Category: people

Reporter Ryan Gibney: “Even with the release in 1987 of Maurice, they batted away any prying questions about their private lives. When I ask Ivory why this was, he comes as close to calling me a blasted fool as someone so urbane can. ‘Well, you just wouldn’t,’ he splutters.” (includes grousing about the lack of nudity in Call Me by Your Name)

“The coolly elegant and craftily enigmatic French actress … drew acclaim for performances in the Oscar-winning films Babette’s Feast and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as well as many dramas by her husband, director Claude Chabrol.”

For these creators, a trade isn’t just about paying the bills; it’s something that grounds them in reality. In 2017, a day job might perform the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience. But this break is also fieldwork. For those who want to mine daily life for their art, a second job becomes an umbilical cord fastened to something vast and breathing. The alternate gig that lifts you out of your process also supplies fodder for when that process resumes. Lost time is regained as range and perspective, the artist acquiring yet one more mode of inhabiting the world.

“Mr. Grossman moved to Washington in 1976 to take charge of PBS, at the time little more than a loosely aligned group of hundreds of locally controlled educational TV stations around the country. During his eight-year tenure, he maintained financial stability while giving PBS more of a national presence, largely through cultural programming and news. … He introduced such programs as Live From Lincoln Center and concerts from the White House and the Kennedy Center and approved production of a 13-part series on the history of the Vietnam War. He led efforts that expanded The MacNeil/Lehrer Report to a full hour in 1983, making it the first hour-long nightly newscast on any network.”

Yes, Ferlinghetti has scaled back his involvement with City Lights, where he shares an office with former City Lights Publishers editor Nancy Peters, co-owner of the store. But the celebrated bookseller, publisher and former San Francisco poet laureate nevertheless maintains an active lifestyle — and life of the mind — that anyone far younger would envy.

Assia won the first competition in 1956 for Switzerland, and competed again in 1957 and 1958, when she came in second. “At the age of 87, she decided it was time to return as a contestant and unsuccessfully attempted to represent Switzerland in 2012 and 2013.”

O’Flynn collaborated with everyone from John Cage to Sinéad O’Connor – and even poets: “A further pairing was with the poet Seamus Heaney, who explained his love of O’Flynn’s playing: ‘The pipes call and raise the spirit. They also quieten and open up the daydream part of people.'”

Among many, many other accomplishments, Neidlinger helped Barbara Streisand write songs, served as the principal bassist for the LA Chamber Orchestra, and was the principal bassist for the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra.

Well into his 30s in 1975, he formed a small orchestra of a dozen young musicians that would become the seed for El Sistema, or the System. Four decades later, the government-financed program claims to currently put 1 million Venezuelan children in contact with classical music through a network of hundreds of youth choirs, orchestras and music centers spread across the country.

He haunted flea markets in Oakland and found quilts at the stall of Rosie Lee Tompkins. Eventually, she let on that they were her work. “He began to buy whatever she would sell him while also buying from other members of a large community of African-American quilt makers in the Oakland area. Over 30 years he accrued a collection of around 3,500 quilts, including some 200 by Ms. Tompkins. (With his death, how that collection will be disposed of is not yet known.)”