Category: people

“For the first time since its inception almost four decades ago, the Glastonbury festival did not make any money this year. […] ‘Glastonbury costs £22m now, it’s a huge cost,’ [organizer Michael] Eavis recently told BBC 6 Music. ‘The infrastructure, the fencing, the roads, the water and the loos, the marquees, the management, the security and the police, it goes on and on so we do have to sell out in order to make it work.'”

“I used to feel sheepish describing Studs Terkel as one of my favourite American writers, right up there with Roth and Doctorow, Updike and DeLillo. Yes, OK, his oral histories (Working, Race, Coming of Age) ranked alongside the most compelling and illuminating books produced about the American experience – but how much of this was down to the author? … How stupid I was. The genius of Studs Terkel is in his discretion.”

Historians are suggesting that entire chapters in the life of the founder of Protestantism might be re-written following the discovery of household trash at two of his homes. Among the preliminary conclusions is that Luther’s tales of coming from humble circumstances were untrue: his parents were considerably more prosperous than he claimed.

“Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.”

“Without Mr. Terkel’s radio program, which was broadcast daily between 1952 and 1997, and without his books of oral history — including one that won him the Pulitzer Prize — it is difficult to imagine that National Public Radio would have evolved in the way it did, or that Ken Burns could have made oral history into a cinematic tradition.”

“Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel, to give him the full name he rarely used, was born in New York City but came to embody Chicago as no other writer or cultural figure ever has. And few have left such a deep literary imprint. He took the obscure academic exercise known as oral history and turned it into literature.” Terkel died this weekend at the age of 96.

“Reporters and priests and psychologists know it takes a certain kind of personality to get a certain kind of person to speak honestly. Terkel’s gift — displayed on his syndicated radio program for decades, as well as in print — was just this. He perfected a kind of shoe-leather approach to writing the history of America in the last century that coaxed extraordinary tales out of nobodies.”

“Estelle Reiner, who as the wife of Carl Reiner and the mother of Rob Reiner was the matriarch of one of the leading families in American comedy, and who delivered one of the most memorably funny lines in movie history herself, died on Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 94.”

The multiply-honored The Rest Is Noise is one of five finalists for the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award. Ross’s history of classical music in the 20th century has already won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; its author received a MacArthur “genius” grant earlier this year.

In a Halloween package with articles such as “Death, Career Move” and “Ghoulish Gold: Celebrity Body Parts Market,” the Capitalist Tool™ gives its list of the top moneymakers in the Great Beyond. Not surprisingly, Elvis Presley tops the list (John Lennon is only seventh); Albert Einstein is no. 4; newcomers to the list include Heath Ledger (no. 3) and Paul Newman (no. 11).