Category: people

The former Miramax master was a king. But “today’s Harvey has lost his way, not to mention his magic touch. Since he cut his ties with Disney, leaving his Miramax label behind and starting the Weinstein Co. with his brother Bob at the end of 2005, he seems to have lost his passion for making the kind of classy fare that earned him an unprecedented string of 11 consecutive Oscar best picture nominations.”

“Mr. Ho was a durable spokesman for the image of Hawaii as a tourist playground. His rise as a popular singer dovetailed with a visitor boom that followed statehood in 1959 and the advent of affordable air travel. For 40 years, his name was synonymous with Pacific Island leisure, as was “Tiny Bubbles,” his signature hit, which helped turn him into a national figure.”

While almost every aspect of George Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s lives “has been scrutinized — their friends, lovers, favorite drugs, hangouts, hat sizes and nicknames (Picasso called Braque Wilbourg, after Wilbur Wright) — one mutual fascination has been largely overlooked: Both men were crazy about the movies.”

“Roscoe Lee Browne, a stage, film and television actor known for his rich voice, died early yesterday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. … Mr. Browne came to acting somewhat late, after gaining fame as a track star in the early 1950s. But he soon became part of a vanguard of leading black actors in the traditionally white New York theater world.”

“Edgar B. Young, the behind-the-scenes administrator who smoothed the way for the construction of Lincoln Center in the 1960s by juggling the demands of government agencies, donors, architects and artistic organizations, died on April 6 at his home in Medford, N.J.”

“Sol LeWitt, the master of Conceptual and Minimal art who died this week in New York at age 78, was one of the few artists from those movements who caught on fairly early and strongly in Chicago. His ascetic geometrical sculptures and wall drawings could hardly have been expected to overcome a local taste for figurative fantasy art, but overcome it in large measure they did, and he exhibited here more frequently and in greater depth than just about any other East Coast artist who achieved prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”

In an unusually public spat, two prominent professors are trying to destroy one another’s careers amid charges of shoddy scholarship, anti-Semitism, and plagiarism. Alan Dershowitz and Norman Finkelstein have been at each other’s throats for years, but their battle was taken to a new level this year, when Dershowitz, who teaches at Harvard, began actively advocating against Mr. Finkelstein receiving tenure at DePaul University.

“Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan,” several weeks after suffering brain injuries in a fall.

“Two hundred years after wandering through drifts of spring flowers in the Lake District, William Wordsworth has been given a pop video and rap version of his famous poem on daffodils. Read by a zany red squirrel in a series of dramatic mountain and lakeside locations, the hip take on the 24 lines of verse aims to lure more young people to the national park this summer.”

“A. Alfred Taubman, ignoring all of his instincts, stayed silent during the price-fixing trial that would end with a prison sentence for the former owner of Sotheby’s auction house. It was a decision that the luxury-mall developer and philanthropist sees as a critical mistake as he reflects on a career in retailing that began as a discount-store salesman and eventually put him at the centre of an art-world scandal… In a memoir being published today, Taubman takes aim at the former executives” at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses.