Category: people

During the conflict between Russia and Georgia a few months back, conductor Valery Gergiev, a native of the breakaway region at the heart of the conflict, was outspoken in his support of Russia, even as public sentiment in the West generally went Georgia’s way. And Gergiev isn’t backing down now. “He says he is vindicated by accounts by independent monitors… suggesting that Georgia was not acting defensively and had launched an indiscriminate attack.”

“Rosella Hightower, an Oklahoma-born ballerina who became a leading figure in the European dance world and founded a major ballet school in France, has died. She was 88… Hightower, of Choctaw descent, was one of five American Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma who have received special honors in the state.”

“Eduardo Diaz, executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, was appointed yesterday to lead the Smithsonian Latino Center. Diaz replaces Pilar O’Leary, who resigned in February after an internal investigation showed that she violated ethics policies by trying to steer a contract to a friend and abusing her expense account.”

“The process is learning a lot of dialogue and jumping up and down on the furniture.” How did he prepare for his role in Body of Lies (besides gaining a lot of weight)? “Preparation? I picked up a bag, I put a pair of underwear in it and I got on a plane. There you go – preparation done.” And by the way, “I can assure you that I’m not an angry man.”

“At the insistence of his family and personal physician, Merle Haggard had a cancerous growth removed from his lung Monday at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital [in California].” A growth had been found in the lung last May, but the country music legend had resisted treatment, saying that he doesn’t trust hospitals.

Celebrated cartoonist Art Spiegelman has a new book out, “and what Spiegelman the cartoonist wants to show us — in this installment of a lifelong self-examination on the page — is what it’s like ‘to think between words and pictures, and have the feelings come out someplace between the two.'”

“As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.”

“Ray Ellis, the versatile pop music arranger who wrote the charts for hits by the Four Lads, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis, has died. He was 85.”

“Veteran Bollywood filmmaker and producer BR Chopra has died in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay)at the age of 94… He became a household name with such films as Naya Daur (1957), Humraz (1967) and Insaf Ka Tarazu (1980).”

“He’s a highly intellectual, extremely confident, smoothly articulate politician who grew up without a father, then wrote a best-selling book about it.” That would be Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome who lost his race for prime minister in this year’s Italian elections. The former editor of the newspaper L’Unità, he has written a dozen books of nonfiction; his first novel has just been published in English as The Discovery of Dawn.