Category: people

“I go to extraordinary lengths not to hear what people are saying about me. But that is itself a form of, well, it’s a form of self-protection because I know that all I have to do is hear one phrase—somebody will report to me all innocently, oh, somebody said such-and-such about me or about something I wrote, like I did this piece for the New Yorker a year-and-a-half ago where I made some, I thought, sensible points about the reality of climate change and the unavoidability of radical climate change, and people said, ‘Oh God, somebody called you a birdbrain’.”

“Zelda Fichandler dedicated her early career to the establishment of America’s resident theater movement. When she co-founded Arena Stage, there were few non-commercial theaters in the United States and fewer theaters committed to providing a full range of world-class drama to its community with a resident company of professional actors.”

The meteoric rise of the author of The Selling of the President 1968, the split with his family (“I get off the plane after doing Merv Griffin and the Tonight Show and have to leave for Paris and your mother tells me I need to take out the trash”), the intermittent happy visits, and the long, depressive, alcohol-fueled decline.

She began her film career at age 11 with a bit part in Chaplin’s Modern Times and went on to appear as a perky sweetheart alongside stars from Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra to Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell and Nancy Reagan. After MGM’s musicals went out of fashion, she developed a career as a character actress in such series as As the World Turns, Ryan’s Hope, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Yves Bonnefoy “never ceased insisting that happiness and fulfilment were not to be sought in some other world, but rather in the here and now of our earthly condition and in the simple realities that all people share. His poetic project was profoundly spiritual, but it was atheistic.”

“Zelda Fichandler, a seminal figure in the regional theater movement who led Arena Stage in Washington for 41 years, producing more than 400 shows and directing more than 50 for a company that helped spur the growth of professional theater around the country and became its centerpiece in the nation’s capital, died on Friday at her home in Washington.”

Captain Kirk and “Star Trek” has been the springboard for everything subsequent to that. Of course, one has no idea what would have happened. That’s one of the most formless of questions, “What would have happened?” because you don’t know.

“We learned today that the aria ‘Nessum dorma’ performed by Luciano Pavarotti is being used (on) the Donald Trump campaign soundtrack,” wrote Nicoletta Mantovani, his widow, in a letter cosigned by Pavarotti’s three daughters. “We remind you that the values of brotherhood and solidarity that Luciano Pavarotti upheld throughout his artistic career are incompatible with the world vision of the candidate Donald Trump.”

Hall sees one positive aspect to his Alzheimer’s. It’s caused him to assemble the archive that now surrounds him at home. The word ‘legend’ comes from the Latin for ‘to read,’ but it also means ‘to select, to gather together.’ Hall has been gathering this rich chronology, piecing together the meanings and connections in his life and career. “So that’s what I have been doing,” he says. “I live in a world where I am constantly with my past.”

An American conceptual artist got the family of Luis Barragán to give her his ashes, which she had carbonized into a 2.2-carat diamond – all as part of a gambit to free up access to Barragán’s all-too-closely-held archives in Switzerland.