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Trying Very Hard To Ask Bruce Dern Interview Questions

"'Wait a minute, let me tell you about this first,” says Bruce Dern, embarking on what I think is his fifth discursive anecdote in six sentences. 'Did you ever see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? Do you remember when Brad Pitt comes in and tries to wake me up?' he asks. … 'So I wake up eventually and...

Book Of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s Love Letters Marks End Of 18-Year Legal Battle Between His Heirs

The letters were between the French author of The Little Prince and his wife, a Salvadoran artist of whom his family sternly disapproved. The lengthy lawsuits were between his relatives and her heirs over rights to previous books about the couple's courtship and marriage. - The Guardian

Celebrate Napoleon? Well, It Is His 200th Birthday…

This isn’t the first time that commemorating Napoleon or the events of his reign has posed a problem. In 2005, the then president of France, Jacques Chirac, and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin – also a Napoleonic historian – thought it wise to sidestep the celebrations for the bicentenary of the French victory against the Austrians at Austerlitz....

W. Royal Stokes, Washington Post Jazz Critic, Dead At 90

"A onetime professor of classics who became a major presence in jazz as a Washington-based radio disc jockey, journalist and author known for his oral histories of musicians' lives, … Mr. Stokes was, by his own admission, an accidental jazz critic with no formal musical training. His instrument was the typewriter." - The Washington Post

Carey Perloff Remembers Olympia Dukakis

She was an astonishing teacher, spending hours and hours in the classroom every time she came to ACT, and back home in New York, at NYU. She was a prolific performer, an acclaimed film actor, an artistic director of the Whole Theater Company, a deviser of new theatre pieces, a polemicist and a partisan. She believed in acting companies...

Classical Music Broadcaster Martin Bookspan, 94

"Known for his distinctive delivery during his 60-year broadcasting career, Bookspan served as a host and commentator for live broadcasts of the , Boston Pops, the New York Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra under its founder, Leopold Stokowski. He was also the lead commentator for Live from Lincoln Center on PBS for the show’s first 30 years, until...

Jacques d’Amboise, Ballet Dancer, Choreographer, And Teacher, Dead At 86

" combined classical elegance with all-American verve and athleticism to become one of the top male dancers at New York City Ballet, then spent more than four decades providing free dance education to countless youngsters through his National Dance Institute." - Yahoo! (AP)

Eli Broad, Philanthropic Cautionary Tale

Broad’s style — his power plays, his demands for control and fealty, and his determination to go it alone — meant that controversy and ill-feeling dogged many of his big projects. He fell out with the architects; he crossed swords with directors such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Michael Govan; and his behavior stirred up resentments among...

Fred Jordan, Who Defied Censorship And Published The Avant Garde, 95

At Grove Press, Jordan and Barney Rosset led the charge to publish as they wished. "Grove’s lawyers were instrumental in overturning anti-pornography court rulings against D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1959, William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the early 1960s and the Swedish erotic film I Am Curious (Yellow) in the late ’60s." -...

James Prigoff, Who Documented And Championed Street Art, 93

Prigoff was a the co-author, with Henry Chalfant, of Spraycan Art, "a foundational book in the street-art field that featured more than 200 photographs of colorful, intricate artworks in rail tunnels, on buildings and elsewhere — not only in New York, then considered by many to be the epicenter of graffiti art, but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, Barcelona,...

Eli Broad, Who Spent Billions To Reshape Los Angeles’ Art, Architecture, And Education, 87

Broad, whose money came from homebuilding and insurance empires, truly changed L.A. "Dogged, determined and often unyielding, he helped push and prod majestic institutions such as Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art into existence, and then, that done, he created his own namesake museum in the heart of Los Angeles." - Los Angeles Times

Olympia Dukakis, 89, Star Of Screen And Stage

Dukakis was well-known as a working actress in the theatre when she took a role as the mom in Moonstruck. Then she won an Oscar for that role, and then she was in Steel Magnolias, Tales of the City (four series over several decades), and so much more. She never gave up theatre, though, and even played the (lightly...

Vincent Van Gogh Was His Own Worst Enemy (Just Read His Letters)

"The tone of the letters consistently is that of a man still aflame after a violent argument, gradually subsiding into a hot puddle of guilt and shame from which now and then, in a renewed fit of rage, he surges up into yet another outburst of rancorous self-justification. On practically every page we seem to hear the slammed door,...

Paul Kellogg, Director Of Glimmerglass Opera And New York City Opera, Dead At 84

Over 27 years at the helm of the summer opera festival in Cooperstown, NY, Kellogg raised standards, doubled the productions per season, built a new theater, and earned the company a national reputation. In 1996, he took the reins at New York City Opera and began a very productive partnership between the two companies. Unable to fix City Opera's...

The Biographer Has Been Accused Of Abuse. Should We Ignore The Book?

"If an artist is a bad person, should that change the way audiences interact with his art? In this particular case, if the author is a rapist, should that change the way we read Philip Roth: The Biography? Arguably, no. A book has an existence apart from its author, a truism that is extra true in the case of...

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