Category: people

“Lt. Col. Omsin Sukkanka, an investigator with the Children and Women’s Protection Center in Pattaya, [Thailand,] said the police opened an investigation in April after they were approached by the boy, his mother and members of a nongovernmental organization. … If convicted, Mr. Pletnev would face 4 to 20 years in prison.”

“[O]ne part of the [late Pop artist’s] archive, which was purchased from the Larry Rivers Foundation for an undisclosed price, includes films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts. One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.”

He was “a third-generation Los Angeles architect known for playful yet functional modern designs who co-founded the city’s Architecture and Design Museum. … Two of his more prominent public buildings were tributes to 1950s jet-age architecture – the In-N-Out Burger on Gayley Avenue in Westwood that riffed on the company’s boomerang-shaped logo and a gas station at Slauson and La Brea avenues with a swooping canopy inspired by the nearby freeway.”

“For years, he was the reigning bass at the Metropolitan Opera, and a regular fixture at London’s Covent Garden and many other houses around the world,” where “he was one of the few Giovannis who could both sing with the sensuous, seductive ease the role requires and look the part of the irresistible seducer. He owned the role for decades….”

“Famed Russian conductor [and pianist] Mikhail Pletnev has been released on bail after Thai police searched his home in Thailand as part of a probe into paedophilia, the Russian consulate said Tuesday. Pletnev, artistic director of the acclaimed Russian National Orchestra, was released on bail after the search in the Thai resort of Pattaya.”

At the climax of an interview with Terry Gross about the unique qualities of Dickinson’s verse – such as the fact that you can sing almost all of it to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” – Collins reads a poem of his own in which he imagines his own “wild nights” with her.

The artistic director of the Ebony Theatre in Los Angeles, “Hicks made history with the Denver Center Theatre Company in 2009, when he became the first director anywhere to helm August Wilson’s entire 10-play, 10-decade exploration of the black experience in America for the same theater company.”

Q: Which artists do you most admire?

A: Good ones.

Q: Would you like to give any examples?

A: Nope. They know who they are.

“The appointment last week of 82-year-old William Stanley Merwin as the U.S. poet laureate both honors his 58-year contribution to American arts and letters and returns the largely ceremonial post to the realm of the traditional white male poet at a time when the field is growing more diverse, like the nation.”

Liverpool-born Dame Beryl was nominated five times for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread novel award twice.