Category: people

With past colleagues backing her up (that story here), the ousted head of the Recording Academy says that she didn’t want to be the story as the 2020 Grammys get underway – but she couldn’t sit back and let others control the narrative. In her first few months at the Academy, her 44-page complaint alleges, “she alleged discovering voting irregularities, financial mismanagement, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among board members and nomination review committees, and criticized what she called ‘exorbitant’ legal fees paid to a few law firms with close ties to the academy.” – Los Angeles Times

His theory of disruptive innovation made him a key influence on Silicon Valley powerhouses like Netflix and Intel and twice earned him the title of the world’s most influential living management thinker, died Jan. 23 at age 67. – Deseret News

“While best known for his anchor work [as co-founder of what is now The PBS NewsHour], which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.” – The New York Times

“My desire to give evolved from going to a lot of museums, art galleries and live performances,” he says. “It took years to develop my taste, but once I was on the ground, seeing what these entities could do, it was easy to want to step up and help. I actually wonder why more people don’t do it because I can’t imagine anything more satisfying.” – ArtsATL

“The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more ‘serious’ entertainment — ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python‘s first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.” – Vulture

“I don’t play music and I don’t paint, but I always thought architecture was an art and I try to practice it that way. Architecture is intuitive. It’s humanly expressive. You’re putting yourself on the line. You start out not being understood, and you keep going because you have to. And it’s harder to explain.” – New York Magazine

Erik Lee Preminger (his father was film director Otto Preminger) started traveling with his mother while still an infant, got his first jobs with her show before he was old enough to go to school, and was her dresser by the time he was a teenager. Of course he has stories — like the time when Gypsy was driving her first Rolls-Royce through Switzerland in winter and got stuck in the snow: “She tried to dig us out using a bidet she had stolen from a hotel. It was quite an adventure.” – American Theatre

Anthony Lane: “Fellini is the great divider. “La Dolce Vita” was the film most loved by Roger Ebert, for whom it was transformed with every viewing, whereas Pauline Kael likened Fellini’s efforts to “poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and then becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.” – The New Yorker

“While officially working on a fax machine project, Mr. Starkweather began to experiment in his spare time with copy machines and digital technology, in effect trying to merge the two. … [His] supervisor at Xerox discouraged his experiments, calling lasers ‘toys’ … [and later] and threatened to lay off Mr. Starkweather’s entire staff.” Now, says the company’s chief technology officer, “The laser printer is arguably the greatest invention made in a Xerox research center.” – The Washington Post

“After huge success with Python in the 1970s and early ’80s, including [directing and acting in] the feature films Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, Jones went on to work on a huge variety of projects. With [Michael] Palin, he created the successful TV series Ripping Yarns and forged a post-Python directorial career with Personal Services, Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows. He made a series of TV documentaries (specialising in medieval history), wrote nearly 20 children’s books, and contributed a string of comment pieces for the Guardian and Observer denouncing the ‘war on terror’.” – The Guardian