People

With past colleagues backing her up (that story here), the ousted head of the Recording Academy says that she didn’t want to be the story as the 2020 Grammys get underway – but she couldn’t sit back and let others control the narrative. In her first few months at the Academy, her 44-page complaint alleges, “she alleged discovering voting irregularities, financial mismanagement, self-dealing and conflicts of interest among board members and nomination review committees, and criticized what she called ‘exorbitant’ legal fees paid to a few law firms with close ties to the academy.” – Los Angeles Times

His theory of disruptive innovation made him a key influence on Silicon Valley powerhouses like Netflix and Intel and twice earned him the title of the world’s most influential living management thinker, died Jan. 23 at age 67. – Deseret News

“While best known for his anchor work [as co-founder of what is now The PBS NewsHour], which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.” – The New York Times

“My desire to give evolved from going to a lot of museums, art galleries and live performances,” he says. “It took years to develop my taste, but once I was on the ground, seeing what these entities could do, it was easy to want to step up and help. I actually wonder why more people don’t do it because I can’t imagine anything more satisfying.” – ArtsATL

“The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more ‘serious’ entertainment — ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python‘s first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.” – Vulture

“I don’t play music and I don’t paint, but I always thought architecture was an art and I try to practice it that way. Architecture is intuitive. It’s humanly expressive. You’re putting yourself on the line. You start out not being understood, and you keep going because you have to. And it’s harder to explain.” – New York Magazine

Erik Lee Preminger (his father was film director Otto Preminger) started traveling with his mother while still an infant, got his first jobs with her show before he was old enough to go to school, and was her dresser by the time he was a teenager. Of course he has stories — like the time when Gypsy was driving her first Rolls-Royce through Switzerland in winter and got stuck in the snow: “She tried to dig us out using a bidet she had stolen from a hotel. It was quite an adventure.” – American Theatre

Anthony Lane: “Fellini is the great divider. “La Dolce Vita” was the film most loved by Roger Ebert, for whom it was transformed with every viewing, whereas Pauline Kael likened Fellini’s efforts to “poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and then becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.” – The New Yorker

“While officially working on a fax machine project, Mr. Starkweather began to experiment in his spare time with copy machines and digital technology, in effect trying to merge the two. … [His] supervisor at Xerox discouraged his experiments, calling lasers ‘toys’ … [and later] and threatened to lay off Mr. Starkweather’s entire staff.” Now, says the company’s chief technology officer, “The laser printer is arguably the greatest invention made in a Xerox research center.” – The Washington Post

“After huge success with Python in the 1970s and early ’80s, including [directing and acting in] the feature films Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, Jones went on to work on a huge variety of projects. With [Michael] Palin, he created the successful TV series Ripping Yarns and forged a post-Python directorial career with Personal Services, Erik the Viking and The Wind in the Willows. He made a series of TV documentaries (specialising in medieval history), wrote nearly 20 children’s books, and contributed a string of comment pieces for the Guardian and Observer denouncing the ‘war on terror’.” – The Guardian

“Writing on her blog, Not Another Music History Cliche!, and standing as a pillar of classical music’s niche on Twitter, Linda elegantly deployed her encyclopedic knowledge, research skills, and quick wit to cut through common classical music anecdote-myths, such as The Rite of Spring provoking a riot at its premiere. Not content to simply explain the truth and leave it there, she also delved several layers deeper to analyze why the myths persisted, and urged her readers to think critically about the information they were fed by advertising and clickbait.” Zoë Madonna pays tribute. – VAN

Had Turing lived longer, perhaps the state of artificial intelligence would encompass more than drearily corporate banalities such as the Amazon checkout window making suggestions about what you might like for your next purchase, Google offering up a few words for how to complete a sentence in progress, or a South Korean genius having his soul crushed by a roomful of statistics wonks—not to mention more chillingly Orwellian developments, such as facial-recognition software. – The New Yorker

Mr. Heath’s saxophone sound was spare but playful, with a beaming tone that exuded both joy and command. But his reputation rested equally on his abilities as a composer and arranger for large ensembles, interpolating bebop’s crosshatched rhythms and extended improvisations into fulsome tapestries. – The New York Times

Olney, 71 and regarded as “the founding father of Americana,” was performing at a songwriters’ festival in Florida when he suffered a fatal heart attack. “‘He was very still, sitting upright with his guitar on, wearing the coolest hat and a beautiful rust suede jacket we laughed about because it was raining … outside the boathouse where we were playing,’ singer Amy Rigby, who said she was sitting next to him onstage, wrote on Facebook.” – The Washington Post

Davis followed rather literally in her mother’s footsteps when she wrote the sequels to her mother’s bestselling and beloved children’s book. But she didn’t write the children’s books until she got sober – and that was after she was pregnant and had a son whose weak heart killed him when he was young. “His death from heart disease in 1990 became the subject of Ms. Davis’s 1995 memoir, I’ll Love You Forever, Anyway. An account of her grief made all the more anguishing by her guilt, it stood in stark contrast to the cheerful children’s tales for which she was known.” – The New York Times

Tanega’s “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” which was truly a recounting of her life with her cat named Dog, smashed through 1966 and was covered by Barry McGuire, jazz artists, Yo La Tengo, They Might Be Giants and many others, has died. Tanega also wrote for Dusty Springfield, with whom she had a relationship. She said as she was touring with her first album, “‘The folkies don’t like me and the rock ’n’ rollies don’t like me.’ … She nonetheless enjoyed performing, she said: “’ just want to sing for people. You might say it’s mass love.'” – The New York Times

Larkin won four Tonys for his work as a designer on Broadway. “Larkin won his Tonys in a remarkable run in the mid-1950s, for Ondine, The Teahouse of the August Moon, No Time for Sergeants and Inherit the Wind. The last three of those plays were running simultaneously on Broadway. Mr. Larkin was still in his 20s.” He also designed movies like Tootsie and Miss Congeniality, and was the co-designer of the George Clinton band’s famous Mothership. – The New York Times

While his father was alive, he drew many of the maps of Middle-earth in the original edition of The Lord of the Rings; after JRR’s death, “his son was left to sift through the files and notebooks, and over the [next] two decades … he published The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren And Lúthien and The History of Middle-earth, which fleshed out the complex world of elves and dwarves created by his father.” – The Guardian

He started playing the horn at age 13 and within two years landed a position in the Melbourne Symphony; by age 19, he had gone to Britain and played in orchestras there; at age 24, he was appointed first horn in the London Symphony. After 13 years, he left the LSO for a full-time career as a soloist (then, as now, very rare for his instrument), making more than 50 recordings, and developed an additional career as a conductor. – Gramophone

“When I suggest to Gladwell he has an unusually relaxed attitude towards criticism, he returns to a theme from the night before: success is wasted on the successful. ‘The weird thing about people who become successful is that they don’t understand that they now have the freedom to let their guard down: you know – it’s fine’.” – New Statesman

“Ms. Gatliff developed a new method for facial reconstruction in the late 1960s, then spent nearly five decades refining her technique and teaching it to hundreds of students, including at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. … Using little more than modeling clay and a set of soft, eraser-like dowels, Ms. Gatliff transformed unknown skulls into eerily lifelike busts. Her work helped identify murder victims, catch killers and give solace to grieving families.” – The Washington Post

After having worked as a publicist for some of rock’s all-time greats, she discovered two of the English comedy troupe’s LPs and began encouraging her contacts at FM radio stations to play the records. Then, once Monty Pyton developed an American fan base, she convinced a reluctant PBS to air their television series — and later encouraged them to bring a lawsuit against ABC that set a key precedent in copyright law. – The New York Times

Along with his classmate Miloš Forman, Passer was one of the key figures of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s, and after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets, the two escaped to the U.S. and resumed their careers in Hollywood. There Passer “directed a steady series of much-admired and often underappreciated films of economy, fidelity, humor and subtle beauty, among them Cutter’s Way, Stalin, Haunted Summer and Born to Win.” – Los Angeles Times

Scruton, who died after a short battle with cancer, was a controversial figure throughout his career as a right-wing philosopher. Author of The Aesthetics of Architecture and The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism, he delivered lectures and wrote extensively on his contempt for the work of modern architects and his passion for traditional architecture. – Dezeen

They dressed in Edwardian clothes, drove a 1913 Model-T Ford and eschewed modern conveniences. As lovers, they shared an apartment on Avenue C that lacked a telephone, television or electric lights. – The New York Times

“I was doing text and photo paintings and paintings solely with text. I had ignored photography for a long time, thinking it was a high school infatuation, but now I had this idea that I would do visual note-taking. I would go out with my camera and take photographs of things that might be information for my paintings. Then I got another epiphany. I asked myself: Why do I have to translate all of this information into painting? Why can’t it be art in itself?” – Los Angeles Times

Lydia Locke (1884-1966) “rose to prominence in the early 1900s, when mass celebrity was still a relatively new concept. But the American soprano embraced the label, making news both for her performances at the world’s most prestigious venues and for her fashion choices. Yet it was her tumultuous personal life that garnered the most attention: Between seven marriages, two dead husbands, and one fraudulent baby, her life was scandalous even by the standards of today’s news.” – Mental Floss

She had two hits onstage (Murray Schisgal’s All About Town and Terrence McNally’s The Ritz) and numerous flops, adoring profiles in The New York Times and People magazine, three criminal trials, a total of 14 years in prison, Roy Cohn for a lawyer and Jean Harris for a cellmate, and a mountain of Ponzi schemes, fraudulent businesses, and lies (not least her age). – The New York Times

“[He] created the satirical spy sitcom Get Smart with Mel Brooks, was a frequent early host of Saturday Night Live and turned plastics into a countercultural catchword with his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Graduate … A restless entertainer, Mr. Henry dabbled in improvisational comedy as well as theater, television and film. He received an Academy Award nomination for co-directing the 1978 afterlife comedy Heaven Can Wait with star Warren Beatty; wrote scripts for the sex farce Candy (1968), based on the novel by Terry Southern, and the Barbra Streisand screwball comedies The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) and What’s Up, Doc? (1972); and appeared as a droll supporting actor in nearly every film he helped create.” – The Washington Post