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.”