Category: people

The 82-year-old titan of Latin American magical realism has published almost nothing since his 2004 novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and he has said that he wrote not a single line in all of 2005. Now his agent and his biographer say they think Gabo has wrapped up his career.

George Frideric Handel was well-known among his circle in London for suffering bouts of palsy, severe melancholy, gout, “Paraletick Disorder,” impaired vision and/or extreme ill temper. (Not to mention his notorious girth.) Was he simply a stressed-out, overfed, high-strung genius? One historian is suggesting another factor: lead poisoning.

“One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, ‘I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!'”

“Without Maurice Jarre, who died last week at 84, who would David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia be? Peter O’Toole’s deliquescent eyes, shimmering in the desert light, would have been little more than a silent mirage. Jarre’s 1962 film score, which won an Academy Award, is a reminder that in the movies there is no character and no landscape unless there is a musical soundscape too.”

Her “unlikely seven-week stint as the oldest contestant ever on [Dancing with the Stars] is just part of what the veteran actress calls her ‘master plan’ for an octogenarian career comeback … [T]he rollout also includes a one-woman show that Leachman has been performing in theaters across the country and on cruise ships, and a new autobiography.”

“[U]nlike so many of today’s thundering but essentially interchangeable big-orchestra-plus-electronics scores, the voice of a Maurice Jarre film was always uniquely his own. Jarre, who died Saturday at age 84, suggested exotic locales with instruments unique to the region being portrayed. He subtly conveyed changes in tone, depending on the story being told — and, yes, he often came up with a memorable melody that kept people humming as they left the theater. “

“Frances Blaisdell, a flutist who played her way into what was then the male world of orchestral music, becoming one of the early women to play a woodwind instrument with the New York Philharmonic, died on March 11 in Portola Valley, Calif.” Chamber Music magazine wrote in 1992: “Every woman flute player in every major American orchestra, every little girl who p[l]ays the flute in a school band, has Frances Blaisdell to thank. She was first.”

“Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. … In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans ‘felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.'”