Category: people

“[M]usic’s most multi-faceted family dynasty has lost the lynchpin which held it together through good times and bad. Alongside her older sister Anna, McGarrigle recorded a string of highly regarded folk-music albums.” She had a famously unsuccessful marriage to fellow folk singer Loudon Wainwright III; they “had a son, Rufus, and a daughter, Martha, both of whom inherited the family musical bug, albeit in wildly divergent ways.”

Under his direction, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture “became a center of efforts to halt the destruction of everything from centuries-old mansions to modernist masterpieces and even the Central House of Artists, constructed under Leonid Brezhnev in the late Soviet era, a period that has few architectural defenders.”

“A mysterious visitor who each year leaves roses and cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe on the writer’s birthday failed to show early Tuesday, breaking with a ritual that began more than 60 years ago.”

“Jellinek created The Vocal Scene program in 1969, a year after he became WQXR’s music director. The weekly, one-hour show was devoted to opera and great opera singers. The show continued for 36 years, and was syndicated on classical stations around the country.”

“‘My psychology training gave me knowledge of what a victim looks like,’ she explains, and demonstrates by curbing her animated gestures and shrinking into herself, hunching her shoulders, taking up less space in the room, and pulling down the shutters on a face that had previously been so open and quick to smile. Her eyes look dead, her mouth sullen, and she looks ugly, overweight and alienated from a body that only seconds before she had seemed totally at ease with.”

The original Lesbian poet “was massively admired in antiquity,” her works collected into nine papyri at the great Alexandria library. But almost none of it survives: only two complete poems and about 200 fragments. “Sappho has a pretty astonishing reputation, given how little survives. … [And] she has been the subject of some extraordinary fantasy over the years, the starting point for ‘biography’, fiction and sheer titillation.”

He’s “famous for packing more concerts, operas, sponsors’ dinners and general wheeling and dealing into a normal working week than most conductors manage in a year. … ‘I have come to realise that you can’t have it all,’ he intones gravely, as if he has just discovered that the Earth revolves round the Sun.”

She went from two years in a WWII internment camp to sewing outfits for her daughter’s ballet class to making costumes for Washington Ballet and later New York City Ballet. She went on to spend 17 years as the admired, and strict, wardrobe mistress for American Ballet Theatre. “Dancers take it out on the costumes,” she said, “like the baby kicking the dog.”

“As Smith describes him in Just Kids, Mapplethorpe is striking, a ‘Hippie shepherd boy’ with dark curls. She says the pair, two of a kind, lanky outsiders who shared artistic drive and a physical connection, ‘Fulfilled a role for each other.'”

“Ms. Oates seems more shocked than anyone to find herself, nearly 50 years into her writing career, entering a new phase in her life.” Remarried last spring to a Princeton neuroscientist, she says that “her writing habits, hobbies and outlook on life have changed.”