“Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you there.’ I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors – saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.”
Category: people
Judith Jones, Who Edited Anne Frank, Julia Child, And John Irving, Dead At 93
She launched her career by rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from a reject pile in Paris and insisting to her boss that it must be published in English. While she worked on literary books throughout her decades at Knopf, overseeing works by Irving, Anne Tyler, and many others, she made her biggest impact on American life with cookbooks: she discovered and shepherded Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as well as volumes by the likes of James Beard, Lidia Bastianich, Madhur Jaffrey, and Edna Lewis.
Harold Williams, Founding CEO Of J. Paul Getty Trust, Dead At 89
In his 17 years there, he oversaw the construction of the hilltop Getty Center and led it to become one of the country’s most-visited museums; he also more than tripled the Trust’s endowment.
‘In Search Of Fear’ – Philippe Petit On Being A High-Wire Artist
“I am never afraid on the wire. I am too busy. But … sometimes the sky grows dark around the wire, the wind rises, the cable gets cold, the audience becomes worried. At those moments I hear fear screaming at me. To imagine that one evening I will have to give up the wire, that I will have to say, ‘I was afraid, I met Holy Fear, it invaded me and sucked my blood’ – I, the fragile walker of wires, the tiniest of men, will turn away to hide my tears – and yes, how afraid I am.”
Facial Recognition Software Eliminates Anonymity. Now The Battles For Privacy Regulations
“Facial recognition’s use is increasing. Retailers employ it to identify shoplifters, and bankers want to use it to secure bank accounts at ATMs. The Internet of things—connecting thousands of everyday personal objects from light bulbs to cars—may use an individual’s face to allow access to household devices. Churches already use facial recognition to track attendance at services.”
Laura Zucker Exit Interview: Three Biggest Challenges For The Arts
Laura Zucker is stepping down after 25 years leading the LA County Arts Commision. Three of the biggest issues facing arts administrators? “Ensuring all students everywhere receive a quality arts education. It’s a social justice issue. Valuing diverse cultural traditions equally, really equally, in terms of opportunity and resources. The democratization of culture: creating opportunities for the arts to be accessed by everyone, like breathing.”
Playwright Sam Shepard, 73
One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and “Curse of the Starving Class” and “A Lie of the Mind.”
Jeanne Moreau, The Face Of French New Wave Film, Has Died At 89
She starred in Louis Malle’s The Lovers and then François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and “went on to particularly memorable roles as Marcello Mastroianni’s lonely wife in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic The Night (1961), a controlling servant in Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), a coldhearted seducer in Eva (1962) and a vengeful newly wed-newly widowed in The Bride Wore Black (1968).”
Composer Gilles Tremblay, Whose Music And Teaching Shaped Contemporary Music In Quebec, Has Died At 85
“Tremblay had students discover a universe where history wasn’t presented as a series of ruptures (between different musical eras), but instead presented as a continuous search for a personal and lively expression of music.”
Photo Editor John Morris, Who Created Our Images Of WWII And Vietnam, Has Died At 100
Morris, who edited Robert Capo’s D-Day pictures and got them to Life in time for its first post-D-Day issue, was photo editor of The New York Times for six years during the Vietnam War. “He successfully argued for front-page display of Eddie Adams’s photograph of a Saigon police chief shooting a suspected Vietcong insurgent in the head. It appeared as the lead picture on Feb. 2, 1968, and became one of the most indelible images to emerge from the war.”