Category: people

Married to Lloyd Bridges for 59 years, she was the mother of Beau and Jeff — and their first drama teacher.

Clemens Hellsberg, president of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra since 1997, “has been a force for change in a body long resistant to it, increasing social awareness and trying to pull the orchestra into the 21st century. The female issue apart, he has fostered the idea of giving back, even making reparations of a sort, as in the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, in 2000.”

“Unable to talk, walk or use his hands, he was confined to a wheelchair – but his intellect was unimpaired. He wrote by using a special keyboard; to help him type, his mother often held his head in her cupped hands while he painstakingly picked out each word, letter by letter, with the aid of a rod, or ‘unicorn stick’, attached to a headband which allowed him slowly to tap out words on a typewriter.”

“The Sudanese author, who had long been pushed as a candidate for the Nobel prize by Sudanese literary groups, was known for his depictions of east-west culture collisions. His 1966 masterpiece The Season of Migration to the North [was] voted one of the 100 best works of fiction in 2002… [and] was declared to be the most important Arabic novel of the 20th Century by the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy in 2001.”

For instance: “I was horrible in that film [Dance With A Stranger], drunk on my own success. I was horrible to Miranda Richardson. But she was very irritating.” Yet, observes Alex Witchel, “Everett has had people staring at him for so much of his life that he seems quite unaffected by it. I couldn’t help thinking that any other man who got these kinds of looks from both men and women would be a complete monster.”

“‘There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life’ on the road and in the monastery, [the Canadian songwriting legend] said. ‘There’s just a sense of purpose’ in which ‘a lot of extraneous material is naturally and necessarily discarded,’ and what is left is a ‘rigorous and severe’ routine in which ‘the capacity to focus becomes much easier.'”

“Gerald E. Myers, a scholarly expert on the philosopher William James who expressed his missionary zeal for modern dance through the highly unusual position of philosopher in residence of the American Dance Festival, died Feb. 11 at his home in New London, Conn.”

“If I were a journalist and had to go see every show and write about it, I’d quit in two seconds. I can go to a show, and then go home and not have to talk about it or think about it. You guys have to write about it. And if you disliked it or felt baffled, that’s torture. Your only resort is to be sarcastic and have fun at the show’s expense.”

“Bond’s relatively low profile outside the profession wasn’t the result of racism, but rather his decision to work at the head of a big corporate firm doing big corporate work. […] This position may not have won him celebrity, but it allowed Bond to show, through tireless work and professional activism, a generation of African-American architects (and architects of African descent worldwide) the way to success in an overwhelmingly white, upper-class profession.”

“A psychopathic Buddhist warrior-king hardly sounds plausible in fiction, let alone in modern history. But the story of Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, an Estonian-raised, ethnically German, tsarist officer, who became the last khan of Mongolia amid the chaos of the Russian civil war, has so many bizarre elements that the reader will soon believe almost anything.”