Category: people

She was “an internationally known scholar and curator who in almost 60 years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized some of its best-known exhibitions, scoured the world for treasure and coaxed rarely seen artworks from places as far flung as the Vatican and as close at hand as a New Jersey abbey.” She retired only at the end of 2008.

“The host of the World at Six and later World Report had a deep, smooth voice, an authoritative delivery and an insistence on correct pronunciation that made him a mentor to both fledgling broadcasters and the grown-ups.”

“I’m very nice until I’m crossed. I only get really annoyed when the situation demands it. But then my response is less anger than couth. Anger diminishes your ability to be objective.”

Audio of the actor’s rant on the set of Terminator: Salvation last summer has been flying all over the blogosphere this week. Within 24 hours, “Urban Dictionary had coined the term ‘bale-out,’ Jimmy Kimmel had taped a parody version for his show, and there appeared a club remix of the rant by L.A. knob-twiddler RevoLucian.” (How long until we get the ringtone?)

The Berlin-based Israeli pianist and conductor, a longtime campaigner for reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbors, wants to see “a new ‘Marshall plan’ under German leadership to rebuild the smashed infrastructure of the Gaza Strip.”

After beginning his career as a percussion soloist who played Cage and Stockhausen, he came to prominence as “a sculptor who worked with nonmusical sound instead of traditional materials such as clay or steel.” (One of his installations can still be heard on a traffic island in Times Square.)

“[A]n influential alto saxophonist and arranger who toured with rhythm and blues innovator Ray Charles and jazz organist Jimmy McGriff,… Mr. Crawford was best known for the plaintive, bluesy quality he brought to the alto saxophone.”

“As a contributor, he was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: ‘Which one sounds better, do you think?'”

“Although he was a German émigré, Mr. Foss was, from the start of his composing career, considered an important voice in the burgeoning world of American composition, along with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter and Leonard Bernstein.”

Updike was “America’s last true man of letters, an all-purpose writer and a custodian of literary culture. He wrote more, and in more different genres — stories, novels, poems, essays, reviews, occasional journalism — than anyone since Henry James, and it’s hard to imagine how he can be replaced. Who has the energy, or the eyeballs, for that much reading?”