Category: people

“His lifelong infatuation with the czarist past, the art and architecture of the Orthodox Church and the mystical conception of Holy Russia found an eager audience among audiences disillusioned with Communism and distraught by Russia’s loss of standing in the world. Liberals, on the other hand, regarded Mr. Glazunov as an obscurantist, xenophobe and anti-Semite, in thrall to the darkest forces in Russian history. He preferred to think of himself as a patriot.”

“Joey Alexander has the world at his feet: his first two albums have attracted Grammy nominations; his playing partners and musical mentors are some of the biggest names in jazz; and he has recently relocated from his native Bali in Indonesia to an apartment in downtown Manhattan.”

“From the basement of his house in Hackney, an artsy borough in London’s East End, [Jon] Underwood perpetuated a movement that spread to more than a dozen countries with more than 1,000 gatherings. … These were not grief support groups or end-of-life planning sessions, but rather casual forums for people who wanted to bat around” – over tea and cake, a key element of the project – “philosophical thoughts. What is death like? Why do we fear it? How do our views of death inform the way we live?

“Trading bombast for rigorous research, he wrote acclaimed biographies of American innovators as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Morse, John Cage, Harry Houdini and [Cotton] Mather himself, in a research-intensive process that Dr. Silverman described as ‘wrestling with an angel.'”

More than a thousand men, women, and children alike dressed up as the popular Mexican artist to celebrate her 110th birthday, setting what appears to be a Guinness World Record for the most Fridas in one place.

“[She] was among the last political prisoners of the Brezhnev era, and among the first to be released under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.” (He freed her immediately before the 1986 Reykjavik summit.) “Her three years in [a labor] camp … nearly killed her, but resulted in an acclaimed memoir, Grey Is the Colour of Hope (1988), and more than 250 poems that bore witness to an undiminished optimism.”

“In an acting career that shifted between Europe and Hollywood and peaked in the 1960s, Ms. Martinelli won the Silver Bear for best actress at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival for the Italian comedy Donatella. Directors she worked for included Orson Welles (The Trial), Roger Vadim (Blood and Roses) and Elio Petri (The 10th Victim).” Yet the role for which she’s best remembered in the U.S. was as the love interest of Kirk Douglas’s character in The Indian Hunter.

“What does it mean to raise money for individual artists at a time when our largest governing body says that thing has no value whatsoever? For me, the main goal is to make the organization sustainable. I want to know that if the NEA is cut today, tomorrow, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, that United States Artists can still be here, still doing the same work.”

The actor, beloved for his portrayal of the character Lafayette, died from complications of heart failure, according to his manager. Ellis was talented: “On True Blood, Lafayette was a short order cook at Merlotte’s. In the books, he was killed off, but because Ellis made him such an enjoyable character, he survived in the series.”

“[His] brooding figures graced exhibits from Paris to New York during a career as a painter, sculptor, writer, draftsman and engraver that spanned more than seven decades. Cultivating the image of a philandering ‘tomcat'” – he claimed to have had hundreds of partners, once included his semen in an exhibition, and offered to impregnate any woman who wanted to have his baby – “Cuevas drew on the work of Francisco de Goya and Pablo Picasso, and his depictions of dark, deformed, animal-like figures were a sharp break with the socialist-tinged muralism long popular in Mexico.”