Category: people

“What’s more shameful is that Hearts With A Mission is so fearful of being perceived as endorsing — what?” the Medford Mail Tribune wrote in an editorial. “The existence of gay men? The performance of choral music by gay men in a church sanctuary to benefit a charitable organization?”

Irina Dvorovenko retired from ABT in 2013, and since then she’s had roles in two major dramatic television series. She tells Gia Kourlas how it happened.

Mob wives, CB radio buffs and AIDS victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Mr. Demme (pronounced DEM-ee) plucked his subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work — including fiction films and documentaries, dramas and comedies, original scripts, adaptations and remakes — that resists easy characterization.

Sure, there will be campfires and s’mores, but there will also be burlesque lessons, Hairspray karaoke, scotch and cigars, and Bloody Mary Bingo – not to mention a movie marathon, a costume contest, and the national treasure‘s own one-man show. Also arts-and-crafts and archery, which seem pretty kinky in this context.

“Where [Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan] pursued enlightenment in hallucinogenic experience, Zen argued for its equal availability in the brain-racking rigors of Reason with a capital R. Years after its publication, it continues to be invoked by famous people when asked to name a book that affected them most deeply.”

“I saw O’Keeffe rise unsteadily to one knee, and then to her feet. She looked shaken. ‘Well,’ she said, with a thin smile, ‘It seems we’re not having chicken.'” Calvin Tomkins remembers a visit to the artist at her summer home in New Mexico, the Ghost Ranch, in 1973.

“The feeling that every advertiser wants to evoke in millennials is nostalgia; that warm, comforting sensation that one experiences when recollecting the past. People usually feel nostalgic for their own past, commonly referred to as autobiographical nostalgia. But oddly enough, they can also feel nostalgia for time periods when they weren’t alive; perhaps their parents played old music to them when they were young, and now, they associate those sensory details with positive memories.”

Among the many roles that won her acclaim at the Met, Covent Garden, and two dozen other international opera houses were the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier, Idamante in Mozart’s Idomeneo, and, in contemporary opera, Kitty Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic and Sister Helen Préjean in Dead Man Walking.

“Over the course of his career, the aristocrat of American architects, who turns 100 on April 26, has drawn on a dazzling range of influences, from Chinese gardens to ancient Colorado cliff dwellings to the fountain in a Cairo mosque. He blended the austere modernism of the Bauhaus with opulent Beaux-Arts classicism, technological daredevilry with reverence for precedent and a minute study of the past.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o didn’t think he’d ever become a writer, much less a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist with his work translated into more than 60 languages. Now, he’s fighting for recognition for his native language, Gĩkũyũ. He says, “No language is ever marginal to the community that created it. Languages are like musical instruments. You don’t say, let there be a few global instruments, or let there be only one type of voice all singers can sing.”