Category: people

“Who knew the director of Pink Flamingos, Serial Mom and Hairspray was such a nut about the holidays? Filmmaker John Waters reads an excerpt from his essay, “Why I Love Christmas” and explains why it’s essential to send holiday cards and how to escape post-Christmas depression.”

A “story in snapshots” (of prose) of the man “generally regarded as the greatest photographer in the history of Chicago” – the man who took the “black turtleneck” portrait series of legendary actors and whose posters for the Chicago International Film Festival were notorious at first and later renowned.

“Sir Michael Levey, who died on Sunday aged 81, was a distinguished art historian who rose through the ranks of the National Gallery to become its director.”

“As we mourn the passing of one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, let’s not forget that the field of human rights has also lost a great defender of freedom of expression. During my time at PEN, Harold Pinter proved indispensable in helping to raise the profile of numerous, lesser well-known, writers in trouble for their work. He never let them down.”

“Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack.”

“Dale Wasserman, an autodidact who became the playwright responsible for two Broadway hits of the 1960s, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Man of La Mancha,’ died on Sunday at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., near Phoenix.”

“Language, which is so often a weapon in his plays, is also a reliable shield, ‘a constant stratagem to cover nakedness,’ as the playwright himself once described it. David Hare was right to pay Pinter the ultimate Auden compliment of having ‘cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly’.”

“Sex symbols always confront the world’s morality, but few went to such lengths as Eartha Kitt… Whether asking Santa Claus for a yacht (with an obvious payback in mind) in her hit ‘Santa Baby’ or seductively plying a man young enough to be her grandson with champagne during her nightclub act, Kitt presented herself with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that defied the judgments of others.”

“Sweaty palms, nervous laughter, a Brooklyn accent, panic-induced silences. These were just a few of the image blemishes addressed by Dorothy Sarnoff, an opera singer and Broadway star who had a much bigger second career as one of the first, and most influential, image consultants.”

“But note a curious fact about his career: It maps perfectly onto the 25-year bull market in stocks that, like Cruise, is starting to show its age. Nascent in the early ’80s, emergent in 1983, dominant in the ’90s, suspiciously resilient in the ’00s, and, starting in 2005, increasingly prone to alarming meltdowns. For both Cruise and the Dow Jones, more and more leverage is required for less and less performance.”