Category: people

“The Moscow-born poet published his first poems in 1958 and became one of the iconic artists of the Thaw, the brief era of liberalism ushered in by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev after the death of dictator Joseph Stalin. In the 1960s, Voznesensky was one of several Soviet poets who gave poetry readings in stadiums and concert halls before huge crowds of transfixed listeners….”

“Although they spent time apart, Ginsberg and Orlovsky’s relationship endured for more than 30 years. … Orlovsky taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974.”

“The Minnesota State Patrol says 79-year-old Mark P. Malkovich III of Portsmouth, R.I., was killed Sunday in an accident on Interstate 35 near North Branch, which is about 40 miles north of Minneapolis.”

“Ray Charles is a music publisher’s dream. Not only did he write songs that stand the test of time, but his interpretations of other songwriters’ tunes could turn them into royalty-generating goldmines.”

“What is less known about Hopper was that in addition to being a visual artist, he was an experienced theater artist — at least in the early part of his career.”

Now nearly 82, and one of the outstanding musicians of our time, he looks back on his search for perfection as something that has brought him “great despair, self-pity and unhappiness allied with commensurate ecstasies”.

“By now, of course, everybody on the planet should realize that Justin Bieber is the Canadian-born, platinum-selling, swaggering 16-year-old with a baby face and a Beatles-redux hairstyle. And yet Biebermania was concocted – it is the product of a carefully engineered marketing campaign that plucked a downy kid from small-town Ontario and relocated him to a hip-hop hotbed in the Deep South.”

“In its broad detail, the episode has been known about for some time, but confidential British documents declassified on Friday offered new insight into the extent of Dame Margot Fonteyn’s efforts to support her husband, the lawyer, diplomat and journalist Roberto Arias, in a seaborne — and ultimately bungled — attempt to overthrow the Panamanian government with the help of 125 Cuban revolutionaries.”

Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of Britain’s most famous ballerinas, was “up to her neck” in a coup plot in Central America – along with Fidel Castro, according to government files released today at the National Archives.

“As South Africa prepares to welcome the world to the greatest show on turf, Times writers talk to the country’s stars of tomorrow – in everything but football.”