Category: people

“Maybe the time for nevermore is finally here. For the second year in a row, the mysterious Poe Toaster failed to show up at his the writer’s Baltimore grave Wednesday morning”, Poe’s birthday. “Last year’s no-show was the first since at least 1949.”

“The Suzuki Association of the Americas estimates that perhaps 100,000 students annually are taught with Suzuki techniques, although the true number is impossible to define. Suzuki practitioners agree that it brought more kids into music training.”

“People who play chamber music, in the classical world, are serious. People who put self-memorializing granite slabs in their back yards are not. And that’s fine with Tzimon Barto.”

“[The] wittily satirical man of letters … drew upon his Anglo-American background to write bittersweet essays, criticism, memoirs and fiction about cultural life on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Theatre consultant David Taylor, who served as global head of theatre consulting for Arup, has been found dead in Taiwan. Local press has reported the death as “apparent suicide” after he was found dead outside a five-star hotel in Taipei, having fallen from the top of the 14-storey building.

“[He] shepherded songs from a monstrously talented stable of young writers to the top of the pop charts in the 1960s, launched the career of the Monkees and then became a familiar face to millions of rock fans as impresario of his late-night music TV series in the 1970s.”

“An auction on EBay that offered to reveal the identity of the elusive British street artist known as Banksy to the highest bidder has been removed from the website just one day before it was scheduled to close. But was the whole thing just a hoax? Knowing how Banksy operates, the answer is a definite maybe.”

“Her international reputation as an actor depended heavily on the hit films she made in the 1960s, including Tom Jones (1963) and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress). But, even when her movie career waned, she worked ceaselessly in theatre, often appearing in pioneering fringe productions.”

“[For] decades [she] read soothingly to Americans as they toiled at the gym, behind the wheel or over housework … Mrs. Gibson was the founder of, and chief reader for, Audio Book Contractors, which she ran for nearly three decades from a specially built recording studio in the basement of her home.”

“‘In terms of scope of ambition, Mr. Linney may be our bravest living playwright,’ Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote in 1996, ‘running from rural dramas about hillbilly homicides to lush meditations on Lord Byron’s ghost and Frederick the Great’.”