Category: people

“With mild exasperation, Mr. Allen said, ‘This has been documented a million times.’ He and Bergman, he said, ‘have met, we’ve had dinner, we’ve spoken on the phone. I’ve had dinner with him, with Liv Ullmann …” Is it true that, throughout that dinner, the men never spoke?

“Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths.” Lévi-Strauss called those commonalities “structures,” and his insight was the basis of the school of thought known as “structuralism.”

“In what is perhaps the first project of its kind, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has put English-language translations of 902 of Vincent van Gogh’s personal letters on line.” Vangoghletters.org “allows you to search them by keyword, correspondent, city and more.”

He was “renowned for taking large-scale productions to small towns and cities and festooning the shows with headliners like Mae West, Gloria Swanson and Burt Reynolds.”

Dick Cavett, in an epilogue to a series of online columns remembering the late actor, reveals that the widely praised slow-motion actions Burton employed in his 1980 Broadway run of Camelot “were in part bred of pain.” He needed, and subsequently had, a gruesome operation called a laminectomy.

Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, who was “largely unknown before his sudden death at 50, has become one of the most successful writers in the world,” with an estate estimated to exceed £20 million. “But because he and the architect Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of 32 years, never married and he died without making a will, the proceeds have defaulted to his blood relations….”

“His long-prodigious intellect and his perennial ability to combine dramatic political agitation with a deep sense of emotional need has deepened into an acute awareness of human frailty. Many of those close to him say he is now doing his very best work.”

“The dispute — over how to divide foreign royalties — is spelled out in lawsuits in separate Los Angeles courts. In a Superior Court case that could be titled “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” the trust that controls lyricist Ira Gershwin’s estate is suing Warner/Chappell Music, one of the giants of song publishing.”

“As postwar America sprouted suburban malls, urban parks, corporate compounds and federal urban renewal projects, Mr. Halprin helped forge a new, sharper style of landscape architecture, often as dependent on concrete as on vegetation. Places he shaped include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis; a sequence of urban spaces with dazzling fountains in Portland, Ore.; a park atop a freeway in Seattle; and large plazas in Los Angeles.”

“The video nabbed nearly 6 million views on YouTube and prompted the airline to promise it would do better. But when Carroll flew into Denver International Airport on Sunday, he learned that United had lost his bag. What’s worse, Carroll was in Colorado to do a keynote speech for a group of hundreds of customer-service executives.”