Category: people

“With the release of Side Effects earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from filmmaking (at least for the big screen), announced in 2011, finally took effect. Liberation might be a better word, since his recent activities seem to belong to a restless person newly freed from the constraints of his profession, rather than a used-up man at rest.”

“At Fidel’s behest, Guevara founded the I.C.A.I.C., the Cuban Institute for the Arts and Cinematography, which sponsored Cuba’s state-funded, leftist ‘new’ cinema … Paradoxically, Guevara was also the preëminent homosexual in a Communist regime where … homosexuality was brutally suppressed.”

“[The] verse, written in French to her lover Violet Trefusis and translated by Harvey James, the scholar who found it, contrasts daytime strolls through floral meadows with ‘intoxicating night’ when ‘I search on your lip for a madder caress/ I tear secrets from your yielding flesh’.”

“Margot thought that [her husband] would end up as head of the country, and that she would be Queen of Panama. Her role was a romantic one.”

“An Istanbul court on Friday ordered a retrial for a world-renowned pianist, Fazil Say, sentenced earlier this month to 10 months in prison for blasphemy over social media posts.”

“Perhaps we have seen too much, grown too cynical about the inevitable compromises of power. There are no Gandhis, no Lincolns anymore. One man’s hero (Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro) is another’s villain. We no longer easily agree on what it means to be good, or principled, or brave. … Even more strangely, we have become suspicious of those who take a stand against the abuses of power or dogma. It was not always so.”

“Starker had played principal cello in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for five seasons during the 1950s and had been a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music since 1958. His cello seminars arttracted students from all over the world.”

“He recorded his first album in 1981, and went on to make more than 30 others, divided between solo projects and collaborations with friends from around the world. In the process he introduced western audiences to an extraordinary variety of music.”

“The book, first published in 1976, grew out of a writing course that Mr. Zinsser taught for several years at Yale University. And he is still teaching at 90, holding one-on-one counseling sessions for accomplished and aspiring writers at a round wooden table close to those bookshelves. The only difference is that he can no longer see.”

“Begum was one of the first female playback singers in Hindi cinema — singers who are heard but not seen on screen, with actresses lip-syncing to the recorded voices.”