Category: people

“[His] film career spanned five decades and included leading roles in many movies that endure as icons for millions across the former Soviet Union. […] He also played leading roles in films of the brooding Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, including Mirror and Nostalgia.“

“At Tuesday afternoon’s upfront presentation [of next season’s shows] in New York, Mr. Kimmel, the host of ABC’s late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live, delivered a withering, blistering monologue that took direct aim at ABC, its potential advertisers and his NBC late-night rival, Jay Leno. The assembled advertisers received his performance with a mixture of uneasy laughs and the occasional gasp.”

“He’s ‘all hooded up’: black sweatshirt, black cashmere sweater, and black baseball cap. Of course, there’s really no hiding the hooked nose and green eyes, and one suspects total anonymity is never an actor’s endgame anyway. The question is how much time remains before this particular jig is up.”

Sure, the standard-bearer of Latin American magic realism has, in the retelling, exaggerated mythologized any number of incidents from his own life. But “[j]ust because the miracle didn’t happen as the nifty story says it did doesn’t mean there wasn’t a miracle.”

“Though classical composers aren’t supposed to get any love until they’re old (or dead), the 27-year-old is already collecting commissions at a graybeard’s pace. … In the last year, Muhly composed the soundtrack to The Reader, issued the dizzyingly fine disc Mothertongue, had an evening of works presented by Lincoln Center” and worked on an opera commissioned by the Met. His biggest potential problem might be overexposure.

He was “best known for a sumptuous Violin Concerto he composed for Joshua Bell and a powerfully emotional opera based on William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice … [as well as] his 96-minute, single-movement Odyssey (1987), widely regarded as his magnum opus – and said to be the longest piece of continuous symphonic music ever written.”

“[He] created the role of George in Carlisle Floyd’s opera Of Mice and Men, and was in the original casts of the Broadway shows Once Upon A Mattress, Bells Are Ringing and Fiorello.

“Carol Ann Duffy, appointed this month to replace Andrew Motion, told pupils at a Manchester school today that she had already started work on a poem about recent national events. To laughter and applause, the Glasgow-born poet declaimed: ‘What did we do with the trust of your vote? Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.'”

“Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti, whose bestselling poems and novels helped launch Latin America’s postwar literary boom, has died. … Benedetti’s more than 60 volumes of poems, prose, essays and drama helped secure a prominent place for Latin America in global literature, along with the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.”

“It’s a world of contradictions, Eminland. Feminine and ballsy; genteel and in your face; chaotic and neat; funny and serious. It annoys her when people assume an uncomplicated relationship between her art and her life, though it can sometimes be difficult to divide the two.”