Category: people

“At age 11, she wrote in her journal, … ‘I made good resolutions, and felt better in my heart. If I only kept all I make, I should be the best girl in the world. But I don’t, and so am very bad.’ Decades later, she returned to the journal and attached a note to the entry: ‘Poor little sinner! She says the same at fifty’.”

“On Wednesday … under pressure from human rights activists and with the acquiescence of [Federico] García Lorca’s family, Spanish authorities began exhuming six mass graves in Alfacar. The opening of García Lorca’s grave is the latest and most high profile effort by Spain to come to terms with its ugly past.”

“[He] photographed Harlem during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s with an insider’s view of the subway stations, restaurants, apartments and especially the people who lived [there] … He also was well known for his candid shots of jazz musicians – many of them taken in smoky clubs using only available light.”

Liv Ullmann: “We sat down at the table [in Bergman’s New York hotel suite] – and this is the honest to God truth, Ingrid was sitting there, I was sitting there, Ingmar there, and Woody Allen there – and they did not talk. They just looked at each other, almost lovingly.”

“Michael Philippi, a gifted lighting designer whose roots went to the very core of the Chicago theater and who collaborated with Goodman artistic director Robert Falls on his most important projects, collapsed and died Tuesday afternoon on a sidewalk in downtown Chicago.”

Says the mezzo (who is promoting her new album of arias written for 18th-century eunuchs) of The King of Pop: “He was an amazing, amazing musician and talent and genius really of music. He was really also a victim of this, in a way. Mutilating himself – what he did for his body, for the skin, for the nose.”

The late-life meeting between estranged geniuses W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in Alan Bennett’s new play, “The Habit of Art,” never took place in real life. Nonetheless, “Bennett’s brilliant conjecture … leads us straight to the heart of one of the most gripping and symbolic relationships in 20th-century culture.”

“He left his mark at all scales, from the crafting of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square in the 1960s to the transformation of the 52-acre base of Yosemite Falls that was completed in 2005.” Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, called him “the single most influential landscape architect of the postwar years.”

“The belief among some in his field that opportunities automatically get narrower after such candor is to him mythology. ‘I’m living proof the opposite is true. You get more self-confidence. You don’t have that bit of dishonesty,’ he says, adding that acting ‘is about disguise. But it’s not about lying.'”

“Whitman is an involuntary spokes-celebrity here, and perhaps you deem this ad a desecration of all he stood for. I can’t say I blame you. But were you forced to choose a clothing line for our favorite barbaric yawper to rep, you might choose this one.”