Category: people

“[She was] a dissatisfied daughter of the sexual revolution whose best-selling books” – My Secret Garden and My Mother/My Self – “aimed to liberate women from embarrassment over their erotic fantasies and from fraught relationships with their mothers.”

“The great Polish composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin had a morbid fear of premature burial. ‘The earth is suffocating,’ he told one of his sisters as he lay on his death bed in 1849. ‘Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive.’ … His heart was removed and later stored in a jar of cognac, then interred in a church pillar in Poland. Now scientists have taken advantage of Chopin’s morbid desire.”

“[Her] causes ranged from people with AIDS to the Museum of Modern Art and the 92nd Street Y” – not to mention the school of the arts at NYU and the Central Park Zoo.

It’s maddening at this particular moment to read the ways various media men have written about Gerwig as an actor. “Lady Bird, a remarkably self-assured debut, feels like a rebuke. Or at least an assertion of artistic intent. At 34, and moving, finally, behind the camera, Gerwig is exiting the phase of her life where she’ll be asked to represent a mysterious, fascinating rising generation.”

A bike tangles with a pedestrian – and the pedestrian, the food writer, gets a concussion. “Given that I’d never lost consciousness or suffered any memory impairment, I had unilaterally decided that the injury would be nothing more than a story with which to regale friends and acquaintances at future cocktail parties. Apparently, this memo never made it to certain parts of my cranium.”

The man knew how to create a look, a sound, a … well, everything: “With each album he released, Prince transformed his visual identity. The pompadoured rock god of Purple Rain, for example, was followed by the beatific flower child of Around the World in a Day and the louche sensualist of Parade. Each record carefully maintained its own distinctive color scheme, most obviously with Purple Rain, but also with the peach-and-black palette of Sign o’ the Times and the black, white and red of Lovesexy.”

“Luther physically embodied the Reformation. His massive size mirrored the bulky Saxon princes who protected him from Rome. Excommunicated, the rebellious priest married a former nun; he fathered children and celebrated family life as the antithesis of monasticism. He liked to eat, drink beer, and have sex, even as sin was ever present. … Luther’s physical monumentality became a positive view of the (male) body, a reflection of a positive image of Lutheranism, portraying an earthy and heroic wrestler against the Pope and Satan.”

People of a certain age will remember her from Hollywood Squares; those slightly older know her from The Dick van Dyke Show, where she played a TV writer who kept right up with her male colleagues. But she had her own 15-minute national radio show when she was a toddler and did her first national vaudeville tour at 7 – and she’s still doing voice-over work today. Also, as she tells Rachel Symes, she told off a Hollywood sexual harasser back in the 1950s (and suffered some consequences).

A summer trip to the UK as a teenager and visits to Shakespeare’s birthplace convinced Osama bin Laden that the west was “decadent”, the late leader of al-Qaida and architect of the 9/11 attacks wrote in his personal journal shortly before he was killed by US special forces in 2011.

“[He] served the Cunningham company and school in various capacities for a half-century. … He began collecting dance ephemera in the late 1950s and was considered the first in-house archivist of an American dance company, a post he held officially from 1976 until the Cunningham troupe disbanded in 2012 after Cunningham died, in 2009.”