Category: people

She “led a life almost as picaresque and surreal as her art; born in Britain, she eloped with Max Ernst, hung out with Picasso and Dali, fled the Nazis, escaped from a Spanish psychiatric hospital and later settled in Mexico, where she built a reputation as one of the most original and visionary British artists and writers of the 20th century.”

“In the month before his death, on May 5, the Tony Award-winning writer and director … gave his blessing to a plan for a new film version of Gypsy, starring Barbra Streisand, and also finished a full-length play as well as his third memoir, Laurents’s agent and several associates said this week.”

“For most people, being late to a language trend isn’t a problem. But [Tom] Dalzell, a 59-year-old union leader by day and slang expert after hours, is now in the process of updating the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. And as informal language evolves faster than ever, Mr. Dalzell is finding it trickier to keep up.”

“Catán’s sudden death last month from an apparent heart attack has the left the Los Angeles music community, and especially Los Angeles Opera, bereft. His fourth opera, “Il Postino,” opened the company’s 25th season in the fall. It was a hit, the least troubled and most successful of the company’s premieres.”

“After a 1967 visit to guest conduct, Tung took the stand on a permanent basis from 1968 to 1996. At that time, the orchestra didn’t have a permanent venue, let alone a concert hall. With his wife, singer Margot Walk, Tung raised the money to build a concert hall in Teton Village on land donated by the Jackson Hole Ski Area.”

“In the late 1970s he began coaxing distressed, disjointed humanoid forms from large, vertical clay columns. Colored with powdered oxides and fired in a kiln, they presented potent images of broken, struggling humanity.”

The playwright of Art and God of Carnage finds television interviews “degrading. They never give you time to talk. I hesitate. I reflect. I contradict myself. Whenever I’ve done it, I was very, very bad. A catastrophe. … After I write, I have nothing to say. The commentary afterwards is superfluous. I write. And that’s enough.”

“Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist whose arrest has prompted an international outcry, is being charged with evading ‘huge amounts’ of taxes.” The brief news release “was the first official disclosure of the charges being leveled against the 54-year-old artist, who was arrested without warning at Beijing’s international airport April 3.”

“After a concert late one Saturday night in March 1966 Bob Dylan, while on tour in the US, boarded his private plane in Lincoln, Nebraska bound for Denver with his friend Robert Shelton. Over the next two hours Shelton taped an interview with Dylan which he later described as a ‘kaleidoscopic monologue’.”

“In the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Kastle enjoyed a modest reputation as a composer of melodic, romantic operas and as a musical director of works for the stage. … [He] unexpectedly found a niche in film history as the writer and director of the low-budget 1969 crime-thriller film The Honeymoon Killers.”