Category: people

“To working musicians whose sense of form and craft were deeply ingrained—and whose personal artistry and place in the profession were built on improvising on the harmonies of songs—Coleman, for all his lyrical inventiveness and rhythmic drive, was a threat. Jazz could suddenly dispense with their techniques—and when Coleman became an instant succès de scandale, battle lines and generational lines were drawn.”

“Lee had a reputation for being proud and humorless, and he certainly wasn’t easy. But everyone I’ve met who knew him well adored him, insisting that once you got past the prickliness, he was kind, loyal, and immensely endearing —one of the true good guys.”

“HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” was only the most famous of the front page come-ons that Vinnie Musetto produced for the love-to-hate-it tabloid. He also wrote, among many others, the deathless gems “500LB SEX MANIAC GOES FREE” and “GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS.”

For the past 17 years Cameron, 61, lived and worked in New York City. He was program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation since 2006 and executive director of the Theatre Communications Group, a professional organization, for eight years before that.

“Mr. Lee was 35 when his breakthrough film, Terence Fisher’s British horror movie “The Curse of Frankenstein,” was released in 1957. He played the creature. But it was a year later, when he played the title role in Fisher’s “Dracula,” that his cinematic identity became forever associated with Bram Stoker’s noble, ravenous vampire, who in Mr. Lee’s characterization exuded a certain lascivious sex appeal.”

“Mr. Coleman widened the options in jazz and helped change its course. Partly through his example in the late 1950s and early ’60s, jazz became less beholden to the rules of harmony and rhythm, and gained more distance from the American songbook repertoire. His own music, then and later, became a new form of highly informed folk song: deceptively simple melodies for small groups with an intuitive, collective language, and a strategy for playing without preconceived chord sequences.”

When Stephen Jay Carlton, director of the Peninsula Symphony in California was hired in 2009 “at an annual salary of $75,000 plus full medical benefits, the balance sheet for the Symphony at the fiscal year ending June 2009 showed about $500,000 in endowment funds with close to $10,000 in the checking account. On Sept. 20, 2013, when the alleged fraud began to unravel, there was $1,400 in endowment funds and $0 in the checking account.”

“Mr. Vaculik was a key figure in the Czechoslovak underground publishing world in the 1970s and ’80s, helping to give voice to other dissident writers in the country who were banned by the government. He himself was censored for more than two decades, but still managed to write a series of influential articles, books and novels” – as well as the famous Prague Spring manifesto Two Thousand Words.

“The Star found Solomon had been brokering the sale of paintings and masks owned by a flamboyant Toronto-area art collector to rich and famous buyers. Solomon, in at least one case, took commissions in excess of $300,000 for several pieces of art and did not disclose to the buyer that he was being paid fees for introducing buyer and seller.”