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....
"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
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...
"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...
" 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)
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...
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." -...
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,...
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
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...
"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,...
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...
"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...
A longtime soloist at the Met and a mainstay of New York Grand Opera's summertime productions in Central Park, "over his 60-year career he gave nearly 800 performances in three dozen countries in opera productions (some 60 roles) and in concerts of arias, Broadway fare and Hellenic songs (a lifelong passion)." - The New York Times
The Lee family, including his widow and three children, expects to pay more than 12 trillion won ($10.8 billion) in inheritance taxes, which is more than half the wealth Lee held in stocks and real estate, Samsung said Wednesday. This would be the largest amount in South Korea and more than three times the country’s total estate tax revenue...
