Category: people

Most literary fakes find their careers severely damaged when they’re exposed. “But Laura Alberts, another trickster, could emerge from her literary scam with her reputation enhanced. Since her fabricated author, JT Leroy, was exposed last year in New York magazine, she’s done script writing for the HBO series “Deadwood” while lying low from most interviewers.”

He replaces Benjamin Forgey. Kennicott was the paper’s classical music critic and became critic-at-large when Tim Page returned to the paper. He’s one of the paper’s most thoughtful writers.

Mazisi Kunene, “the first poet laureate of democratic South Africa,” who spent almost two decades in exile in Los Angeles, has died. His poetry — “rich in African history, steeped in the nation’s oral tradition — had a purpose beyond its artistic value. Poetry for Kunene was a weapon in the war to liberate the nation from the brutal system of apartheid.”

“Sergio Savarese, a designer known for lyrical shapes and a founder of the furniture store Dialogica, died on Friday in a small-plane crash in Moffat County, Colo., that also took the life of his flying companion, Ivan Luini, according to their families. Mr. Savarese was 48 and lived in Manhattan and Southampton, N.Y.”

Playwright Sarah Ruhl, jazz violinist Regina Carter, composer John Zorn and nonfiction writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc are among this year’s crop of 25 MacArthur Fellows. Each fellowship comes with $500,000, no strings attached.

Turkish writer Elif Shafak has become the latest Turkish writer to be charged with insulting Turkey for a comment on of the characters in one of her books makes about genocide. “Section 301 of the penal code makes it an offence to insult Turkish identity, and is being used in more than 60 cases against Turkish writers and journalists.”

“He is sitting in a wheelchair, his expressive hands are creased with the marks of age, and his body – once so erect and graceful – seems to have folded in on itself. However, his hair still falls in exotic curls, his eyes are steady, and his gentle voice is clear and sure. Each day, after rising and making little pencil drawings of animals (“a wonderful way of getting out of your own head, nothing to do with art”), he takes rehearsals at his company’s studio in New York – for over half a century perhaps the most important modern dance company in the world.”

“Housed at San Jose State University, the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies is the only research collection in North America devoted exclusively to Beethoven. The center, which opened its doors in 1985, includes books and manuscripts, rare early editions of Beethoven’s works and, on long-term loan, two fragments of his skull. Its most famous artifact is undoubtedly the lock of Beethoven’s wild hair, which Mr. Brilliant and three colleagues acquired in 1994.”

“In its increasingly aggressive campaign to establish itself as a showcase of Canadian theatre, Ottawa’s National Arts Centre is hiring a controversial Quebec director who says he plans to go mad on the job… In accepting the task of programming a nine-production playbill in a city with small and conservative theatre audiences, [Wajdi] Mouawad boldly announced that art is born from artists’ hallucinatory perspectives that change the way we see the world, and that his job was to promote this kind of madness.”

A short-tenured but highly influential director of the Edinburgh International Festival has died. John Drummond, who ran the legendary fest from 1979 to 1983, was credited with turning “what had been a rather formal presentation of classical music into a kaleidoscopic celebration of many arts. [He] diversified the festival’s programs to include an assortment of ethnic musicians, dance performances, book fairs, art exhibits, a film festival and what he called ‘street happenings.'”