Category: people

“Pat Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy. It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact.”

“Ms. Wersba began writing in the 1960s, and her work reflected the era’s new realism in literature for younger readers with stories no longer confined to intact nuclear families and sanitized goings-on like prom nights. Some of her frank themes generated criticism; others generated praise.”

The first thing to say is that Lloyd Webber is a total theatre animal. He has a nose for what will work on a stage, whether it be an odd collection of TS Eliot poems (Cats), a mad 19th-century melodrama (The Phantom of the Opera) or the inspirational anarchy of a scruffy teacher (School of Rock). Sometimes, as with the superfluous Stephen Ward (about the man at the centre of the Profumo scandal), the nose seems badly blocked. But reading Lloyd Webber’s recently published mammoth memoir, Unmasked, you realise where this instinct comes from.

After debuting at age 19 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and later conducting under three different titles (including acting music director for one season) at the Chicago Symphony, he became the first music director of what was then called the Florida Gulf Coast Symphony (formed from the merger of ensembles in Tampa and St. Petersburg). He then molded it – sometimes with harsh criticism of musicians – into an accomplished professional orchestra.

“Avruch played Bozo the Clown [on the eponymous children’s television show] from 1959 to 1970, a clown character particularly popular in the U.S. in the 1960s because of widespread franchising in television. Avruch became the first nationally-syndicated Bozo.”

“On magazine covers and in newspaper pages, Mr. Grossman chronicled and caricatured a half-century’s worth of politicians, pop-culture figures and social issues. He had a knack for causing a stir with his colorful images, whether they be one-shot covers for magazines like Rolling Stone and Time or serial comic strips for The New York Observer or New York magazine.” One of his most famous images was a National Lampoon cover showing Richard Nixon with a breathtakingly long Pinocchio nose; another was on the poster for the greatest film comedy of all time.

“Ms. Westphal’s canvases – which included quilts, kimonos, dresses and baskets – reflected her life and her world travels, and were distinguished by her pioneering use of heat-dying processes to transfer photocopied images onto fabrics.”

Carlo Parodi, founder of the Giacomo Casanova Foundation (and, not incidentally, CEO of the winery Casanova Prosecco), plans to site the museum in six rooms at the Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in Venice – and also hopes to create a temporary pop-up museum that would travel to such cities as Paris, Tokyo, New York, Beijing, and London.

“The fact that more than 100 journalists were murdered is, in [large] part, to be blamed on the freedom of the press today,” the Nobel-winning Peruvian author told a radio interviewer, “which allows journalists to say things that were not permitted previously. Narcotics trafficking plays an absolutely central part in all of this.” Mexicans, as one might expect, are not happy about this.

Nasrallah was a journalist, teacher, lecturer and novelist who advocated for women’s rights and wrote about refugees and war in Lebanon. Her books “recount the emptiness left by immigration, the women left behind by men seeking a better life beyond war-torn Lebanon, the parents abandoned by children desperate to fulfill the dreams they had been denied.”