Category: people

In secondary school, “he played cricket and rugby for the first teams; won medals for swimming and boxing … played golf and tennis, ran, cycled and motorcycled. He loved diving from high rocks. He followed many of these sports with interest, even passion throughout his life.”

“Tony Scott, who died on Sunday at 68, apparently from suicide, was one of the most influential film directors of the past 25 years, if also one of the most consistently and egregiously underloved by critics.”

“The way she delivered the lines made it clear that although she was making a joke about herself, she was not making a joke of herself. In fact, the joke was the joke – it was funny to see her fretting about her looks, or her cooking, or her marriage, because it was so clear that she did not care, and neither, by the way, should you.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning who worked at the Chicago Daily News (1947-67) and The New York Times(1967-91), who was also “an accomplished pianist and classical guitarist, reviewed operas, concerts and recitals for the daily newspaper and wrote longer-form essays on a wide range of cultural subjects.”

Brewster Kahle “took the library of libraries — the internet — and made a couple of copies of it, and keeps making copies. One he keeps in servers in San Francisco, the other in mirror servers in Alexandria, where the world’s most famous library burned 2,000 years ago. (His data survived the Egyptian revolution unscathed.)”

“Several witnesses told police they saw Scott get out of his Toyota Prius, which was parked on the bridge, about 12:30 p.m. Then he scaled an 8- to 10-foot fence and jumped off without any hesitation, law enforcement sources said.’

“Mr. Freeman’s playing was characterized by emotional fire (he was so intense he once bit his mouthpiece clean off); a huge sound (this, he said, took root in strip clubs where the band played from behind a curtain); and singular musical ideas.”

Playing at SXSW can change a band’s career, and Brent Grulke was in charge of the bookings. “Not recommended for making an impression — though each had been tried at least once — was bombarding Mr. Grulke’s office with kegs of beer, smoked salmon, assorted strippers and a toilet bowl filled with Tootsie Rolls.”

“Flights of fancy were Harrison’s stock in trade. A coal-fired flying boat? A submarine to Mars? No problem. He imagined taking a time machine to the future and finding no one there. In his 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was translated to the screen as Soylent Green in 1973, he painted a dystopian nightmare of too many people scrambling for too few resources.”

“Mr. Charlip’s half-century of work cut across a wide spectrum of art forms, aesthetic registers and audiences. He drew no particular distinctions among them. All were forms of an ‘internal dance,’ as he called it, that he liked to stage in his own and other people’s minds.”