People

“I think that to him, in his head, he was just a big star and everyone wanted him. And to the rest of us he was just, you know, this creepy guy that could make or break your career.” – Los Angeles Times

“[He] dedicated a lifetime to writing and anthologizing poetry for children, amassing troves of verse” — 120 volumes by the time he died — “to help young people navigate the unknowns of life, from why stink bugs stink to how to survive a divorce.” – The Washington Post

Everyone had an opinion about what Kanye did. The VMAs were viewed by 11 million people that year, though the crush of coverage after the fact was more comparable to that of a Super Bowl, which typically gets 10 times as many viewers. – Washington Post

In Europe, there were no immediate cancellations of the 78-year-old Domingo’s performances and even some words of support for the star. Opera world officials noted that no charges had been brought against Domingo and no formal judicial investigations were underway that might provide legal underpinning to cancel any contractual obligations.The stark differences in the levels of urgency in the responses underline the differences in the footing of the #MeToo movement on both sides of the Atlantic. – Yahoo! (AP)

His movies earned 21 Oscar nominations over his four-decade career, and he garnered one himself for Best Picture for Costa-Gavras’s 1982 film Missing. But he’s best remembered for breaking the blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for Spartacus — and crediting him for it by name. – The Washington Post

“The allegations against Jamie Thomas, Indiana’s personal caretaker since 2013 and a longtime island associate, are included in a counterclaim by Indiana’s estate” in response to a complicated lawsuit by Thomas.” – Portland Press Herald

Manson had three primary lures: LSD, sex, and music. But music, and its power to unite a community of outsiders and misfits, remains the least-examined weapon in his arsenal. – The New Yorker

“A self-described ‘instinctive scholar,’ Takis” — né Panayiotis Vassilakis — “worked primarily in plaster and wrought iron before becoming fascinated by magnetism, electricity and sound — and how those unseen forces animate the physical world and how they might also breathe life into his artistic creations.” – The Washington Post

“While other budding jazz musicians of the 1940s were enamored of the daring bebop innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Mr. Wilber, … a clarinetist and saxophonist who was a protege of Sidney Bechet, one of the founding fathers of jazz, … looked toward the past for inspiration. He found it in the music of the 1920s.” – The Washington Post

He was chiefly renowned for his intimate personal and professional association with George Gershwin; after Gershwin’s early death in 1937, Levant virtually owned Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F. For a time, during the 1940s, he was the highest-paid concert pianist in the United States, spicing his performances with banter and self-lacerating quips. Assaying Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata, he might promise to play “with my customary arthritic abandon” and add: “This piece has never had a worthy interpretation. And it still won’t.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Mr. Bylsma’s 1979 recording of the Bach suites was widely credited with being the first performed on a period instrument using gut strings, which were typical of cellos of earlier eras. Pablo Casals’ historic recordings of these scores in the late 1930s, after long neglect, had brought them to wider attention. Today they are the most performed works for solo cello. – The New York Times

It seems there’s a moral spectrum in play: Scientists found that people would probably lie if they thought a big corporation, like say, Starbucks or Walmart, would foot the bill for the deceit. They told the truth if they felt like an individual proprietor of a business or a specific employee would have to pay for their dishonesty. – Mic

Phil Kennicott: “Death and remembrance, at least, come with the customs and norms that have been shredded in most of the rest of public life. If nothing else, death still inspires a pause in ordinary life and, in the case of artists, a respectful consideration of their habitually ignored accomplishments.” – Washington Post

Not David Marchese’s writing; he does a fine job. But Cage showed up for the interview wearing “oversize sunglasses, a dragon ring the size of a walnut and a black velveteen jacket over a Bruce Lee T-shirt.” He says that he has based various performances on his pet cobras, Woody Woodpecker, Stockhausen, and Pokey. (That’s Gumby’s sidekick, the orange horse.) He talks about his grail quest that was and was not metaphorical. (The Holy Grail, he has determined, is the Earth.) And he says about his acting, “I’m [now] at the top of my game.” – The New York Times Magazine

“The painter, known for his wry, carefully composed investigations into the nature of art making — say, analyzing every shade of paint used in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then rendering those shades in abstraction — was also profoundly dedicated to his students as a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA, where he taught for more than three decades.” – Los Angeles Times

He began his career on conventional instruments and spent six years as the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s principal cellist before becoming one of the key artists of the European period-instrument movement in the 1970s and onward. Among his dozens of recordings as soloist and chamber musician, he’s most admired for two recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites, each considered revelatory in its time. – The Strad

“The first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, … Ms Morrison placed African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life. With language celebrated for its lyricism, she was credited with conveying as powerfully, or more than perhaps any novelist before her, the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after it ended.” – The Washington Post

No figure in Broadway history had a bigger influence on how shows looked and behaved in the second half of the 20th century. – Los Angeles Times

Pennebaker’s documentary filmmaking stretched across more than six decades, and in that time, he “chronicled a who’s who of other pop music and entertainment world figures and icons over the course of his long career, including John Lennon, David Bowie, Jane Fonda, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry and the Monterey Pop Festival.” Then there’s Dont Look Back. – Los Angeles Times

Paley won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant for her work. Her methods met with resistance during the era of quantification and textbook standardization, but “in addition to teaching children, she mentored a generation of teachers, held workshops and lectured about her experiences in the classroom” – and wrote 13 well-regarded books about the educational rewards of storytelling as a pedagogical practice. – The New York Times

Lorne Michaels: “He was a force to be reckoned with, and his presence and strength were something I came to rely on. … He will be missed, but if God has him now, despite all the arguing, heaven will be much better lit.” – The New York Times

The Chronicle struggled in the first few years after Gwaltney and John A. Crowl established it in 1966, but became widely-read and influential for its coverage of unrest and social issues on college campuses in the weeks and years following the Kent State shootings in 1970. And in 1988, Gwaltney and Crowl founded The Chronicle of Philanthropy. – The Washington Post

“His first exhibition was of the sculptor Alison Wilding, whose work he continued to show until his death. It was in 1988, though, that … three of the [Goldsmiths] art school’s new graduates – Gary Hume, Michael Landy and Ian Davenport – had their first West End exhibition at Karsten Schubert Limited.” – The Guardian

“We were close for a long time. I was his photographer, colleague, friend, subject, and occasional collaborator. He used to say that he wanted to take off his white doctor’s coat and see Tourette’s in real life, outside a clinic or hospital. I facilitated this not only as a photographer, but also as someone with access to others with the same condition.” – New York Review of Books

Let’s put “job” in quotation marks. Being Hal Prince’s apprentice was a huge honor, almost (in my family) like getting into law school, but there were different degrees of apprenticeship. – The New York Times

The summer of 1954, which the author and his family spent in Paris, was when Steinbeck wrote the just-rediscovered short story “The Amiable Fleas” for his column in Le Figaro. But that wasn’t all he was up to, writes Christopher Dickey: there’s documentary evidence that he was gathering intelligence for the CIA. (Whether he found anything useful is another matter.) – The Daily Beast

“[He] created sculptures of some of the nation’s leading public figures, works that can be seen today in major cities … He [always] maintained his commitment to verisimilitude, whether depicting a charismatic President Franklin D. Roosevelt or an effervescent Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York.” – The New York Times

Over his long career in the theater, Prince received 21 Tony Awards, including three special Tonys, marking the most Tonys received by any individual. The celebrated director and producer was a frequent collaborator with Stephen Sondheim, as the director and producer of “Company,” “Follies,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and “A Little Night Music,” director of “Sweeney Todd” and producer of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “West Side Story.” – Broadway News

Barnum’s peculiar gift lay in his relationship to his audience. Better than anyone who’d come before, the Prince of Humbugs understood that the public was willing—even eager—to be conned, provided there was enough entertainment to be had in the process. – The New Yorker