Carus believed that children should read - and see - high-quality short stories, poetry, and art. In 1982, she said in an interview, "So many people talk down to children, but you have to respect their intelligence. ... Parents give them the best clothes, the best food, the best toys, when what they should be giving them is food...
Until his death, Levine was perhaps the music world’s most staggering living testament to the dangers of genius-worship culture. That culture nourished his ascent and enabled his alleged serial sexual abuse of young men, whom he had the power to make or break. - Boston Globe
The record label was reeling in 1970: its cash cow, The Beatles, had disbanded, and it lost $8 million that year. Parent company EMI put Menon in charge the next year and he turned it all around: in 1973 Capitol released Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, and the label spent the decade issuing hit after hit...
Justin Davidson: "Levine made innumerable comebacks, and though he ended his career in bitterness and disgrace, he also avoided the punishment he deserved. The Met investigated allegations of sexual harassment and fired him … and then paid him millions to settle a lawsuit. His health would likely have prevented him from conducting much longer anyway." - New York Magazine
Constant bullying at school (he was the headmaster's son, and he paid for it); repeated adolescent suicide attempts; Benzedrine and Nembutal and lots (and lots) of alcohol (and opium if he was in the right country for it). Both under and above it all, bipolar disorder, which Greene "saw … as key to his personality and his work." -...
Levine had been in precarious health for more than a decade, canceling many of his performances after 2008 and undergoing spinal surgery. Even when conducting from a wheelchair, he remained a vigorous and indefatigable presence in American cultural life far beyond the rarefied opera world — widely considered the country’s most influential conductor since Leonard Bernstein. But accusations of...
As students, Fulford and Gould would argue about music. Fulford was acquiring a taste for jazz and other forms of popular music, which Gould dismissed. Having to argue with someone as informed and quirkily opinionated as Gould forced Fulford into becoming an ad hoc critic, thus beginning a second career on top of journalism. - The Nation
He started drawing for the magazine 65 years ago. “Hitting the century mark in age, it’s a nice number” for the brain to consider, Jaffee said with a warm laugh Thursday from his New York home — even if some body parts don’t “seem to appreciate it.” - Washington Post
Jagoda sang and wrote songs that connected her to her grandmother in Yugoslavia. "They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and...
But more people would know her as the "blue-eyed, flame-haired Irish singer and storyteller who packed Carnegie Hall on St. Patrick’s Day for a quarter-century and regaled her audiences with tunes and tales from the Old Country." - The New York Times
Gast spent 22 years making the documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle, and in the end, it paid off: "In 1996, Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where they received a special jury citation and 17 distribution offers. Critics praised the film, which nearly swept the awards for documentary films that season...
Dupont was a household name in France, where his death was major news and occasioned a press release from the president's office. He was sent to audition for the Paris Opera Ballet School at 10: "His talent and charm made him a favorite of the school’s director, Claude Bessy, who championed him despite his often rebellious attitude and frequent...
Nick Cornwell, the son of both people who created John Le Carré: "It was easy to misunderstand her as just a typist – and many did – not only because she also typed everything, as he never learned how, but also because her interventions were made in private, before the text was ever seen by anyone else. I was...
" began writing and performing comedy while a student at Cambridge University, traveling in the same circles as future members of the Monty Python troupe. In 1964 he and his performing partner, Nick Ullett, took their stage act to the United States, and from there he fashioned a steady if peripatetic career doing stand-up comedy, writing and editing for...
As chief of new product development for Philips in 1960, Ottens invented the first portable tape recorder. But it was reel-to-reel, a format which he (like many) found frustratingly bulky, so he set out to invent a tape that would fit in a jacket pocket — and wound up transforming the audio world. Yet later, he quite matter-of-factly stated...
