Category: people

“It was a ragged little affair, taking place at first dark, after an afternoon of beer and hot dogs and participatory firecrackers and bottle rockets, ending with a bonfire of cleared brush. People liked it. I resolved to top it the next year, and that became a rule: ever bigger, ever better. (The final show, in 2015, was colossal. Ask anybody.)”

“Adil Faraj bucked conservative Iraqi culture to teach himself how to dance via YouTube and Skype, inspired by a Michael Jackson performance he watched on DVD. He danced to videos in his cramped family home — hiding from a society scornful of the art form and from the chaos that engulfed Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Then, he was discovered by the Manhattan-based Battery Dance Company and brought to Jordan to train professionally and perform for the first time on stage.”

“By 1978, when his collected poems were published, Mr. Bonnefoy’s position as France’s most important poet, and one if its most influential men of letters, was secure.” In addition, “over the years, he translated 15 of [Shakespeare’s] plays, all of the sonnets, and wrote extensively on Shakespeare’s poetics. His translations of Yeats are equally well known in France.”

Bernard Imbert, 53 and for ten years a resident soloist at the Opéra de Nice, was taking part in a concert of Offenbach arias and ensembles at an open-air theatre near Cannes on Saturday when he passed out onstage. No cause of death has yet been determined. (in French; Google Translate version here)

“Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-born nurse who cared for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War in the 19th Century. … The statue was created by sculptor Martin Jennings and stands opposite the Houses of Parliament in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital.”

Baritone Vasyl Slipak, 41, “had left his native Ukraine in the 1990s to settle in France, where he regularly sang at the Paris Opera. But after war erupted in 2014, he decided to return home and join a volunteer battalion to fight Russian-backed separatists on the country’s eastern front.”

“When a cartoon in which [Atena Farghadani] depicted government officials as farm animals appeared on [Facebook] in 2014, it led to her receiving a prison sentence of more than 12 years. During her ordeal Farghadani was beaten, strip-searched, went on hunger strike and – despite being only 29 – suffered a heart attack.”

“Kiarostami, whose subtly enigmatic films” – among them A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Certified Copy – “play brilliantly with audiences’ preconceptions, was considered one of the greatest directors in contemporary world cinema.”

“In the 1980s, Peter Schjeldahl and his wife purchased many acres of mountainous land in the town of Bovina, a little more than three hours north of Midtown Manhattan. For more than a quarter-century, the property served as the site of a Fourth of July celebration that has maintained a singular place in New York’s social history, drawing friends, and friends of friends, from the city — artists, writers, musicians, academics, gallery owners, movie stars — and a considerable segment of the surrounding population of Delaware County.”

“Aherne created some of British comedy’s best-loved characters: lazy daughter Denise in The Royle Family, acerbic chat show host Mrs Merton – which first aired on BBC2 in 1995 – and memorable Fast Show characters such as the Checkout Girl and Poula Fisch, a TV weather girl in an unnamed country where the sun was always ‘scorchio!'”