Category: people

“[He] was working on a new film, The Other Sea, when he was hit by a motorcycle [in Piraeus] and sustained serious head injuries. He died later in hospital.”

Long Yu, music director of the China Philharmonic, was in Manhattan to lead the New York Philharmonic in a Chinese New Year program. He was walking along Columbus Avenue one night this week when a man asked him for a cigarette and then punched him; Long Yu chased his attacker down the street and punched back.

Says the beloved mezzo, now 66: “If somebody asked for a Belle Hélène? Sure! … Maybe something like the Grandmother in A Little Night Music. Not Marcellina in Figaro, not the old Countess in Queen of Spades. I won’t take old-lady roles just to be onstage.”

“Nearly 30 Muslim activists had tried to enter the venue and police had told him large crowds were gathering at city parks to march. The video-link had been organised after Sir Salman withdrew from attending the festival, saying that sources had told him of an assassination threat.”

“As a choreographer, Van Dantzig made more than 50 works, most of them on contemporary themes, although he also produced well-received versions of standard classics … Many of his ballets contain a strong thread of social criticism; he was not afraid to explore difficult subjects” such as homosexuality and environmental pollution.

“Confoundingly plotless but cleverly and energetically edited to render images in often poignant, often uproarious juxtaposition, Mr. Nelson’s movies are varied in tone and subject matter, but they all exhibit the subversive relish of a renegade, quirky wit.” Nelson died of cancer on January 9.

“Ellsworth has been fearless in his commitment to the limitless possibilities of abstraction,” said James Cuno, chief executive and president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles. … “With concentrated imaginative power he has made some of the most beautiful and important paintings of the Modernist era. And he is at the height of his powers, not elegiac but ecstatic, filled with the wonder of seeing the world afresh.”

“Etta James sang professionally nearly her whole life, and could stock a long shelf full of memorable records: gritty blues songs in the 1950s, hits in a broad range of styles in the ’60s. But “At Last,” the soaring ballad she first committed to wax in 1960, was her signature number, the one that followed her like a sweet lost child for a half-century.”

“Opposition from some Indian Muslim groups erupted this month after Mr. Rushdie was invited to attend Asia’s largest literature festival, and senior Muslim leaders called on the government to prevent the 65-year-old author from entering the country.”

None other than Alexander the Great. His preserved body, hijacked by one of his generals, was displayed in a secular shrine just as Lenin’s and Kim’s corpses are now, and for the same purposes.