Category: people

It is not an overstatement to say that without Ken Dayton, Minneapolis would never have gained a national reputation as a city of the arts. “He and his wife, Judy, were key players in a small group of wealthy, socially prominent Minneapolis families who remade the city’s artistic life in the last half of the 20th century. They helped it evolve from a Midwest city with a few robust old civic institutions into a national model of thriving contemporary and traditional culture, renowned for its philanthropic support… [They] contributed more than $100 million to the Minnesota Orchestra, the Walker Art Center and other civic, social and cultural causes.” Ken Dayton died this weekend, one day shy of his 81st birthday.

“The poet Josephine Jacobsen, who died last week in Maryland at age 94, was a cultural exception. Although she never attended college, she earned the respect of her fellow writers and was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the honorary job now called United States poet laureate) in 1971. She did not gain widespread recognition until her 60’s, although her collected poems, In the Crevice of Time, and selected prose, The Instant of Knowing, which appeared when she was an octogenarian, are still in print and winning new readers at a vigorous clip.”

When the U.S. government needed a blueprint for rebuilding Japan after World War II, they looked not within the American military-industrial complex, but to a cultural anthropologist named Ruth Benedict. “The choice to rely so heavily on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq, a country that, like Japan, is seen as both impossibly foreign and forbidding.” The idea of rebuilding a foreign nation without a deep and abiding knowledge of and respect for its culture seems risky at best, but there seem to be few Ruth Benedicts around to help with the current mess in Iraq. Or, perhaps more accurately, if they do exist, no one’s asking for their help.

Rosalyn Tureck was one of the leading Bach interpreters of her generation, and a celebrated keyboardist who also embraced contemporary music, making her Carnegie Hall debut not on the piano or the harpsichord, for which she would become so well known later, but on the strange and eery electronic instrument known as the theremin. Brash and opinionated, she once snapped to a colleague, “You play it your way; I play it Bach’s way.” She passed away at her New York home this weekend, at the age of 88.

“Celia Cruz, who died yesterday of brain cancer at 78, was one of the great singers of the century. Her voice inspired awe, her phrasing was unimpeachable, her output was prodigious and she had more of the ineffable quality sabor than perhaps any other singer in the history of Latin music. Sabor means flavor, but in this context it translates best as swing, and that’s what she did – swing hard – for 50 glorious years. She was the Aretha Franklin of salsa, the unchallenged queen. She practically invented the genre, and then went on to perfect it.”

“Bob Dylan’s appropriation of material from Junichi Saga’s ‘Confessions of a Yakuza,’ first published in 1989 and translated into English in ’91, isn’t merely another tale of purloined text (see Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jayson Blair, et al.). It’s a fascinating study in artistic process and influence. The path from a forthrightly anecdotal history of a professional Japanese gambler to a set of elusive, emotionally turbulent songs set in the American South is steep and mysteriously twisted.”

The widow of crime boss John Gotti is apparently an artist. And she’s having a show. “A Chelsea gallery is opening a show of Victoria Gotti’s artwork tonight – and a portrait of the late Dapper Don is one of 20 paintings up for grabs. Gotti, who is rarely seen in public, told the Daily News she’s been painting for years. She doesn’t have any professional training, which may be obvious to some art critics. But like Picasso, she apparently does have a blue period.”

Carol Shields, one of Canada’s most acclaimed writers, has died of cancer at the age of 68. “Since the publication of her first novel, Small Ceremonies in 1976, Shields wrote numerous works of fiction – including the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries – plays, short story collections and poetry. Her books have also won a Canada Council Major Award, two National Magazine Awards, the Canadian Author’s Award, and a CBC short story award.”

David Mamet says playwrights have a responsibility to confront the violent past of racism in America. “I am old enough to remember separate waiting rooms, restrooms, and drinking fountains in the American south: one set for blacks, one for whites. Looking back, one says: ‘Was there ever a greater, more widespread or persistent delusion than that of racial superiority?’ And the answer was and is: ‘No.’ So, though I decry and abominate the computer, the mass media and, indeed, most things that differentiate the 21st century from the 19th, I remind myself that I have lived to see the beginning of the end of American racism – and that is something to have lived to see.”

James Conlon is the poster boy for the talented American conductor who has to go to Europe for his talent to be recognized. But with his appointment to the directorship of Ravinia, the summer festival of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Conlon is coming home at last, and sounds excited to be here. But he believes that there is much “missionary work” to be done before American audiences will be capable of digging their minds into a classical concert the way, say, German audiences do. “To them, music is not simply an entertainment or an aural sensation. They listen, they think, they feel, they question. I think we need several more generations of classical music lovers in America before we get to that point.”