Category: people

John Adams is the most-performed living composer. “A sophisticated media handler, he has the tongue of a liberal intellectual and the laid-back aura of a hippie-turned-family man. He neither starves in a garret – orchestras are falling over themselves to play his scores – nor inhabits an ivory tower. Adams has kept in touch with what audiences like to hear. His music is the most beautiful, witty and technically assured of anyone writing for orchestra and opera house today. Listen to Nixon in China (1987), his first work to reach a wide audience, and the chances are you will respond to its subtly distilled rhythm and verve.”

Author Susan Sontag has been named the recipient of a “Peace Prize” by the German publishing industry. “In a world of falsified images and mutilated truth, she has stood up for the dignity of free thinking,” according to the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. The award comes in response to negative publicity Sontag received in the U.S. for an article she wrote in The New Yorker shortly after September 11, 2001, in which she accused the U.S. government of manipulating the public in order to wage unjust wars.

A century after his death, Frederick Olmstead’s legacy continues to enrich America. The father of American landscape architecture made an impact on cities across America. “He democratized the whole idea of open space. To me, I don’t think the United States would have turned out like it did without Olmsted.”

“Fifty years ago, even twenty, nearly every ten-year-old knew who Helen Keller was. ‘The Story of My Life,’ her youthful autobiography, was on the reading lists of most schools, and its author was popularly understood to be a heroine of uncommon grace and courage, a sort of worldly saint. Much of that worshipfulness has receded. No one nowadays, without intending satire, would place her alongside Caesar and Napoleon; and, in an era of earnest disabilities legislation, who would think to charge a stone-blind, stone-deaf woman with faking her experience? Yet as a child she was accused of plagiarism, and in maturity of ?verbalism??substituting parroted words for firsthand perception. All this came about because she was at once liberated by language and in bondage to it, in a way few other human beings can fathom.”

Veteran actor Hume Cronyn has died of prostate cancer. “He was known for his versatility as an actor, playing a wide variety of characters on stage. Mr. Cronyn, a compact, restless man who was once an amateur boxer and remained a featherweight 127 pounds all his life, was at home in everything from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Edward Albee and Beckett.

Jacques Herzog and Rem Koolhaas see themselves as the twin giants of the architectural industry, says Deyan Sudjic, and like any other rival titans, they cannot seem to resist the temptation to one-up each other. “Between them, they have transformed architectural debate… [but] the relationship between them is becoming more like that between Godzilla and King Kong. They can’t help but go swarming all over the skyline, trying to take pokes at each other. And in the end, they are interested in entirely different things.” Herzog’s magnificent new Prada store in Tokyo is the latest salvo in the friendly battle: it “comes hard on the heels of Koolhaas’s much- publicised New York flagship for Prada, and effortlessly eclipses it.”

Actor Gregory Peck, best remembered as Atticus Finch in the celebrated film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, has died of natural causes at his California home. “Possessed of a soul-stirring voice called ‘one of the world’s great musical instruments’ by violinist Isaac Stern, and a face chiseled from the same bedrock as Abe Lincoln’s, Mr. Peck towered over the American cultural landscape for six decades. He consistently played men who saw wrong and did right.” Peck was 87.

A few days before Gregory Peck’s death, his characterization of Atticus Finch was recognized by the American Film Institute as having created the “greatest hero” in the history of American film. That such a title, however subjective it may be, could be bestowed on a protagonist who threw no punches, rode no galloping horses, and in fact, lost his court fight to save an innocent man, is yet one more indication of Peck’s skill as an actor. In an industry that glorifies violence, and celebrates the culture of shoot-first-ask-questions-later, Peck managed to make a hero of a vulnerable pacifist. It was a role that suited him well.

Peter Maass knows the secret identity of Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, whose writings from his home in Baghdad have captivated thousands of readers and led to a regular column in London’s Guardian newspaper. Pax was apparently Maass’s translator while the New York Times journalist was reporting from Iraq, although Maass didn’t make the connection until he returned home. “Maass is still in touch with Pax via e-mail, and lately he has been forwarding inquiries from book publishers and magazine editors to his former employee. He has no doubt whatsoever that Pax is the real thing – just a middle-class Iraqi blogger without a specific agenda, not the tool of any political party or intelligence agency.”

Playwright Harold Pinter condemned the United States at a gathering In London Tuesday night. “In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, Pinter said the US government was the most dangerous power that had ever existed. The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp. The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a ‘deluded idiot’ Pinter hoped would resign.”