People

“Robert Booker led the state Arts Commission through an often challenging period marked by recession-era budget reductions and major shifts in the state’s public policy environment. Nevertheless, under Booker’s leadership, the Arts Commission distinguished itself as one of the state’s most resilient, responsive, fiscally responsible agencies, and one of the nation’s boldest and most innovative state arts agencies.”

Claude Lanzmann told the DPRK authorities that he was shooting a film about tae kwon do – and he kept it up with his ever-present government minders, who believed him. In reality, he was revisiting the scene of an affair some 60 years earlier.

As James Ivory, now 89 and still traveling and writing, tells Sarah Larson, “[Ismail] was my life’s partner. From the beginning right on down to his final day. I lived openly with him for forty-five years, in New York and wherever else we were. That says what it says.”

It in 1957, her first year at U. Texas-Austin – and the first year black students were admitted as undergrads – that Conrad was cast as Dido, opposite a white student, in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. She was harassed not only by white students but also by state legislators, who threatened to withhold funding from the university if she were not replaced.

“The whole notion of Canadian culture is a very peculiar thing, driven by what are referred to unfortunately in English as founding nations – the English and French – which is just so not true since there was over 300 distinct First Nations there.”

By the time World War II ended and Zuzana Růžičková had recovered her health, her hands were in such terrible shape that her teacher cried when she saw them. She went on to have a successful concert career, including frequent visits to the West, and became the first person ever to record Bach’s complete works for harpsichord. Now she’s 90 and no longer performing, but still active – and if you’re playing for her in a lesson and she gets bored, she’ll pick up a novel.

“[She was] an actress whose aristocratic poise and willowy good looks earned her many film and TV roles as well-bred society women – parts that reflected her own life as a scion of two of America’s richest families.”

“In ‘Wicked,’ for instance, Mr. Brohn selected woodwinds and harps to convey ‘the swirling girly fantasy’ of the good witch Glinda’s entrance inside a bubble, he told a website dedicated to the musical’s composer, Stephen Schwartz. For ‘I’m Not That Girl,’ which is sung by Elphaba, the green-skinned wicked witch of the West, Mr. Brohn used muted strings, a harp and acoustic guitars to stress its melancholy mood.”

Can art – in any form – provide a cathartic experience for its creator? How do artists negotiate the landscape of their own trauma to create a work that stands independently of that experience? To distance his creation from his cataclysmic personal loss, Jonathon Young began to research post-traumatic stress disorder. He was not diagnosed with the disorder, and maybe there was relief in other people’s stories. But as his research deepened, he came across a phenomenon known as peritraumatic dissociation.

“If Mark Twain was right that clothes make the man, then Ms. Button helped define hundreds of characters in Broadway and Off Broadway plays, operas and films. … As a designer, Ms. Button was often lauded for her range and the breadth of her imagination.”

Elvis has fallen to the status of “novelty act”, according to David Hesmondhalgh, an author and professor of music at the University of Leeds, who says that any musician whose image transcends their music will ultimately fade away: “If you ask a small child about Elvis, the fact he died on a toilet through overeating or wore a silly suit is all that registers. The music has become far less important than the caricature. His image has been cheapened.”

“Hallmarks of her work, critics agreed, included her fleet, engaging prose and prodigious archival research. … What was more, where children’s biographies of an earlier age inclined toward unalloyed veneration, Mrs. Fritz’s were warts-and-all portraits of the often flawed men and women who left their impress on the world – and the resulting books were deemed far more humanizing as a result.”

“[Françoise] Nyssen is the CEO of Éditions Actes Sud, based in the southern city of Arles, which has published the work of Nobel laureates Imre Kertész and Svetlana Alexievitch, as well as Prix Goncourt winners Laurent Gaudé, Jérôme Ferrari, and Mathias Ernard.”

“Though not among the movement’s best-known adherents in the U.S., Ehrenberg was one of the most important exponents of its principles in Europe. … When he returned to Mexico in 1974, Ehrenberg participated in the country’s los grupos movement. Combining activism and anti-art, Ehrenberg and the other los grupos artists created sociopolitical work that could address oppressive political regimes.”

Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya ran afoul of strict — some say ridiculous — security procedures imposed back in January by Performing Arts Fort Worth Inc., the organization that owns and runs Bass Hall.  The rules forbid any bags or purses larger than 12 by 4 by 12 inches. Luggage, backpacks and shopping bags are not allowed, and bags or purses larger than 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches must be inspected. Ushers and security personnel have been scrutinizing arriving audience members and inspecting larger bags.

“Like Mark Twain, David Letterman distinguished himself as a cockeyed, deadpan observer of American behavior and, later in life, for his prodigious and distinctive facial hair. Now the two satirists share a further connection … He will officially receive the prize in a ceremony that will be held [at the Kennedy Center] on Oct. 22 and broadcast at a later date.”

Founder and longtime director of the DanceAfrica festival in Brooklyn and the African American Dance Ensemble in Durham, NC, Davis “was known both for his re-creations of traditional dances from throughout the African world and for his contemporary choreographed pieces that fused African traditions with modern dance.”

Coupland gave Gen X its name and identified what are still seen as its signal traits: cynicism; irony; a melancholic sense of having been sidelined by the major forces in social history; and, above all, a mistrust of corporate culture in all its forms. (One of the novel’s chapters is titled “I Am Not a Target Market.”) “We live small lives on the periphery,” the novel’s narrator explains; “we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate.” On a revisit nothing stands out quite so painfully as the book’s ambient self-pity and whininess.

“The plaintiff, Alex Kaseberg, claimed in a lawsuit filed in July 2015 that writers from Conan … lifted five monologue jokes from his blog over the course of more than a year. … Judge Janis Sammartino on Friday dismissed the claims for two of the jokes, but said Mr. O’Brien must face the allegations for the other three.”

“[He] lent his burly frame and Texas drawl to numerous TV series beginning in the late 1970s. In addition to the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood, he was seen on shows including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Nashville and 24, on which he played the vice president of the United States. Among the movies in which he appeared were Red Dawn (1984) … Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), in which he played Alexander Haig. He won an Emmy in 1980 … for his performance as the leader of the Jonestown cult in the mini-series Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.”

Having come through what can only be described as a midlife crisis, she is getting ready to find solace not through any of the traditional remedies (sports car, younger paramour, dangerous hobby), but with a new city — New Orleans, which she now describes as “the great love of my life that I just didn’t know about.”

Octavia Bürgel: “My mother, the art world, and I function as an ever-evolving trio, and while my mother and I each require the other two to sustain, I cannot say that the art world has needed me for anything.”

Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who has been president of the board during the Oscars So White years, is not seeking reelection to the board. Oh, and in other news, Netflix’s chief content officer would very much like one of the seats on the board.

Yoga and hypnosis didn’t work, so he went for something different. Why? “Grant spent his life as a creature in flight. His mercurial nature was the making of him – a peculiarly Gatsby-esque urge that allowed a Bristol street urchin named Archie Leach to reimagine himself as an American prince, the embodiment of Hollywood grace and glamour.”

Deborah Solomon travels to Lafayette, La. to meet the artist’s sister and learn about his dyslexia and their fundamentalist Christian upbringing, talks to a classmate at Black Mountain College from whom he stole a quilt to use in an early artwork (“The next time I saw it was at the Leo Castelli Gallery”), and has coffee-with-Häagen-Dazs in a Williamsburg loft with Susan Weil, Rauschenberg’s ex-wife and the woman who taught him how to make photograms.

“The idea that art and politics don’t mix, and that silence is therefore perfectly acceptable, is prevalent in Europe and North America, leading to more indulgence towards Dudamel. But this view is based on a profound misunderstanding of the conductor and the program behind him. El Sistema and politics have been mixed since the arrival of Hugo Chávez in power in 1999, and Dudamel’s career and program have been heartily supported by the Bolivarian Revolution. The idea that silence equates to political neutrality is therefore misguided, as many Venezuelans are well aware.”

“In the past few years, entertainers of south Asian origin have gone from being a minor footnote in American popular culture to a headline event. You can see a snapshot of this new America in a picture British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed tweeted this month at the Met Gala, the annual gathering of pop-culture royalty.”

An explosive legal battle between one of Hollywood’s best-paid actors and the business managers he fired has laid bare tumultuous finances, outrageous spending and troubling behavior on Disney’s new ‘Pirates’ movie in a case that could even change how the industry does business.

“Nadezhda Mandelstam … [wrote] about the many instances when, confronted with the desperation of their situation, they had asked each other if this was the moment when they, too, could no longer bear to go forward.”

The showman ultimately became a good friend and supporter of his one-time adversary, the founder of the ASPCA – and Barnum taught him some crucial points of public relations, without which the movement might have died.