Katharina Wagner Survives Freak Autobahn Incident "Katharina Wagner, the co-director of the Bayreuth Festival and great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, was in a car on the German autobahn when the driver died at the wheel."

Bloomberg 11/14/08

email this story | Posted 11/19/08@09:39PM

Chagall Was 'A Colossal Mama's Boy' A new biography of the painter says that he freely went from one parental figure to another to another for sustenance and nourishment. "Everyone embraced him, nursed him, held him aloft." He was also, it seems, "a social climber and a prince of self-pity. He thrived in a bloody century that killed many friends… But he saw himself as Christ on the cross."

International Herald Tribune 11/13/08

email this story | Posted 11/19/08@09:22PM

Alberto Vilar Convicted Of Fraud And Money Laundering "A federal jury convicted Alberto W. Vilar of all 12 counts in his securities fraud trial on Wednesday, a final fall from grace for a man who gave millions of dollars to musical and other causes but was ostracized for falling short on his pledges."

New York Times 11/20/08

email this story | Posted 11/19/08@11:33AM

Clive Barnes, 81 "Clive Barnes, who as a critic in Britain and later for The New York Times helped bring dance to a broad audience with an exuberant, highly personal style in his reviews, died early this morning... His death, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, was caused by complications of cancer."

The New York Times 11/19/08

email this story | Posted 11/19/08@09:04AM

Gustavo Dudamel Says Life Hasn't Changed All That Much Only four years after he first led a professional orchestra, the boy wonder of conductors has two big music director jobs and a DG contract. But the 27-year-old says his life isn't so very different now - he's always conducted a lot, he's just doing more of it outside Venezuela. He's never intimidated, either - except for this one time in Vienna …

WRTI-FM (Philadelphia) (audio) 11/15/08

email this story | Posted 11/18/08@09:20PM

Nicole Kidman Wonders Aloud About Retirement At the Sydney launch of her latest film, the Baz Luhrmann epic Australia, she said, "In terms of my future as an actor, I don't know. I'm in a place in my life where I've had some great opportunities but I may just choose to have some more children… There's many things I want to do besides act."

The Age (Melbourne) 11/19/08

email this story | Posted 11/18/08@09:13PM

Ab-Ex Painter Grace Hartigan Dies At 86 "Her bold canvases made her a bright star in the 1950s New York art world, but she 'sank from view faster than the Titanic' when she moved to Baltimore, The New York Times said. Grace Hartigan, who ultimately found a second career offering her wisdom and advice to generations of young painters at the Maryland Institute College of Art, died of liver failure today at the a Lorien Mays Chapel in Timonium nursing home."

Baltimore Sun 11/16/08

email this story | Posted 11/17/08@06:54PM

Lee, De Havilland, Ford's Theatre Get Arts Medal From Bush "Stan Lee, who helped create hundreds of comic book superheroes, including 'Spider-Man,' and Olivia de Havilland, 92, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1939 for her portrayal of Melanie Hamilton in 'Gone With the Wind,' were among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal at the White House yesterday."

Washington Post 11/18/08

email this story | Posted 11/17/08@03:22PM

Jazz Biographer Peter Levinson, 74 "Peter J. Levinson, a music publicist who parlayed his close familiarity with jazz personalities into rich and sometimes intimate biographies of them, died on Oct. 21 at his home in Malibu... He eventually started his own publicity firm in New York and later expanded it to Los Angeles."

The New York Times 11/16/08

email this story | Posted 11/16/08@11:08AM

Hundreds Gather To Remember Makeba "Large crowds have flocked to a memorial service in Johannesburg for South African singer Miriam Makeba, who died last weekend after a concert in Italy. Musicians, poets and politicians paid tribute to the 76-year-old performer... The singer, who was known as Mama Africa, spent more than 30 years in exile after lending her support to the campaign against apartheid."

BBC 11/15/08

email this story | Posted 11/16/08@09:41AM

Former Arts Patron Alberto Vilar's Fraud Case Goes To Jury "More accustomed to listening to performances he financed, Mr. Vilar heard a prosecutor on Wednesday accuse him of stealing from clients and call him a liar dozens of times during closing arguments, while defense lawyers lauded him as a top-notch financial brain who had no need to steal. The case, they said, was built on disputes that really belonged in civil court."

The New York Times 11/13/08

email this story | Posted 11/14/08@07:19AM

NEH Chairman Cole To Step Down In January "Bruce Cole, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities for the past seven years, announced yesterday he is leaving in January to join the American Revolution Center in Valley Forge, Pa. His departure gives the incoming administration of Barack Obama the opportunity to name the heads of both national endowments."

Washington Post 11/13/08

email this story | Posted 11/13/08@04:37AM

Malcolm Gladwell - Geek Superstar Or Parasite? The author of The Tipping Point and Blink may be a pop-intellectual rock star who rakes in "stratospheric" speaking fees, but he says, "At the end of the day, I'm just a journalist […] I spend my time talking to people who tell me things, and then I write them down. I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. [pause] But I'm still a parasite."

New York 11/09/08

email this story | Posted 11/12/08@09:05PM

Fury In China As Gong Li "Defects" To Singapore The People's Republic's most famous actress, who "embodies Chinese womanhood in the way Helen Mirren sets British hearts racing, or the way Catherine Deneuve is an icon in France," has taken the citizenship of her Singaporean husband. Her erstwhile compatriots are fuming: "She earned enough money in China, didn't she? Then she becomes a foreigner! Why do we make her money for her, just so she can take the money and run."

The Independent (UK) 10/12/08

email this story | Posted 11/12/08@08:50PM

Violinist of the Future? "In a world where there are scores of amazingly trained, virtually interchangeable violin virtuosos, Pekka Kuusisto stands out as that rarest of things: the genuinely individual talent." Kuusisto plays the classics as if he had just made them up, with a sound and style that most violinists would never even consider attempting. No surprise that he's also "in [his] comfort zone improvising with an electronic jazz group or taking the stage with a Norwegian noise duo."

The Herald (UK) 11/12/08

email this story | Posted 11/12/08@05:57AM

Rushdie On Religion: Unnecessary But Indispensable The world's most famous living condemned heretic says, "The world was not created in six days and God rested on the seventh. It was not created in the churning of a giant pot… And regarding 'how shall we live,' I don't want answers that come from some priest. [But] as a writer I find I need [religion] to explain the world I'm writing about. As a person I don't need it and as person I do. I would agree, that tension is irreconcilable. [But] it's just there. It's just so."

Time 11/08/08

email this story | Posted 11/11/08@09:31PM

Ward & June Would Be So Proud: Their Boy At The Louvre! "Eat your heart out, Eddie Haskell. Tony Dow, best known as the actor who portrayed The Beav's big brother, Wally, in the '50s TV series 'Leave It to Beaver,' will have one of his abstract sculptures on display at the Louvre."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer (AP) 11/11/08

email this story | Posted 11/11/08@07:07AM

Michael Crichton, Public Intellectual "Mr. Crichton was fundamentally a novelist of ideas -- a public intellectual who wrote potboilers. He took on big subjects, such as bioengineering and climate change. He wasn't afraid of slowing down the action to teach a scientific concept. When he wanted his readers to understand something, he would devote a couple of paragraphs to explaining it."

Wall Street Journal 11/11/08

email this story | Posted 11/11/08@06:22AM

Your Tax Dollars At Work: FBI Tracked Mailer For 15 Years "In the summer of 1962, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was scanning his morning Washington Post when an item on Page A15 caught his eye. Norman Mailer's most recent article in Esquire magazine had mocked Jacqueline Kennedy for, among other things, being excessively soft-spoken for a first lady. Hoover scribbled a note: 'Let me have memo on Norman Mailer.'"

Washington Post 11/11/08

email this story | Posted 11/11/08@05:49AM

Irony Lives: Kennedy Center Bleeps Carlin At Twain Prize "The late George Carlin, whose sense of irony was world class, would have appreciated last night's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony at the Kennedy Center, though it's not clear which rich irony he would have liked most. Surely, he would have gotten a kick about being too dead to pick up the prize himself, as more than one presenter noted."

Washington Post 11/11/08

email this story | Posted 11/11/08@05:38AM

Estate Fights Over Paintings - Was The Artist Insane? Martin Ramírez's artistic reputation has undergone an extraordinary re-evaluation in the last few years, with his paintings now fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. Now a multi-million dollar legal battle has begun over the ownership of his paintings, hundreds of which he simply gave away in the hospital ward. An auction of 17 paintings at Sotheby's was recently halted when lawyers for the Ramírez family claimed them. At the heart of the legal dispute is a conundrum. Was Ramírez, who was diagnosed a "catatonic schizophrenic" really insane?

The Observer (UK) 11/09/08

email this story | Posted 11/10/08@07:25AM

Singer Miriam Makeba, 76 Widely known as "Mama Africa," she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother's funeral after touring in the United States.

The New York Times 11/10/08

email this story | Posted 11/10/08@06:36AM

Anish The Anti-Sculptor Sculptor Anish Kapoor "is very interested in negative space, in spaces filled with a nothingness that is, paradoxically, deeply present... 'On one level you might say it's not art, it's a silly game. But I think there's something in that little edge which is interesting and problematic. There is something going between the meaningful and the banal.'"

The Guardian (UK) 11/08/08

email this story | Posted 11/09/08@09:18AM

Remembering A Children's Lit Legend "People feel they know Roald Dahl. Most of us have read his books and had our childhoods shaped by his fantastical mind and macabre sense of humour. Dahl's vision was one of boundless possibility and unfettered imagination; a world where witches had no toes, where giant peaches could float like zeppelins and where friendly giants subsisted on a revolting diet of snozzcumbers." This week, a new kidlit prize bearing Dahl's name will be awarded in the UK.

The Observer (UK) 11/09/08

email this story | Posted 11/09/08@09:16AM

Remembering A Critic For The Ages "A single John Leonard sentence is, more often than not, an unmatchable catalog of learning, wit, enthusiasm and combativeness, and by the time Mr. Leonard died on Wednesday, those sentences surely numbered in the millions. No other critic could range so giddily over so much material... without ever losing his ethical bearings, his sense of humor or the thread of his argument."

The New York Times 11/08/08

email this story | Posted 11/09/08@08:22AM

Gergiev's Ossetian Adventure During the conflict between Russia and Georgia a few months back, conductor Valery Gergiev, a native of the breakaway region at the heart of the conflict, was outspoken in his support of Russia, even as public sentiment in the West generally went Georgia's way. And Gergiev isn't backing down now. "He says he is vindicated by accounts by independent monitors... suggesting that Georgia was not acting defensively and had launched an indiscriminate attack."

The New York Times 11/08/08

email this story | Posted 11/09/08@08:05AM

Rosella Hightower, 88 "Rosella Hightower, an Oklahoma-born ballerina who became a leading figure in the European dance world and founded a major ballet school in France, has died. She was 88... Hightower, of Choctaw descent, was one of five American Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma who have received special honors in the state."

The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 11/08/08

email this story | Posted 11/09/08@07:46AM

Eduardo Diaz Named To Lead Smithsonian Latino Center "Eduardo Diaz, executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, was appointed yesterday to lead the Smithsonian Latino Center. Diaz replaces Pilar O'Leary, who resigned in February after an internal investigation showed that she violated ethics policies by trying to steer a contract to a friend and abusing her expense account."

Washington Post 11/07/08

email this story | Posted 11/07/08@05:21AM

For Russell Crowe, Acting Is Not Complicated "The process is learning a lot of dialogue and jumping up and down on the furniture." How did he prepare for his role in Body of Lies (besides gaining a lot of weight)? "Preparation? I picked up a bag, I put a pair of underwear in it and I got on a plane. There you go - preparation done." And by the way, "I can assure you that I'm not an angry man."

The Independent (UK) 11/07/08

email this story | Posted 11/06/08@10:02PM

Critic Extraordinaire John Leonard, 69 The writer whom Kurt Vonnegut called "the smartest man who ever lived" died Wednesday night of lung cancer. He began his career monitoring the left-wing press for National Review; he gave Pauline Kael her start at Pacifica Radio; from 1971-75 he served as editor of The New York Times Book Review, where he was an early champion of Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Gabriel García Marquez; he wrote about books for The New Republic, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly and Salon.com, among "countless other publications"; he was even a television critic for CBS and New York magazine.

Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (AP) 11/06/08

email this story | Posted 11/06/08@09:57PM

Merle Haggard Has Malignant Tumor Removed From Lung "At the insistence of his family and personal physician, Merle Haggard had a cancerous growth removed from his lung Monday at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital [in California]." A growth had been found in the lung last May, but the country music legend had resisted treatment, saying that he doesn't trust hospitals.

San Jose Mercury News 11/04/08

email this story | Posted 11/06/08@09:46PM

Thinking Between Words And Pictures Celebrated cartoonist Art Spiegelman has a new book out, "and what Spiegelman the cartoonist wants to show us -- in this installment of a lifelong self-examination on the page -- is what it's like 'to think between words and pictures, and have the feelings come out someplace between the two.'"

Washington Post 11/06/08

email this story | Posted 11/06/08@06:17AM

Michael Crichton's World "As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one -- except possibly Mr. Crichton himself -- ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down."

The New York Times 11/06/08

email this story | Posted 11/06/08@06:03AM

Pop Arranger Ray Ellis, 85 "Ray Ellis, the versatile pop music arranger who wrote the charts for hits by the Four Lads, Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Doris Day and Johnny Mathis, has died. He was 85."

Los Angeles Times 11/05/08

email this story | Posted 11/05/08@09:19PM

Sci-Fi Giant Michael Crichton Dies At 66 The immensely successful author/screenwriter/director - responsible for The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Westworld and the television series ER, among dozens of other properties - died Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer."

Los Angeles Times 11/06/08

email this story | Posted 11/05/08@08:42PM

Bollywood Legend Dies "Veteran Bollywood filmmaker and producer BR Chopra has died in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay)at the age of 94... He became a household name with such films as Naya Daur (1957), Humraz (1967) and Insaf Ka Tarazu (1980)."

BBC 11/05/08

email this story | Posted 11/05/08@05:54AM

'The Obama Of Italy' "He's a highly intellectual, extremely confident, smoothly articulate politician who grew up without a father, then wrote a best-selling book about it." That would be Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome who lost his race for prime minister in this year's Italian elections. The former editor of the newspaper L'Unità, he has written a dozen books of nonfiction; his first novel has just been published in English as The Discovery of Dawn.

Philadelphia Inquirer 11/02/08

email this story | Posted 11/04/08@10:06PM

Britain's Top Rock Festival Fails To Turn Profit "For the first time since its inception almost four decades ago, the Glastonbury festival did not make any money this year. […] 'Glastonbury costs £22m now, it's a huge cost,' [organizer Michael] Eavis recently told BBC 6 Music. 'The infrastructure, the fencing, the roads, the water and the loos, the marquees, the management, the security and the police, it goes on and on so we do have to sell out in order to make it work.'"

The Guardian (UK) 11/03/08

email this story | Posted 11/04/08@10:03PM

Terkel Was An Artist Of Oral Histories "I used to feel sheepish describing Studs Terkel as one of my favourite American writers, right up there with Roth and Doctorow, Updike and DeLillo. Yes, OK, his oral histories (Working, Race, Coming of Age) ranked alongside the most compelling and illuminating books produced about the American experience - but how much of this was down to the author? ... How stupid I was. The genius of Studs Terkel is in his discretion."

The Guardian (UK) 11/03/08

email this story | Posted 11/03/08@07:28PM

The Secrets In Martin Luther's Trash Historians are suggesting that entire chapters in the life of the founder of Protestantism might be re-written following the discovery of household trash at two of his homes. Among the preliminary conclusions is that Luther's tales of coming from humble circumstances were untrue: his parents were considerably more prosperous than he claimed.

Der Spiegel 10/28/08

email this story | Posted 11/03/08@07:49AM