Category: people

Besides being a famous movie actor, he’s “a political activist: a friend of Representative Dennis Kucinich, … he sings, sort of. He also writes and translates poems, and paints and takes photographs, composes and records music.” And he “owns and runs a small publishing house, Perceval Press.”

“It’s endless amounts of drivel coming out of your mouth. You would find yourself having completely idiotic thoughts in order to have something to write about.” (Besides, “Men own the internet: it’s another world that’s male.”)

“A husband-and-wife art team has launched a project dedicated solely to Yoko Ono. Titled ‘Amerika Wants Yoko,’ the project consists of a video/text/Web component plus a petition ‘that merges the fictional with the real’ … We still can’t get the temple bells out of our heads.”

This year’s recipients range from the sublime to the (purposely) ridiculous and back again: actor Robert De Niro, rocker Bruce Springsteen, jazzman Dave Brubeck, writer-director Mel Brooks and mezzo/soprano Grace Bumbry.

The novelist and Prairie Home Companion host was hospitalized on Labor Day after driving himself to the emergency room. He is now at the Mayo Clinic, where he is said to be “up and moving around and speaking sensibly” and even working on his laptop.

“The former manager of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, yesterday admitted defrauding the composer of more than half a million pounds, apparently to spend on online gambling.”

Fred Mills, who played piccolo trumpet with the world-famous quintet from 1972 to 1996 and made many of the arrangements in the group’s repertoire, died after his car swerved off a highway as he was driving home from the airport after an overseas gig.

“What I like about museums is that people can come in and look around without feeling ­inadequate if they don’t understand everything they see,” Alan Gilbert says. “But classical-music concerts have become identified with a pretentious notion that a listener must understand every note to enjoy the music.”

“Army Archerd, who became an industry institution and beloved figure in his more than half a century at Daily Variety, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. … Archerd was one of the first writers to link AIDS to a celebrity when he wrote a piece detailing, amid denials from the actor’s publicists and managers, that Rock Hudson was undergoing treatment for AIDS.”

“The photographer Annie Leibovitz’s $24 million loan was due Tuesday, but by the end of the work day, it appeared that little had happened between her and her lender.”