Category: people

“In the 1960s he transformed Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, from a colonial backwater into one of the most beautiful and innovative of south-east Asian cities. Drawing inspiration from the ancient bas-reliefs and designs of the Angkor Wat temple complex, Vann’s style, which came to be known as New Khmer architecture, blended Khmer tradition with the modernist principles he had mastered during studies in Paris.”

Kirill Serebrennikov, chief of Moscow’s Gogol Center and best-known in the West as director of the Bolshoi’s off-again/on-again ballet Nureyev, “was placed under house arrest in August on charges of embezzling 68 million rubles ($1.1 million) in government funds in a case widely seen as political. … The judge denied Serebrennikov’s request to be released for five days to complete the filming of a movie about rock legend Viktor Tsoi and to visit the Bolshoi Theater Dec. 9-10. The director will remain under house arrest until Jan. 19 next year.”

“The Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky set fire to an entrance of Bank of France in Paris this weekend. The artist also condemned bankers as the new monarchs in his latest act of political performance art in France, the country that granted him political asylum in May. Pavlensky came to worldwide attention for his previous performances in Moscow, such as nailing his scrotum to the ground in Red Square and setting alight an entrance of the Federal Security Service building.”

His six-decade career included plenty of television and film work (he played Mozart’s father in Amadeus) as well as an astounding number of stage appearances. He was an early member of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company, won a Tony as the scheming father in A Moon for the Misbegotten, gave nearly 1,800 performances as 17th-century writer John Aubrey in the one-man show Brief Lives and hundreds more as the president in Mister Lincoln. He holds the world record for the number of different characters voiced in audiobooks – 224, in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Iceseries, the source for Game of Thrones.

“The oldest Gen Z’ers are turning 18 this year, and we millennials, long used to being the cool kids, can already feel your cultural power pushing us to the side. While big and deeply uncool companies once paid $20,000 an hour to learn how millennials think, they’ve now moved on to shelling out cash for Gen Z experts, frequently paying teens themselves to advise on what’s cool. Gen Z has already been declared “the next big retail disruptor,” and consumer goods companies are already getting anxious about whether you’ll buy their shampoo.”

Bach was her religion and her guide. When she “left the Nazi labour camp at Terezín in a truck bound for Auschwitz, she wrote down a passage from one of JS Bach’s English Suites ‘as a sort of talisman, because I didn’t know what was awaiting us.’ She came to think of his music as being ‘above human suffering.'”

The poet, who wrote “pretty” and orderly poems that didn’t always suit reviewers’ tastes, also wrote lyrics for musicals and for opera, including Bernstein’s Candide. “‘I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy,’ he said in an interview with The Paris Review, ‘that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good.'”

Earlier this year, Notaro spoke out against fellow comedian Louis CK. Now, she says, “I feel like there is hope. I feel like it’s cracking the glass.”

The sculptor, who placed a massive bear outside the Colorado Convention Center in 2005, said in 2013, “Public art gives you a chance to embrace peace and inquisitiveness. … You become a part of it, and you’re changed.”

Yuval Sharon is pretty busy, but iIn 2020, when he is free of all future work commitments, he will take a six-month sabbatical in Japan, most likely in Kyoto. He’s never been there, but the country’s music, culture, theater and literature have long appealed to him. ‘Self-reflection is crucial to artistic work,’ he said. ‘It’s so easy to get caught up in the machine of producing. The second one project is done, you’re on to the next.'”