Category: people

“Argentine songwriter and singer Facundo Cabral, an icon of Latin American folk and protest music, was shot to death early Saturday by unknown gunmen who intercepted his car in Guatemala City and pumped it full of bullets.”

Cuba is opening up to the outside world. But you can’t rush the process if you want to retain a country’s authenticity and culture. Look at islands such as Puerto Rico; I don’t know where its culture ends and American culture begins. … I want to make Cuba an artistic destination not just the place people visit to see the home of Che Guevara.”

“[He] was a Czech violinist who carried the mantle of his grandfather, the composer Josef Suk, and his great-grandfather, Antonin Dvorak.”

Yoani Sanchez’s “sketches of daily life in Cuba – a dreary, enervating routine of food shortages, transportation troubles and narrowed opportunity” – have earned her an admiring following abroad and the enmity of the Castro government. She is barred from leaving the island; her blog posts are smuggled out on flash drives.

“His work was in many ways infinitely more basic, even primitive, in its emphasis on direct old-fashioned mark making, except that his feverish scribbles and calligraphic scrawls made that process seem new and electric. And part of that electricity came from his ecstatic response to history, literature and other art, and the raw emotionalism that his mark making conveyed.”

“[His] decline began at 18, with a wound suffered on the Italian front in World War I. He took over 200 pieces of shrapnel in his body and endured a massive concussion that rearranged his brain. The concussive wounds continued at an alarming rate. … His biographers count six major brain traumas, with others suspected.”

The critic Robert Hughes called him “the Third Man, a shadowy figure, beside that vivid duumvirate of his friends Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.”

“Although she made her first film aged 21, she was better known as a television actress, appearing in such classic BBC dramas as The Pallisers (1974) and the 1978 adaptation of Rebecca.” Her most famous film role was probably Babs Milligan in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

There’s been “a recent spate of virulent online and media attacks on Shaw’s reputation as a progressive, if eccentric, humanitarian. His critics tar him as a totalitarian supporter of Hitler and Stalin who wanted to send society’s weakest members to the gulag or to develop a ‘humane gas’ to kill them.” (And who started all this? Glenn Beck.)

“Cast as impressionable children in Hollywood’s biggest fantasy franchise, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and their many young co-stars have maneuvered through 11 years of fame — and the temptations it brings — without any whispers of Lindsay Lohan-style meltdowns that can derail child actors.”