Category: people

“I’m singing on the mall for the people,” she said. “I don’t have a dog in this fight — I’m just a singer, and it’s a welcome concert for the people on the mall.”

“What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? And what do we really know about him now? We may vaguely know that he was the first essayist, that he retreated from the world into a tower on the family estate to think and reflect, and that he wrote about cannibals (for them) and about cruelty (against it). He was considered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, no less, to be the first social scientist, and a pioneer of relativism—he thought that those cannibals were just as virtuous as the Europeans they offended, that customs vary equably from place to place.

When she was pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia, she got a Guggenheim Fellowship to study obeah in Jamaica and (later) vodou in Haiti. Her goal was to write what she called “the proper voodoo book,” raising the understanding of Afro-Caribbean religion beyond the “black magic” and “devil worship” (her words) caricatures prevalent in the 1930s.

“From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of West Side Story, to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of La Cage Aux Folles in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever.”

“Mr. Greco mixed talent, tenacity and a hot temper in a career that lasted more than 80 years. He was an oft-married ladies’ man and almost but not quite a member of the Rat Pack, the high-living gang of entertainers surrounding Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin that embodied the extravagance of Las Vegas in its glory days.”

“From clues to his cancer hidden in Blackstar‘s artwork to his mortal fear of Tina Turner, some astounding new Bowie facts have come to light over the last year.”

“Lucas’ personal collection of fine and popular art, including ephemera related to his “Star Wars” franchise, will fill a futuristic-looking new museum planned for L.A.’s Exposition Park, which beat out a competing design for Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The rivalry had pitted the two cities in the competition not only for Lucas’ collection and the tourism it will bring, but also for the thousands of jobs that backers said the project will create.”

“This is a man who has always been obsessed with the entertainment industry—an aspiring A-lister, reality-TV show host, and Hollywood hanger-on. To mock the entertainment industry as out of touch with the will of the people, while praising a man who cared more about dating Salma Hayek than he’ll ever care about the average American, shows a fundamental lack of awareness.”

The longtime Village Voice writer earned this glorious paragraph in his NYT obit: “The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz aficionado, a mystery writer, an eyewitness to history, an educational reformer, a political agitator, a foe of censors, a social critic. He was, indeed, like the jazz he loved — given to improvisations and permutations, a composer-performer who lived comfortably with his contradictions, though adversaries called him shallow and unscrupulous, and even his admirers sometimes found him infuriating, unrealistic and stubborn.”

The film Loving, about the court decision that struck down anti-micegenation laws in the United States, stars Ethiopian actor Ruth Negga, who says, “People like Richard and Mildred often are one of many untold stories. And we have a duty to revisit these stories and share them.”