Category: people

“George Weissman, who helped transform Philip Morris from a midlevel tobacco company to a diversified conglomerate known for contributions to the arts, and who then led Lincoln Center for nearly a decade,” has died. Weissman pushed Philip Morris “to become a major donor to arts groups, particularly experimental undertakings,” and “installed a branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art on the ground floor of the company’s new Park Avenue headquarters.”

Mark Swed: “I have many times quoted from the program notes of Michael Steinberg, and I expect I will do so many more times. They include some of the finest writing on music that I know. … Not only writers came under the spell of his words, and of the man, but also musicians, composers and administrators. And, most important of all, audiences.”

“[He] clearly tapped a rich vein of reader interest with his racy and sometimes graphic tales of affluent, ambitious, powerful black men – athletes, businessmen, lawyers and the like – who nonetheless struggled with their attraction to both men and women. His books married the superficial glamour of jet-setting potboilers with an emotional candor that shed light on a segment of society that had received little attention: black men on the down low.”

That would be the prolific Scottish writer-director-producer Armando Ianucci, creator of the new political satire In the Loop (and its BBC-TV progenitor, The Thick of It) and the man who blazed a path for, among others, Jon Stewart, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Colbert, Sacha Baron Cohen and Wag the Dog.

The Daily Texan has unearthed a profile of The Quotable One which the late newscaster wrote while he was a student at the University of Texas. Among Miss Stein’s observations: “A writer isn’t anything but contemporary. The trouble is that the people are living Twentieth Century and thinking Nineteenth Century. … [At a school Stein had recently visited,] the girls of from fourteen to seventeen understood [her writing] perfectly, but their teachers did not.”

“It is a pilgrimage site for visitors from all over the world, now standing on a road renamed Keats Grove in his honour, and was voted the top poetry landmark in Britain by members of the Poetry Society. It reopens to the public on Friday after major restoration work backed by a £424,000 Heritage Lottery grant, which has recreated the rooms the poet knew – some charming, some hideous.”

“[T]he Ojai-based master potter, educator and symbol of the midcentury California studio crafts movement … along with his late wife, Vivika, reformulated a lost-to-the-ages Chinese glaze that made him a multimillionaire.”

“In a note on his website, the 37-year-old singer said: ‘I am very happy to tell you that my [vocal cord] surgery went very well, and that everything looks even better than we could have hoped. I have begun the re-training process, and am in very good spirits.'”

“Sitting last week in the London house in which she grew up surrounded by shelves lined with thousands of her father’s books, Boudicca took a deep breath and began to explain why she had supported her parents; why she had backed not just her mother, who had only a few, painful months left, but also her father, who may have lived for a decade or more.”