Category: people

“Three years ago, conservationists managed to save the mighty chestnut tree which offered Anne Frank comfort during her 25 months of hiding in an Amsterdam attic during World War II. On Monday, however, the tree succumbed to disease and toppled in a storm.”

“[An] exhibition at London’s Handel House Museum [is] marking the 40th anniversary of Hendrix’s death. Composer George Frideric Handel lived and died in 25 Brook Street while, 200 years later, Hendrix lived and died next door in number 23, now used as administrative offices for the museum.”

A famed actor as well as an innovative and controversial director, “Schlingensief [staged] numerous movies, plays and operas, including an internationally recognized” – not to say notorious – “production of Parsifal for the Wagner summer festival in the southern German city of Bayreuth in 2004.”

“When Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence decided to have his badly damaged eye removed from its socket, he chose to replace it not with a prosthetic, but with a wireless camera. The decision, he says, was easy.”

“Smith’s story serves as an antidote to the trend of the last few decades in which artists have become arguably more proficient in the technical aspects of their disciplines through formalized training but often at the expense of a natural connection to a thriving cultural community.”

“Lincoln, who died on Aug. 14 at age 80, owed her status as a great artist not just to her musical gifts, but also to a bold originality that accommodated the classical values of Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan while foreshadowing the modernist impulses of Diana Krall, Dianne Reeves and Cassandra Wilson.”

“Winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, Morgan was known for the range and variety of his writing.”

“A television interviewer once asked Baldwin to describe the challenges he faced starting his career as ‘a black, impoverished homosexual,’ to which Baldwin laughed and replied: ‘I thought I’d hit the jackpot’.”

To judge from her handwritten drafts of Persuasion, “Austen hardly punctuates at all, so what you get is a much more urgent form of language, which becomes more restrained when it is edited. … There tends to be an awful lot of clauses and sub-clauses. There is the odd comma, but they aren’t always in the most rational places. There are no paragraphs.”

“Everybody in the theater who’d heard about John Logan’s script for the new HBO series The Miraculous Year knew that the main character, a brilliant but self-destructive Broadway composer-lyricist named Terry Segal, was based on Stephen Sondheim. Everybody, that is, but the great man himself.”