Philippe Lançon: “I thought about Bernard, Cabu, and the others in my narrow field of view, all dead now, and I wondered, with no idea of how seriously I was hurt, what determined life or death … The only difference between us was a couple of inches’ variation in the paths of the bullets and our respective locations when the black-legged men came in.”
“On August 5th 1946, two years after Paris was liberated from the Germans, a young American soldier named Jerome Seckler visited Henri Matisse. … Until now this interview has never been published.”
“From CDs to DVDs to Live in HD, DiDonato is a diva for the digital age, using new technology and social media to reach broad audiences.”
“The Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.”
“For a half-century, she stayed current by taking topical roles in films dealing with social justice and women’s rights. As an idolized national figure, she not only galvanized support for those causes but also helped redefine the Arab woman.” (She was also, by the way, the frequent co-star and erstwhile wife of Omar Sharif.)
“Tests on Neruda’s exhumed body in 2013 found no trace of poison but more will now be done. His death certificate says he died of prostate cancer. Neruda died 12 days after the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power.”
“As a critic and author, Mr. Bayley was acclaimed for his dissections of Goethe and Pushkin as well as of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.” He drew an international readership, wide praise and some condemnation for Elegy for Iris, his account of his wife’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease.
His a cappella octet “reimagined Bach and Mozart with driving jazz rhythms and playfully scatlike vocals – and put centuries-old classical masterworks on the pop charts.”
“Mr. Verna was directing the Army-Navy football game for CBS Sports in 1963 when he ran the first instant replay on television, changing the way sports were viewed by fans and, over time, refereed by officials. His invention, for which he received no patent or payment, is considered one of the most momentous in sports and entertainment history.”
“While not known most widely for its literary fiction, Playboy was for many years one of the few mainstream monthlies that published ambitious short stories. Ms. Turner became fiction editor in 1980 and guarded that tradition, shepherding works by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Shacochis and other acclaimed writers into pages better known for Playmates and other pinups.”
A young Japanese harpist who went to Venice to study and met and married a wealthy nobleman, she spent her adult life discreetly but lavishly funding major performers and institutions – and sometimes taking personal care of them.
“In the postwar era, Wilson marshaled the dominant Abstract Expressionist style – loose brushwork and wide swaths of color – to record real places, from the endless skies of her Midwestern childhood and the seascapes of Long Island’s East End to Tompkins Square Park in New York City.”
“Being an actor is a strange thing that came up in my life, and I’ve had great good luck with it … I take myself much more seriously as a writer, but I understand why people might not like my writing. I mean I really understand why it’s not as popular as the writing of some other people. … I actually don’t understand why I haven’t been taken more seriously as an actor, in the sense of being given better parts.”
“Often experimental in structure, mixing diary entries with intensely lyrical passages, [Tadeusz] Konwicki’s work was not always political, though his anti-Soviet novels, published underground, are among his most esteemed works.”
“When I got the diagnosis in January of 2014, it was a catastrophe for me. Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I’d die of something else.”
“Ms. Obraztsova became such an admired favorite of the Soviet cultural establishment that the authorities in Moscow allowed her frequent opportunities to perform abroad as a shining representative of Soviet artistic greatness.”
“Literary biography—an enterprise Updike regarded with some skepticism—is largely a hunt for such deeply buried evidence. As an aid to future biographers and anyone else interested in pursuing the mystery of Updike’s prodigious talent, I’d suggest paying attention to his lifelong love affair with cartooning, a passion that burned hottest when he was young but remained warm until his dying days, when he ceased to draw but still repeatedly referred to the comics he had loved in childhood.”
I was realizing more and more that my artistic journey was creating dramatic and lasting effects, not only on the generations to come, but on all living beings and I refused to continue down that path. I thought: “This is going exactly against the very nature of dance, which is to be ephemeral.”
“Most art lovers won’t recognize the name Milton Hebald. But it’s safe to assume that tens of millions of people have seen his work: sculptures, installed in prominent public places in Los Angeles and New York City, that include a monumental display of the 12 signs of the Zodiac that stood for decades at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.”
“Throughout her work, Ms. Summers was fascinated by the interplay of form and movement, something, she realized, that dance and film could exploit both singly and in combination. Through film, she was able not only to capture the motion of a dance itself, but also to add contrapuntal movement through camera work and cutting.”
“According to Curbed, Bradbury’s house was purchased by “starchitect” Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne. Mayne, who is on the faculty at UCLA, is a winner of the Pritzker Prize. Bradbury, who typed “Fahrenheit 451″ on a pay-as-you-go typewriter at the UCLA library, was presented with the National Medal of Arts in 2004.”
“We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet everywhere in our culture everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed. In a way I think science is the modern religion and at times I despise it as much as I despise other religions, because it really will only accept stuff that fits its masculine ability to define the world.”
“In many ways, Mr. Berthot spent his career exploring how to supplement and expand on the modernist monochrome without straying too far from it.” After a 1996 move to rural upstate New York, “the natural world became an increasing influence. He turned to depicting trees and hills so close in tone to their backgrounds that they almost seemed carved from them.”
The author of Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise “was widely regarded as one of the most significant novelists of his generation,” often compared to Conrad and Hemingway. “[He] took readers into the underworlds of drugs, violence and strife, both cultural and personal. His characters were sometimes strung out, often morally ambiguous and, above all, real.”
“[He] started doing local stand-up gigs when he was still in high school. As his reputation grew, so did the variety of his roles: Negron played comic and serious characters on TV shows including Hill Street Blues, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was a familiar face in film comedies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Easy Money.”
“The French critic Michel Ciment once counted Mr. Rosi among ‘the three last giants of Italian cinema,’ the others being Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonio. His films won top prizes at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. Yet he never acquired the kind of international fame many of his peers knew.”
One of the few Soviet opera singers to become famous beyond the Iron Curtain, she made many appearances at the likes of La Scala and the Met in addition to her extensive career at the Bolshoi.
From his student days, the Count tried to use what we now call journaling as a tool for everything from self-improvement to capturing the nature of time, memory, and the innermost self. (It didn’t really work, alas.)
“Mr. Frere-Jones will use his contacts in the music industry to bring artists and writers into Genius, seeking a critical mass of influential names for ‘that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves.'”
“Witherspoon has certainly emerged, somewhat unexpectedly, as one of the flagwavers of Hollywood feminism.”