Category: people

“Boylemania has become about so much more than an underdog singing a good show tune. Rather, Ms Boyle has been turned into an SIE (Shared International Experience) whose angelic voice and against-the-odds international fame apparently reveal that feminism is alive and well, beauty is overrated, the recession ain’t that bad, cynicism is dying, and God still loves us. You think I’m exaggerating?”

A 27-year-old manager at the Bank of Alameda (California) has reportedly confessed to embezzling more than $650,000 from an Individual Retirement Account kept by the renowned soprano at the bank.

“Stefan Brecht, whose father was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and who added to the family’s theatrical legacy by fastidiously chronicling the rise of avant-garde theater, died on April 13 in Manhattan. … For decades, Mr. Brecht worked on a series of books, collectively known as ‘The Original Theater of the City of New York: From the Mid-Sixties to the Mid-Seventies,’ that described, in great detail, the work of the city’s seminal experimental theater artists.”

“Alan Ayckbourn has written more than 70 plays, which makes him something like the Joyce Carol Oates of British theater. ‘If you didn’t write so much, they’d realize you were quite good,’ the director Peter Hall once told him wryly. But productivity has never really hurt Mr. Ayckbourn, who turned 70 on Easter Sunday and whose works are performed, seemingly continuously, across Britain and beyond.”

The Cincinnati Symphony music director, who was found asleep at the wheel while stopped in the middle of an intersection late one night last month, pled no contest to the charge. A judge “sentenced [him] to six months probation, suspended his driver’s license for six months and ordered the conductor to spend three days in a driver’s intervention program.”

“‘My whole existence has been the merest Romance,’ Poe wrote, the year before his death, ‘in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.’ This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. {…] ‘I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,’ Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.)”

Jeremy Strick, new director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, is still carrying a balance on a loan of more than $500,000 from his previous employer, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “A written contract required him to repay any balance when his employment ended.” But when he left MOCA, those terms were changed, he said, so that “he owes the money when he sells a house that the loan helped him buy.”

“Tharon Musser, who said she ‘painted with light’ and proved it with her lighting designs for more than 150 Broadway shows — including ‘Follies,’ ‘A Chorus Line’ and ‘Dreamgirls,’ all of which won her Tonys in the 1970s and ’80s — died Sunday at her home in Newtown, Conn.”

“Perhaps searching for a Ballardian cinema in ordinary terms is obtuse: we should be looking instead at CCTV footage taken from any shopping-mall security camera, or the Big Brother daytime live feed, or one of the direct-impact 9/11 World Trade Centre plane-crash shots – avidly consumed on YouTube, but now considered too brutal for television. Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror.” And his influence spread far beyond literature.

“If J.G. Ballard — the visionary British novelist who died this morning of prostate cancer at age 78 — ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That’s true enough, I suppose, in a certain small-bore manner, but it’s ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against.”