Category: people

“The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has accused British authorities of turning their backs on human rights defenders after UK immigration officials rejected his application for a six-month business visa, claiming he had not declared a criminal conviction in his home country.”

“I find a variety store-bar called the Sans-Souci. Inside is a drunk loudmouth of about 50 and a platinum blonde who looks like she’s been thru all the mills and talks tough. The drunk is saying: Well, if you waz ever in a war, you’d see something. She says: I ain’t gettin near no war! I’m not thinkin of wars, I’m thinkin of prisons!”

Tonja Carter, who rediscovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman and sued the local museum over its gift shop’s Mockingbird-themed merchandise, has formed a company to produce the stage adaptation of the novel in the town’s historic courthouse – taking the rights away from the museum, which had presented the play for years.

“Today, Kubota … [is] better remembered for her 1965 performance Vagina Painting, in which Kubota attached a paintbrush to her skirt, squatted, and moved around over a canvas.” More notable was her work, by herself and with husband Nam June Paik, developing the genre of video art in general and combining video and sculpture in particular.

Besides spending four decades as the Boston Symphony’s principal tympanist (Seiji Ozawa called him “the single greatest percussionist anywhere in the world”), he decided in the 1960s to design and build his own sticks, feeling that what was on the market was inadequate for the subtleties of serious symphonic and ensemble music. Little did he know then that he was setting the gold standard for percussionists in all genres all over the world.

“Her career was inescapably defined by her marriage, at the age of 20, to the director Peter Brook, with whom she worked many times in productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Anouilh and Beckett. She was also a vital part of Brook’s experimental, theatrical work in Paris, Persia (as Iran then was) and the villages of Africa. But Parry also had an independent career in films that marked her out as a fine screen actor.”

“Revamped and doubled in size at a cost of 20 million euros ($21.92 million), the museum for the first time displays Wagner’s anti-Semitic screeds, which he published in his youth anonymously, then under his own name before he died in 1883. It also depicts the close ties his widow Cosima, who died in 1930, and his descendants forged with Hitler.”

The woman credited by her publisher with reinventing the previously male-dominated true crime genre by focusing on the victims has died at age 83. Rule wrote more than 30 books, including “The Stranger Beside Me,” which profiled Bundy. Rule and Bundy met in 1971 and their relationship was mostly a grim coincidence, except that he later confessed to eight murders in the state of Washington.

“A noted Chopin interpreter, Moravec focused on the ‘central’ Romantic repertoire as well as music by Czech composers. … [He] enjoyed a loyal following among piano buffs thanks to his recordings and relatively rare concert appearances.” (includes video)

A clip titled “Still Young at Eighty” – part of the enormous trove of historical video that AP is posting on YouTube – “shows the fresh octogenarian in 1961 at his French Riviera home surrounded by a swarm of guests … [and later] enjoying himself at a bullfight. … Fast-forward to 1973, and one can witness the funerary procession following the artist’s death at the age of 91.”