Category: people

Donald Seawell “created the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in 1972. The 12-acre Denver Performing Arts Complex covering four square blocks is the largest performing-arts facility in the nation at one location.” Now he’s 94 and stepping down as chairman after 34 years. “Seawell’s transfer to ‘chairman emeritus’ marks what some are calling the most significant leadership shift at any Denver arts organization in the city’s history.”

“He seems sometimes nowadays to have changed unrecognisably. It is not just that he has grey hair and looks like the 69-year-old Yorkshireman he is. It is the polemics and debating fury that make him so different from the dreamy painter of men in swimming pools.”

“Chinese authorities have banned the film director Lou Ye from making films for five years because he failed to seek permission from them before his latest work, set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen uprising, was screened at the Cannes film festival. Mr Lou’s film ‘Summer Palace’ is to be confiscated and income from it seized, the Xinhua news agency reported.”

The New Republic has suspended a critic from writing for the magazine. “Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog.”

The Village Voice has disposed of a legend in firing Robert Christgau. “Christgau’s project at the Voice was to create a venue for popular-music writing that assumed a certain readership—one equipped not just with broad cultural knowledge but with a fluency in music history, the pop canon, and all the little meta-narratives of individual artists and their discographies. The goal, in other words, was to talk about pop music in the way literary critics talked about books.”

“Dewey Redman, an expansive and poetic tenor saxophonist and bandleader who had been at the aesthetic frontiers of jazz since the 1960’s, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 75 and lived in Brooklyn.”

“The Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy, a major figure of the resistance against Nazism and Communism, died Friday at his home in Budapest, the national news agency, MTI, reported Saturday. He was 95. The poet, known to many in the West as George Faludy, was part of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Communist uprising and was to have been a major speaker at a conference to celebrate its 50th anniversary this month.”

“Having overcome financial misfortunes, a cocaine addiction and a series of debilitating strokes, Mr. Evans, 76, has also survived something as manageable as corporate regime change. His durability surely says something about the power of myth in the movie world. A boy wonder who ran Paramount in the early 70’s, he embarked on a personal odyssey that brought him back to the studio as a producer 15 years ago.”

Doris Eaton Travis is 102 and still dancing. “It’s really odd because day to day you forget she’s a celebrity. You don’t think of it until you see her in a setting…. When she steps onto that stage to a sold-out house and people are on their feet screaming and applauding, then you realize it. That’s when it’s breathtaking. She’s an American treasure.”

“Tenney was as close to experimental music royalty as a modern composer could get, having studied or worked with a host of famed American mavericks, including Harry Partch, Edgard Varese, Carl Ruggles and John Cage. He was in on the seminal musical developments of the 1960s: the founding of computer music and Minimalism, the revivals of Charles Ives’ music and of ragtime. He participated in the Cage-inspired art movement Fluxus.”