Category: people

“Though Jonas Mekas, a prolific director and avant-garde film archivist, became the better-known sibling, Adolfas Mekas made a handful of films that endure as avant-garde landmarks. The best known of them, Hallelujah the Hills, … was among the critical and popular hits of the inaugural New York Film Festival in 1963.”

“Before he became an international literary sensation last year at age 100, Hans Keilson was better known as a psychoanalyst and an expert in childhood trauma.”

“Did [Stefani] Germanotta know that she was not the first Lady Gaga – that she was staking claim to a title previously held by a Babylonian slave owner, an Irish-born French noblewoman, and a fictional habitué of the Roaring Twenties London party scene?”

“A singer whose voice charmed millions of listeners even if they didn’t know his name, … Tozzi claimed a wide repertoire, from the title role in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov … Tozzi was also very comfortably a crossover artist before that term existed,” known for his performances in the musicals South Pacific and The Most Happy Fella.

“Before his rants about corruption made him persona non grata with the Communist Party, before he started agitating for the rights of children and evicted tenants, before he denounced the Beijing Olympics, there were the cats.”

“Unlike high-concept conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, the interpretively less obtrusive Levine emerges as someone who doesn’t conjure music, as many conductors would like us to believe, but releases it by allowing everyone around him to operate with an ease and comfort.”

“German police believe that American actor, comedian and collector Steve Martin played a minor role as a victim in what may be Germany’s biggest-ever art forgery scandal.”

“For those admirers of the actress who feared she would spend her career playing buttoned-up and increasingly remote English women of a certain class the sudden broadening of range” – women coming undone in the French films I’ve Loved You So Long and Leaving – “has been startling.”

“Lately there has been a flurry of rumours online that some of Mao’s writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary, Hu Qiaomu, and others. They say two reports detailing the ghostwriters’ activities were filed with the Central Committee in 1993 and in 1995.”

“If Noah had run into the modern nanny state, or nimby, or a few of the other obstacles that Johan Huibers has been facing, the animal kingdom might look a lot different today.”