“The pair were the cultural beacons of their generation, but their relationship, known in their refined circle, was to remain secret from the public throughout their lives. In his missive, in scrawled and often barely legible handwriting, Proust, then 24, writes: ‘I want you to be here all the time but as a god in disguise, whom no mortal would recognise.'”
People
Nobody Does A Book-Signing Like David Sedaris
“Nor did anyone mind when … he said, ‘What happened to your mother — is she dead?’ to a man named Richard, who wanted a book signed for his father.
‘She is to him,’ Richard said.
Mr. Sedaris drew a little person and gravestone with ‘R.I.P.’ written on it. ‘Here is your father looking at the ashes of his failed marriage,’ he explained.”
Julia Louis-Dreyfus Awarded 2018 Mark Twain Prize For American Humor
“The actress said in a statement: ‘Merely to join the list of distinguished recipients of this award would be honor enough, but, as a student of both American history and literature, the fact that Mr. Twain himself will be presenting the award to me in person is particularly gratifying.'”
Fluxus Artist Geoffrey Hendricks Dead At 86
“The Flux Divorce” – a famous public ceremony he staged with his wife, artist Nye Ffarrabas, to mark their split – “was just one of many adventurous artworks and art events he created or participated in during a career that also included teaching art at Rutgers University for 47 years. Mr. Hendricks literally looked to the heavens for inspiration for some of his art; he was known for paintings of the sky, which he would render on traditional canvases and assorted other surfaces. (A fellow artist, Dick Higgins, gave him the nickname Cloudsmith.) But, like other Fluxus artists, he went far beyond the boundaries of painting.”
Ira Glass: I Have A Particular Set Of Skills, He Says In J-School Commencement Speech
“I am very aware that I make my living with a weird grab bag of skills that probably shouldn’t add up to anything. My primary skill is that I’m a good editor. That’s the main thing I do all week. From the start it was the one thing in journalism I had a natural talent for … an easy command of. I also have a bunch of showbizzy skills that go into packaging material into a program – pacing and flow and humor and emotional arcs. Stuff I learned basically in high school musicals and as a teenaged magician at children’s birthday parties.”
Philip Roth, 85
“The big one – the Nobel prize in literature – eluded him, but there can be few American literary careers so richly laurelled, early and late. He was a bestselling writer only once in his career, when Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) sold 420,000 copies in the first 10 weeks after publication.” Roth was, however, embattled throughout his career, known for both his mental health troubles and the constant criticism he received for his relations with women and with Judaism.
Robert Indiana, Pop Artist Who Created ‘LOVE’ Sculpture, Dead At 85
“Robert Indiana stands as one of the very few artists in history to make a work of art that got away from its maker and took on an incredible, even improbable, life of its own. His iconic presentation of the word ‘LOVE,’ which he created in 1964, ranks as one of the most popular artworks of the 20th-century — an utter crowd-pleaser that is instantly recognizable to millions, whether rendered as a giant metal sculpture or emblazoned across a T-shirt. Such omnipresence could be the signal achievement for any artist, but Indiana was also one of the cornerstones of the Pop art movement of the 1960s.”
Patricia Morison, 103, Stage And Screen Star Of 1930s, ’40s and ’50s
“An actress who combined ravishing beauty with cool sophistication, [Morison] was promoted as the ‘Fire and Ice Girl’ when she landed in Hollywood in the late 1930s. She appeared opposite some of the most popular stars of the era — from Spencer Tracy to Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller — but her career stalled from typecasting as a well-coiffed vamp. [She] did not emerge to public recognition until returning to her Broadway roots in 1948 to perform in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, which became one of the most popular stage musicals of all time.”
Zhao Kangmin, Who Restored Xi’an’s Ancient Terra-Cotta Warriors, Dead At 81
The long-serving archaeologist “was not the first person to see the pottery fragments, nor did he order the partial excavation of the complex, which became a national treasure.” But he was the first one to reassemble the statues from the broken fragments that were first discovered. “Decades later he was still signing his name with a grand title: ‘Zhao Kangmin, the first discoverer, restorer, appreciator, name-giver and excavator of the terra-cotta warriors.'”
Architect Will Alsop, 70; His Designs Were “A Little Insane”
A Falstaffian provocateur, Mr. Alsop believed that his visually spectacular projects brightened their landscapes, and that architects had a calling to inspire the public. “Lifting the spirit, whether you’re working in a building or walking past it every day, is the job of the architect,” he told CNN in 2005.
We Form Intimate Relationships With Artists. And When They Die…
“I’ve been kept alive by music, and I’ve had friends who were kept alive by music. And the thing I know is that when a musician dies at the hands of their own demons, it makes the demons in your life—the ones that the musician helped you understand—seem briefly larger and more menacing. A person inspires you by enduring in the face of insurmountable pain, until they decide not to endure anymore. By virtue of having imagined yourself in the same boat, that death can become a fresh and dark isolation.”
Bill Gold, Backstage Superstar Designer Of Famous Hollywood Posters, Has Died At 97
Gold designed the posters for Casablanca, A Streetcar Named Desire, Alien, and thousands more. “Long before poster artists turned to photography and computer-generated images in the 1980s and ’90s, illustrators like Mr. Gold billboarded movies with freehand drawings, based on scripts and first screen prints, that hinted at plots and moods and mysteries, without giving away too much — priming audiences for love, betrayal, jealousy, murder.”
The Animator Slash Director Who Brought Us ‘Secret Of Kells’ And ‘Song Of The Sea’ Dropped Out Of School At 15 And Worked In A Factory
Nora Twomey: The factory “was an incredible training for my imagination. The machinery was very loud so I had to wear earplugs and then headphones on top of the earplugs and I couldn’t talk to anybody. And I’d just make up stories and entertain myself with beginnings, middles and ends in my head for those 12 hours.”
Jane Campion Is Still The Only Woman To Have Won Cannes’ Palme D’Or, And She Says Time’s Very, Very Up For The Festival
Beat Poet, Author, And Mentor Bobbie Louise Hawkins Has Died At 87
Researchers: Drugs Can Counter Effects Of Social Isolation
The researchers found that chronic isolation leads to an increase in Tac2 gene expression and the production of NkB throughout the brain. However, administration of a drug that chemically blocks NkB-specific receptors enabled the stressed mice to behave normally, eliminating the negative effects of social isolation. Conversely, artificially increasing Tac2 levels and activating the corresponding neurons in normal, unstressed animals led them to behave like the stressed, isolated animals.
Lucian Pintilie, Romanian Director Who Defied Communists And Inspired Country’s Cinematic ‘New Wave’, Dead At 84
“Pintilie directed plays at the prestigious Bulandra Theater in Bucharest in the ’60s and early 70s. However, his work was censored by the communists and one film was personally banned by Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. … U.S. theatre director Andrei Serban, who was born in Romania, told Pintilie last year: ‘You were the first person to give me the courage right from the start, that with courage and theatre you can do anything.'”
How Tom Wolfe Channeled The 20th Century
To say that Wolfe’s writing was the poetic refinement of the art of sixties advertising is to say only a good thing about it—Wolfe took the taste for the potent phrase, the loaded short sentence, the startling intervention, even the wild punctuation, of sixties advertising copy, and turned it into a kind of art.
Richard Gray, 89, Leading Chicago Art Dealer
“Richard Gray Gallery opened in 1963 in Chicago, becoming one of the first spaces in the city to show work by some of the day’s most prominent artists, among them Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, Louise Nevelson, and Jim Dine, as well as works by modernists like Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Milton Avery, and many others. … But Gray’s gallery didn’t only show contemporary art — he also had a passion for work by aboriginal and African artists, antiquities, and prints and drawings.”
Dissident Russian Playwright Found Dead, Six Weeks After Her Director Husband’s Death
“A renowned Russian playwright who wrote a play about the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has been found dead, according to a number of reports from Russia. Elena Gremina, 62, reportedly died just six weeks after the death of her her husband, Mikhail Ugarov, who directed the play, which was called One Hour and Eighteen Minutes. The play revolved around the death of Magnitsky in a Moscow prison cell in 2009 after he exposed a coverup by state officials to embezzle an estimated $230m from the Russian treasury.”
Tom Murphy, Ferocious Irish Playwright, Dead At 83
Fintan O’Toole: “[He] didn’t do kitchen-sink drama and he was always a little bit on the outside. But he produced play after play marked by soaring imagination, ferocious honesty, great artistic ambition and unshakable integrity. … What made Murphy such a distinctive, original and restless presence in the theatre of the last six decades was his ability to evade easy categorization, to bring together the intense exploration of private anguish and the epic treatment of history, politics and myth.”
Composer/Musician Matt Marks, 38
Comics Legend Stan Lee Sues Company He Co-Founded For $1 Billion
“Lee is suing POW! Entertainment for fraud and conversion, claiming the company and two of its officers conspired to steal his identity, name and likeness in a ‘nefarious scheme’ involving a ‘sham’ sale to a Chinese company. POW! was acquired in 2017 by Hong Kong-based Camsing International, and Lee says POW! CEO Shane Duffy and co-founder Gill Champion didn’t disclose the terms of the deal to him before it closed.”
Study: Your Income Level Can Affect Your Brain
“It turned out that, among the middle-aged people (those aged 35 to 64), the higher-status participants both had more gray matter and more of this beneficial “segregation” in their brain networks. Both measures are correlated with better memory and are considered protective against dementia and other signs of brain aging. This relationship held even after the authors controlled for things like mental and physical health, cognitive ability, and even their socioeconomic status in childhood, rather than adulthood.”
Why I Got Fired From Academia – (Or What’s Wrong With What Universities Have Become)
“As the dean enumerated this extraordinary set of failings, he warmed to his task — leaning ever further forward, as if sharing gossip with a group of intimates or inmates. Encouraged, no doubt, by a sense of rightness and righteousness, the faithful apparatchik’s eyes lit up like a chap embarked on a quest with like-minded souls.”
Tom Wolfe, 87
Guitarist-Composer Glenn Branca Dead At 69
“Even among the many underground artists, musicians and misfits who populated downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s, he stood out as one of the weirdest. His music – with its stark sheets of minimalism and overwhelming guitar-oriented symphonies – filtered into rock and noise, and it’s hard to imagine bands such as Sonic Youth and Swans without him. Originally trained in theatre, with no formal musical education, he brought intense drama to experimental music.”
Daniel Webster, Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer Classical Music Critic, Dead At 86
“The Inquirer‘s classical music critic from 1963 to 1999, Mr. Webster occupied his spot as Philadelphia commanded national and international attention through an orchestra that toured, recorded, and broadcast widely. … [His] era was bookended by artists like tenor Richard Tucker and conductor Hermann Scherchen in the 1960s, and the arts boom of the 1990s that created hundreds of millions of dollars in custom-built arts facilities and one of the most bustling music scenes in the country.”
Actress Margot Kidder, 69
The Bob Fosse Show – And It Was A Show
In 1987, at the age of sixty, while walking down the street with Gwen Verdon—they were on their way to the opening of a revival of Sweet Charity—Fosse had a heart attack, his second. He died in the hospital emergency room. For his reputation’s sake, this was not a moment too soon.