Category: people

“Grand Central Terminal, the main building on Ellis Island and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden – all among the greatest New York City landmarks – look better today than they have since their earliest years. Many hands were responsible. John Belle was the common denominator. Mr. Belle, the retired founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, … died last week at 84.”

“[Domingos] Montagner played the leading role in Velho Chico, a soap opera named after the São Francisco river where he died. The 54-year-old had gone for a swim with an actress after a day of shooting in the north-eastern state of Sergipe. … The actress, Camila Pitanga, cried for help but local people failed to act initially as they believed the drowning was a scene in the soap opera.”

“Davis became known as “the sorcerer” because of his alchemical flair for transforming the humblest of materials—a Tin Pan Alley song, a simple bass line, even another musician’s wrong note—into an exalted form of expression. Shy to the point of taciturnity, he rarely spoke to his sidemen, except to offer the occasional cryptic instruction—“play [guitar] like you don’t know how to play the guitar,” he told the guitarist John McLaughlin—yet he knew how to inspire their best playing.”

“Even at his ripe age — he is now 87 — Habermas’s passion remains undiminished. As a public intellectual, however, he may seem an unlikely hero. We live in an age when what some of us still fondly call ‘the public sphere’ has grown thick with personalities who prefer the TED Talk to the printed word and the tweet to the rigors of rational argument. For Habermas, it’s clear that without the constant exercise of public deliberation, democracy will collapse, and this means that citizens must be ready to submit their arguments to the acid bath of rational criticism.”

“By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. “

“Mr. Buchla was an instrument builder, musician and composer. He conceived his instruments, including a voltage-controlled modular synthesizer, as tools for creating previously unheard sounds and gave them names like the Music Easel, Thunder or simply the Buchla Box.”

“She fully embraced audiences’ reverence for the musical, frequently appearing at singalong performances at the Hollywood Bowl. ‘I tell people that they should consider singalong ‘Sound Of Music’ like going to a therapist,’ she said before a 2005 appearance.”

“The annual Praemium Imperiale recognizes career achievements in five categories: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater or film.”

“Kinsella began writing ‘Shoeless Joe’ as a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City near where the story was set. The story, which was published in 1982, follows a farmer who is coaxed in a dream to build a ballpark in a corn field and is visited by the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the White Sox star who was banned from baseball over the 1919 World Series betting scandal.”