Category: people

He first made his mark in the art cinema that developed in India in the 1980s; later, he moved regularly back and forth between popular and indie movies in India (acting in at least three different languages) and film and television in the U.S. and Great Britain (The Jewel in the Crown, East Is East, City of Joy, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Charlie Wilson’s War).

“Throughout his life, Cage remained a cultural omnivore. Interwoven into Selected Letters are comments that reveal how his life and art were informed by his study of the I Ching and Zen Buddhism, his burgeoning interest in mushrooms (making him an amateur mycologist), and his embrace of a macrobiotic diet. He aspired to have “all distinctions between art and life removed.” His blending of Eastern and Western artistic traditions placed him at the center of the American avant-garde of the 1950s and ’60s.”

Sister Frances Carr, a resident of the sole remaining Shaker community, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, passed on Monday at age 89. “Carr apparently didn’t like when people called her, 60-year-old [Brother Arnold] Hadd and 78-year-old Sister June Carpenter the ‘last’ Shakers – she was convinced others would eventually convert to the religious sect, something Hadd still hopes for.”

“[He] led many of the world’s leading orchestras during a remarkable 70-year career that lasted through October when, visibly frail, he gave an emotional farewell concert with the Vienna Symphony, of which he was honorary conductor. At the end of the concert, he blew kisses to the musicians.”

“Barry Jenkins is compact, bald, bespectacled and bookishly handsome. Tarell Alvin McCraney is much taller, with an immaculately groomed beard and stylish green Adidas sneakers … Mr. Jenkins is straight; Mr. McCraney said he considers himself ‘gay-identified.’ Yet their childhood experiences were so similar, their lives so parallel, that you could mix up many facts of their biographies and they’d still be true.”

“The “Star Wars” creator is financing the project himself. He plans to spend more than $1 billion to build the museum, endow it and provide a trove of initial artworks valued at over $400 million. Together with Chinese architect Ma Yansong, Lucas has proposed a sleek, futuristic design looks like a cross between the Guggenheim and a galactic starfighter. The museum’s bold design and concept make clear that the 72-year-old filmmaker sees it as part of his legacy, and he is increasingly impatient to break ground.”

“To French readers, Mr. Déon was a complicated and contrarian figure: a political reactionary whose work evolved from experimentalism to more traditional forms, and an enthusiastic champion of young renegade writers.” Almost as renegade, perhaps, he was a member of the august Académie Française who made his home in the far west of Ireland.

“He was a pioneer in the Canadian film industry,” said TIFF director and CEO Piers Handling, in a press release announcing Marshall’s death. “His vision of creating a public festival that would bring the world to Toronto through the transformative power of cinema stands today as one of his most significant legacies.”

Susan Sontag once described Berger as peerless in his ability to make “attentiveness to the sensual world” meet “imperatives of conscience”. Jarvis Cocker, to mark a recent book of essays about Berger, said: “There are a few authors that can change the way you look at the world through their writing and John Berger is one of them.”

“If you, in 2012, watched Adam Driver on Girls – an unhinged, distasteful walking id, as magnetic as he was bizarre – and said to yourself, ‘This guy is going to be the cast’s biggest star,’ you should probably start betting on horses. … Especially considering that the only thing more obvious than Driver’s gifts might be his presumed limitations – that topographic map of a face, that woodwind voice – the actor’s ascent raises the question of how exactly he became Hollywood’s go-to young actor of excellence.”