Category: people

Thursday February 28

GOODWIN OFF NEWSHOUR: Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has acknowledged using other writers’ work “without sufficient attribution.” She’s left – or been dropped from – the PBS newshour program. The University of Delaware has cancelled an invitation to speak at commencement. Isn’t that enough punishment? Maybe not. Boston Globe 02/28/02

Sunday February 24

HOW GOOD WAS STEINBECK? The debate has raged for decades, from the East-centric halls of Academia to the small towns of the plains. Was John Steinbeck one of the great writers of the last 200 years, or a good-not-great writer of only regional interest? Whichever side you come down on, you’ve probably never considered for a moment that the opposite opinion might be the case. But there are compelling arguments for each conclusion. Dallas Morning News 02/24/02

• BELATED TRIBUTE: At the time it was written, The Grapes of Wrath did not do wonders for John Steinbeck’s image in his California hometown, as the book painted locals as foul-mouthed, abusive extortionists and brutal oppressors of the Okie protagonists. But time heals many wounds, and this month, the 100th anniversary of Steinbeck’s birth will see him honored in the same town that once reviled him. The Age (Melbourne) 02/22/02

HUGHES’ HALLUCINOGENIC REVELATIONS: “IN 1999, a week into filming [a] television series about Australia, the art critic Robert Hughes was involved in a near-fatal car crash. During the five weeks that he lay in a coma in intensive-care, Hughes became intimately acquainted with the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. He was visited by a series of powerful hallucinations more concrete than dreams, more intense than the LSD experiences that he had sampled when he was younger, in which the Spanish painter appeared to be inflicting a prolonged torture on him.” The Telegraph (UK) 02/23/02

THAT’S ALL, FOLKS: “Oscar-winning cartoon animator Chuck Jones, who brought to life a host of cartoon characters including Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, has died in California of heart failure. He was 89.” BBC 02/23/02

MTT’S SECOND (THIRD?) CAREER: “As a conductor, pianist and teacher, Michael Tilson Thomas already boasts a musical resume full enough for two. But in recent years, Bay Area audiences have watched him come into his own as a composer, too. On Wednesday night, Thomas will unveil his most substantial composition, a cycle of Emily Dickinson settings.” San Francisco Chronicle 02/24/02

THE SCREECH RECONSIDERED: Mention the name “Yoko Ono” around any fan of the Beatles (and really, who isn’t one?) and you are likely to get a somewhat violent reaction. But while Ms. Ono will likely go down in history as the woman who broke up the greatest rock ‘n roll band of all time, some critics contend that her legacy should be as one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. From music to film to visual arts, Yoko has always been, it seems, several steps ahead of the rest of the art world. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/23/02

Friday February 22

LUCILLE LUND, 89: “Lucille Lund, an actress who appeared in dozens of films in the 1930’s with stars like the Three Stooges, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, died at her home here last Friday. She was 89. The actress, who co-starred in more than 30 films, is perhaps best known for playing the dual roles of Karloff’s wife and stepdaughter in The Black Cat.” The New York Times 02/22/02

Wednesday February 20

LEVINE’S PLAN TO SAVE THE INDUSTRY: James Levine believes that chamber music holds the answer to classical music’s problems. If the symphony orchestra is a slow and massive battleship, the string quartet is a quick, powerful PT boat, and the newly designated Boston Symphony music director says that the adventurous spirit and adaptibility of chamber music must be adopted by the orchestral world if the industry is to survive another century. Boston Globe 02/20/02

THAT WACKY MAYOR: “Sometimes the ways of Mel Lastman are just too bizarre to be explained. Earlier this week, the befuddled mayor [of Toronto] made headlines by going to Ottawa and demanding the federal government write a big cheque for the Toronto opera house. No doubt many people in the arts world will feel grateful to Lastman for fearlessly speaking out… The only problem is that at this point his passionate plea is utterly irrelevant.” Toronto Star 02/20/02

CANADIAN ARTIST DIES: “The painter Paterson Ewen died [this past weekend] in his London, Ont., home, his system succumbing at last to the combined effects of his many years of alcohol abuse and the heavy medications that kept body and soul together through decades of emotional suffering and relentless striving… Ewen’s trademark works were large panels of plywood gouged with a router and then roughly worked over with pigment to describe sweeping vistas animated by cosmic events.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/20/02

Tuesday February 19 GUNTER WAND, 90: German conductor Günter Wand, former conductor of the BBC Orchestra has died at 90. “He insisted on a minimum of eight rehearsals for a standard programme, a luxury that only a broadcasting organisation could afford to offer. His rehearsals were meticulous and much appreciated by the orchestra, who respected him as part of a vanishing tradition.”

The Guardian (UK) 02/16/02

GUARDING GERSHWIN: “Such is the continuing demand for Gershwin’s music that the estate brings in an estimated income of between $5 and $10 million a year. Rhapsody in Blue is its biggest earner, I Got Rhythm the most recorded.” The estate’s heirs zealously guard their family legacy.  “When we took it over in the 1980s, it was not being well minded: Ira had been very passive and trusted everyone.” The Telegraph (UK) 02/19/02

Sunday February 17

CHAILLY’S REASONS: Ever since Riccardo Chailly’s announcement that he would be leaving the music directorship of the Concertgebow for a less prestigious post in Leipzig, critics and musicians alike have been asking what would cause anyone to do such a thing. As it turns out, Chailly is one of those musicians for whom prestige is far less important than the passion he has for his profession. What a concept. Toronto Star 02/16/02

SAWALLISCH ILL: “Philadelphia Orchestra music director Wolfgang Sawallisch has undergone a ‘minor surgical procedure,’ according to an orchestra spokeswoman, forcing the cancellation of a string of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Sawallisch is in Germany, the spokeswoman said, but she did not know whether he was hospitalized.” Philadelphia Inquirer 02/17/02

MENOTTI’S GIFT: “In 1936 this Italian composer wrote what has become the most-performed opera in America. He founded the renowned Spoleto music festival and moved to a stately home in Scotland in the 1970s, where his plan for an arts centre for young talent has foundered in the face of indifference.” Why can’t Gian Carlo Menotti get more respect? The Guardian (UK) 02/16/02

WHO’S AFRAID OF GETTING OLD? It’s been 40 years since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Edward Albee is officially a septuagenarian, a period of life when many playwrights are content to fade into the background. Not Albee – two new plays will have their New York openings in the next month, and the general consensus is that the writer is having his most prolific and successful period at a time of life when so many others have little left to say. The New York Times 02/17/02

HOW TO SUCCEED IN COMPOSITION BY REALLY TRYING: In an age when even fans of new music generally shun such ear-bending techniques as quarter-tones and minimalist repetition in favor of a new reassertion of melody and theme, a composer who embraces the inaccessible as firmly and unapologetically as Gyorgi Ligeti would seem to be in danger of falling by the wayside. But there is a quality to Ligeti’s composition, a dangerous yet inviting subtext, that has kept audiences and musicians alike coming back for more. “New England is in the midst of an unofficial Ligeti festival, as it often is; Ligeti’s new works tend to enter the standard repertoire with little delay.” Boston Globe 02/17/02

Friday February 15

111-YEAR OLD NYC ARTIST DIES: “Theresa Bernstein, an influential painter and writer whose career spanned nearly 90 years, died Wednesday. She was 111. Bernstein gained recognition in the early 1900s as one of the first female realists, a school of art that depicted often gritty portrayals of people living everyday lives… Also an activist, Bernstein was a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists, a group begun in 1916 to sponsor regular exhibits of contemporary art without juries or prizes.” National Post (CP) 02/15/02

Thursday February 14

SECURING LANGSTON HUGHES’ LEGACY: One of Langston Hughes’ goals was to establish himself as a major figure in 20th-Century literature. “There was a sense of triumph in the air as more than 500 scholars and other enthusiasts gathered at the University of Kansas to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hughes’s birth and to embrace his legacy. In speeches, films, concerts, art shows and poetry readings, they proclaimed him a visionary whose clarion voice spanned the heart of the 20th century from the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights movement.” The New York Times 02/14/02

Wednesday February 13

CRITICAL DISCONNECT: Last week author Caleb Carr sent an “enraged” letter to Salon.com complaining about reviews of his book. He “bitterly attacked reviewer Laura Miller and New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, implying that they should stick to writing about ‘bad women’s fiction’.” Not surprisingly, the comments didn’t go well with readers, and now Carr has apologised. “Meanwhile, Amazon.com has pulled Carr’s self-review of Lessons of Terror. The author had given himself the highest rating, five stars, and stated, ‘Several reviews have made claims concerning my credibility that are, quite simply, libelous, and will be dealt with soon’.” Baltimore Sun (AP) 02/13/02

ANOTHER HISTORIAN INVESTIGATED: Emory University is investigating the work of its award-winning historian Michael Bellesiles. Bellesiles “won last year’s prestigious Bancroft Prize, the most coveted award in the field of American history, for his book The Arming of America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. But the book drew intense criticism from researchers who said they could not find the data upon which he said he based his thesis.” Chicago Tribune 02/13/02

SORRY ABOUT GENE: NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross has had 3000 e-mails about her interview with Kiss musician Gene Simmons. “I got a thank-you note, and even a sympathy card: ‘Sorry you had to spend time in Simmons’ presence’.” Philadelphia Inquirer 02/12/02

Monday February 11

ALL ABOUT EVE: “For 25 years, Eve Ensler was a fairly obscure downtown playwright, ambitious but thwarted, anguished by bad reviews and tortured by injustices personal and global. Most of that changed three years ago, with the breakaway success of The Vagina Monologues, a series of bawdy, straight-talking narratives about women’s sexual triumphs and traumas. Since then, the play has been produced on every continent and in countless communities; it is as pervasive as Our Town, as political as ‘Take Back the Night.” New York Times Magazine 02/10/02

SWEARING AT “SILLY” PRIZES: Madonna has been admonished by BBC TV Channel 4 for swearing on live television as she presented the Turner Prize. “Channel 4 said its trust in Madonna had been abused. During the ceremony Madonna claimed awards shows were ‘silly’. Channel 4 had put special precautions in place because of the singer’s reputation for shocking and she had been cautioned about how she should behave.” BBC 02/11/02

Sunday February 10

WHO’S WHO OF SHAKESPEARE: Who was Shakespeare? The question is a hot one right now. The leading contender? Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. “In 2000, a Massachusetts scholar successfully defended a dissertation based on the premise that de Vere wrote the Shakespeare canon. Hailed as a Rosetta stone of Oxford theory, the 500-page doctoral thesis discusses, among other things, the history of Oxford’s life as reflected in the plays, and correspondences between the works of Shakespeare and verses de Vere marked in his copy of the Geneva Bible.” The New York Times 02/10/02

ZUKERMAN RE-SIGNS: Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra has re-signed Pinchas Zukerman as its music director. “The Israeli-born violinist and conductor, who joined the Ottawa-based NACO in 1998, will stay on till the end of the 2005-2006 season, with an option for another year.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/09/02

Friday February 8

GRASS WON’T KEEP OFF THE TABOOS: “German novelist Guenter Grass has broken two national taboos this week, calling for the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and raising the delicate subject of German wartime refugees fleeing from the Red Army. He called for basic information on National Socialism to be made available, and for public discussion of the phenomenon. He said that would help young people who may be fascinated with Nazism, but do not understand the reality behind it.” BBC 02/08/02

Wednesday February 6

NORMAN MAILER’S LITERARY HEIR: No such animal. “You get very selfish about writing as you get older,” he says. “You’ve got only so much energy and you want to save it for your own work. I’m much more interested in being able to do my own work than bringing a wonderful new writer into existence. Because my feeling is that if he or she is truly a wonderful new writer, they’re going to come into existence on their own.” The Guardian (UK) 02/05/02

GROSS-OUT: Terry Gross, known as one of America’s more thoughtful broadcast interviewers, invited Gene Simmons of the band Kiss on her show. The exchange got a bit heated – not your typical public radio exchange: Gross: “I’d like to think the personality you presented on our show today is a persona that you’ve affected as a member of Kiss, but that you’re not nearly as obnoxious when you’re at home or with friends.” Simmons: “Fair enough, and I’d like to think that the boring lady who’s talking to me now is a lot sexier and more interesting than the one’s who’s doing NPR, studious and reserved.” New York Post 02/06/02

Monday February 4

PINTER ILL: Playwright Harold Pinter has been diagnosed with cancer. “The 71-year-old was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus last month and is undergoing chemotherapy.” The Guardian (UK) 02/01/02

VONK STOPS CONCERT: St. Louis Symphony conductor Hans Vonk stopped his musicians in mid-performance Friday night and had to be helped off the stage. “Vonk, 60, revealed last month that he was suffering from a relapse of Guillain-Barre syndrome. He resumed conducting Friday after a break of about 45 minutes.” St. Louis Post-Distpatch 02/02/02

GERMANY’S MOST IMPORTANT INTELLECTUALS? In the US, people have been debating Richard Posner’s list of the “100 most important intellectuals” which he based on how many media mentions each had. Now the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has compiled its list of the 100 most important German intellectuals, based on their hits on Google. Who’s No. 1? Gunther Grass. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02/04/02

Sunday February 3

FAMILY BUSINESS: When Michael Stern (son of violinist Isaac) was starting out his career as a conductor, his father told an interviewer it was “unlikely” his sone would have a performing career. Paavo Jarvi (son of conductor Neeme) says trying to make a career as a conductor is tougher when you have a famous parent in the business. “People are rightly suspicious of nepotism and family connections, and that is something I can understand.” Miami Herald 02/03/02

THE MAN BEHIND MARK MORRIS: Behind every great artist there’s a manager. Barry Alterman plts Mark Morris’s course. “Barry meets people that I don’t meet, he knows producers that I’ve met and maybe can’t even remember the names of, and he’s on the phone with them all the time, encouraging, cajoling.” The New York Times 02/03/02

Thursday January 31

AMERICAN TRUMPETER BEATEN BY SPANISH POLICE: American trumpeter Rodney Mack, currently living in Spain and serving as principal trumpet of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, was viciously beaten by a gang of out-of-uniform Spanish police two weeks ago. The officers did not identify themselves to Mack, who thought he was being mugged, and offered up the explanation that they thought he was a car thief who had been seen in the area. Mack’s injuries are preventing him from performing with the BSO on its current tour of the U.S., and he is preparing a lawsuit against the police. The New York Times 01/31/02

MAKE IT STOP: “Another complaint against Stephen Ambrose has emerged. This one dates back to 1970, when fellow historian Cornelius Ryan accused him of a ‘rather graceless falsification’ in Ambrose’s book, The Supreme Commander. The allegations were first reported Tuesday on Forbes.com.” The Plain Dealer (AP) 01/31/02

SOME VERY UNPOETIC SOUR GRAPES: “Winning the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize last week has confirmed Anne Carson’s status as one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary poets. Soon after the prize was announced, Carson, who teaches classics at McGill University in Montreal, was denounced in Britain’s Guardian newspaper by eminent poetry critic Robert Potts for writing ‘doggerel’ that mixes ‘an occasional (and occasionally cliched) lyricism, some fashionable philosophizing and an almost artless grafting-on of academic materials.'” National Post (Canada) 01/31/02

Wednesday January 30

GREAT WRITERS WHO AREN’T NICE GUYS: He’s been called a reactionary, an Islamophobe, a racist, and an intellectual neo-colonialist. And last year V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize. Regardless of the epithets, he demonstrates “a fecundity, an originality, and an extraordinary technical daring that have been insufficiently recognized, partly because Naipaul is so readable. His work exemplifies the art that conceals art, and he is one of the greatest living craftsmen of English prose, perhaps the very greatest.” Atlantic Monthly 02/02

Tuesday January 29

LONG WHARF’S NEW DIRECTOR: New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre has hired Gordon Edelstein to be its new artistic director. Edelstein is currently director of Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre, where he’s credited with reviving the company’s artistic and financial fortunes. Seattle Times 01/28/02

PARALYSIS CAN’T DERAIL CONDUCTOR: Mario Miragliotta was a promising conductor who had recently finished his term as music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony and had been appointed assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, when he got into a car accident last June that left him paralysed, unable to move his hands or legs. Determined to overcome the injuries, he’s been working daily to get back on the podium, and he’s got a concert coming up… Los Angeles Daily News 01/28/02

Monday January 28

PIPPI LONGSTOCKING CREATOR, 94: Popular children’s writer Astrid Lindgren, creator of the braided, free-thinking Pippi Longstocking, has died at age 94. “Lindgren wrote more than 100 works, including novels, short stories, plays, song books and poetry.” Nando Times (AP) 01/28/02

THE AUTHOR, NOT THE PERSON: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis canceled his book tour last week. Last year it was revealed that Ellis had lied about having served in Vietnam during the war, and Ellis was sure to be questioned about this on the tour. In Seattle, there have also been objections to Ellis speaking at an author series at the Seattle Public Library. But hosts of the event have decided to go ahead with the appearance in February. “It seemed to us that Ellis’ personal life – what he did or didn’t do as a teacher – really has nothing to do with the scholarship that went into his books about Jefferson and the founding brothers.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 01/28/02

Tuesday January 22

PEGGY LEE DIES: “Soulful singing legend Peggy Lee has died of a heart attack at the age of 81… Lee is best known for her rendition of Fever and in 1969 she won a Grammy award for best contemporary female vocal performance for the hit Is That All There Is?” BBC 01/22/02

TAUBMAN APPEALS: Former Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman, convicted in December of price-fixing, has filed a motion for a retrial, saying the case against him was presented unfairly. Among other things, Taubman says the government was “wrongly allowed to read a quotation at trial from Adam Smith to the effect that higher prices invariably result when people in the same trade meet.” The Art Newspaper 01/22/02

RETHINKING HINDEMITH: Few composers have had their reputations endure harsher cultural mood swings than Paul Hindemith. Rejected by academics in the mid-20th century after he rejected the atonalism of Schönberg, his music has never regained any real traction in the concert hall, even as other “accessible” composers like Shostakovich and Britten have been vindicated and popularized. What is it about Hindemith’s music that doesn’t interest today’s music programmers? Commentary 01/02

Monday January 21

IT IS BETTER TO SOUND GOOD…(BUT DON’T LET THAT STOP THE MARKETING): Magdalena Kozena is 28, and “the blue-eyed, blonde Czech mezzo-soprano is the classical recording industry’s latest hot property. But does Kozena owe her success to her looks?” The Guardian (UK) 01/21/02

• SOUND BEFORE LOOKS? “A tall and willowy 28-year-old, Kozená is a delightful girl with a crisp sense of humour and – sorry, chaps – a nice new French boyfriend. More important, she is blessed with an impressive vocal technique and a clean, warm and alluring mezzo-soprano that reaches, in the modern style of Anne Sofie von Otter, Ann Murray and Susan Graham, into soprano rather than contralto territory.” The Telegraph (UK) 01/21/02

Thursday January 17

NOBELIST CAMILO CELA, 85: “Spanish writer Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for literature, has died in Madrid from respiratory and coronary failure. With his first novel, published in 1946, Cela became a leader of a straightforward style of writing, called tremendismo, which clashed with the lyricism that had characterised writers of the previous generation in Spain.” BBC 01/17/02

Wednesday January 16

MUSIC MEDICI: “Alberto Vilar has become the biggest benefactor in the history of classical music. Whatever the critics make of his philanthropic style, it has endeared him to many of the world’s top directors, conductors, and singers, not to mention the managers who must pay them. He has few other cultural interests (he hates movies) and – unlike the Medicis – isn’t interested in expanding the repertory; he doesn’t commission new work and has no soft spot for small, struggling companies.” New York Magazine 01/14/02

CHAILLY LEAVING CONCERTGEBOUW: Riccardo Chailly, who’s been chief conductor of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra since 1988, is leaving the orchestra to head up the Leipzig Opera in Germany, in 2005. Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/16/02

Monday January 15

LARKIN’S MONEY GOES TO CHURCH: Poet Philip Larkin, who “declined the poet laureateship a year before he died in 1985, remains best known for his reverently agnostic poem Churchgoing. He also said: ‘The Bible is a load of balls of course – but very beautiful’.” So his friends and fans were amused recently when £1 million of his legacy was willed to the Church of England. The Guardian (UK) 01/12/02

DEMME (NO, THE OTHER ONE) COLLAPSES ON THE COURT: “Ted Demme, a film and television director whose credits include the movie Blow, collapsed and died while playing basketball. He was 38.” Washington Post (AP) 01/15/02

Friday January 11

LYNCH LEADS CANNES THIS YEAR: Director David Lynch will be president of the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, which runs this year from May 15 to 26. Lynch won the top prize at Cannes in 1990 for Wild At Heart, and the best director award last year for Mulholland Drive. Nando Times (AP) 01/11/02

Wednesday January 9

MORE AMBROSE ALLEGATIONS: “A second book by best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose is being cited for having material that was allegedly copied from another text. Forbes.com is reporting that Ambrose’s Crazy Horse and Custer contains sections similar to Jay Monaghan’s Custer. A representative for Ambrose said Tuesday there would be no immediate comment. Anchor Books, which publishes the paperback edition of Crazy Horse and Custer, also declined immediate comment.” Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 01/09/02

Tuesday January 8

THE DIVA OF LINCOLN CENTER: Beverly Sills has always been a diva. But heading up Lincoln Center is proving to be a rougher playground than the opera stage was. Why does she stay? “Sills long ago grew accustomed to being the center of attention, the cynosure of a colorful and melodramatic whirl. But when her vehicle was a real opera, there were flowers and shouts of ‘Brava!’ at the curtain call. When she finally leaves the soap opera at Lincoln Center, that may not be the case, and some of the people around her think that she is only now coming to painful terms with that.” The New York Times 01/06/02

ART OF TRAITORS: Anthony Blunt was one of England’s most notorious spies. He was “a diligent, cool-headed traitor for two decades, yet this was the smaller part of his life. His overt expertise was in French art and architecture. He was (legally) recruited first by the Warburg Institute in London, then moved to its rival the Courtauld, where he eventually became director.” The New Yorker 01/07/02

JUST WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS: “Leni Riefenstahl, who produced masterful propaganda films for the Nazis, plans her first movie release in nearly 50 years to coincide with her 100th birthday this summer. Impressions Under Water, a 45-minute film about the underwater world of the Indian Ocean, is the result of dives between 1974 and 2000, Riefenstahl told Germany’s Die Welt newspaper in a rare interview.” Toronto Star (AP) 01/08/02

Monday January 7

THE SELLING OF RENEE: Soprano Renee Fleming is said to have the most beautiful voice on stage today. “Though singing may be a private orgy, it is also a business, and if Fleming has become America’s sweetheart it is because, behind her soft smile, she so shrewdly understands the country’s values: the need to balance pleasure and profit, self-expression and the ambitious manoeuvrings of a career.” The Observer (UK) 01/06/02

VARNEDOE LEAVES MOMA: Kirk Varnedoe has been chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture since 1988. But as MOMA prepares for a major expansion, Varnedoe is leaving the museum to go to Princeton. “Many people regard me as a raging postmodernist, says Mr. Varnedoe, who has also been accused of an emphatic bias against contemporary theory. ‘I’m more of a pragmatist than anything else, a Darwinist, I suppose, as opposed to having a teleological vision of a great race of isolated geniuses who pass the baton on to one another’.” The New York Times 01/06/02

Friday January 4

KERNIS AT THE TOP: Composer Aaron Jay Kernis has been winning all the music world’s top prizes for composers, including the Grawemeyer and the Pulitzer. He’s also getting some of the most prominent commissions by major orchestras. “He’s capable of irony and wit, but won’t take cover behind those qualities. There’s a lot of passion to his writing, and what ties his disparate pieces together are the grand gestures, the way he’ll go for a big romantic statement.” Christian Science Monitor 01/04/02

PETER HEMMINGS, 67, L.A. OPERA’S FOUNDING DIRECTOR: “With a budget of just $6.4 million, Hemmings launched Music Center Opera (later renamed Los Angeles Opera), mounting five productions in a first season that immediately made the operatic world take notice. By the time he retired in 2000 to return to his native England, Hemmings had left behind a company with a $22-million budget and an eight-opera season of more than 50 performances, most of them selling out.” Los Angeles Times 01/04/02

Thursday January 3

WHO’S WHO OF SMART: A new book attempts to determine who America’s leading intellectuals are by counting media mentions. Dumb methodology but great fun. “The top public intellectual by media mentions in the last five years turns out to be Henry Kissinger, followed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Sidney Blumenthal comes in seventh, which of course undermines the entire enterprise.” New York Observer 01/02/02

SANDERLING TO STEP DOWN: Conductor Kurt Sanderling is turning 90, and he’s decided to retire from the podium after 70 years on stage. “Musicians are rueing his departure, while admiring its dignified restraint.” Why do so many other artists have difficulty knowing when it’s time to quit? The Telegraph (UK) 01/03/02

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS (HAPPILY) UNKNOWN: “Successful, of course, is not synonymous with famous. For famous, you might choose a name such as Riopelle, Thomson, Carr, Pratt or Colville. But Eric Dennis Waugh has likely sold more canvases than all of them — combined. In fact, he’s sold more paintings, by far, than anyone else in Canada (and in most other countries as well). Eric Dennis who? Exactly.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 01/03/02

Wednesday January 2

MESSING WITH THE POPE: Last month the acting head of the National Endowment for the Arts turned back two grants; one – for a production of Tony Kushner’s Kabul play eventually was approved, but the other, for a retrospective of conceptual artist William Pope, was not. Pope’s work is hard to categorize. “Combining performance, installation and sculpture, it is formally exacting but improvisational, politically pointed but comedic. Social inequality and consumerism are among his targets, and although his work deals intensively with the issue of race, it upsets preconceptions of what ‘black art’ should be.” The New York Times 01/01/02

Monday December 31

POET IAN HAMILTON, 61: “Highly regarded British poet and biographer Ian Hamilton, whose unauthorized life of J.D. Salinger was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, has died at the age of 61.” Nando Times (AP) 12/30/01

EDWARD DOWNES, 90: Edward Downes, famous to millions of opera lovers as the host of weekly Texaco Opera Quiz heard during intermissions of Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, has died at the age of 90. Nando Times (AP) 12/30/01

Sunday December 30

IN APPRECIATION: Theatre critic Urjo Kareda has died at the age of 57. He was a critic at the Globe & Mail and the Toronto Star, and exerted an enormous influence on Canadian theatre. Toronto Star 12/30/01

Friday December 28

CLEMENT TIME: Financial Times dance critic Clement Crisp is one of the most respected critics in the UK. Crisp “commands English like a maestro controlling a vast orchestra of thousands upon thousands of instruments, some splendidly abstruse. Readers scurry to their dictionaries. Ballet, which of all the performing arts offers the highest challenge to any attempt to express it in words, has produced a tiny handful of star writers able to match the brilliance of the achievements they saw on stage with their own verbal artistry.” Ballet.co.uk 12/01

UNDERSTANDING RICHTER: Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter was not a man easily defined. A brilliant technician and musical master, he nonetheless refused to accept that any of his skills made him worthy of the praise he received, both at home and abroad. “He wanted the focus to be entirely on the music, and not on himself; a tremendous musical personality, he detested the cult of personality.” Boston Globe 12/28/01

BORING ME SILLY: More and more musicians are keeping online journals. But why are they so banal? “The common denominator of these notebooks is their superficiality. They have none of the serenity of Janet Baker’s late journal, nor the energy of the young Kenneth Branagh’s. They serve, ostensibly, as a token of the artist’s urge to communicate. But since the artist has, in most cases, nothing to say, they reduce art to mundanity and deflate our eagerness to hear it.” The Telegraph (UK) 12/26/01

DEFEATING THE ARAB MYTH: Novelist Hanan al-Shaykh is a remarkable writer, but she sometimes wishes that people would stop assuming she’s a remarkable woman as well, simply because she chose to leave her home in the Arab world to make a life in the West. In her newest book, she is determined to cut off at the knees some of the stereotypes that Westerners are forever laying at the feet of Arab immigrants. Nando Times (CSM News Service) 12/27/01

Thursday December 27

KAREDA PASSES: Legendary Canadian theatre manager and critic Urjo Kareda has died in Toronto at the age of 57. “Mr. Kareda was a former theatre critic at The Toronto Star and literary manager of the Stratford Festival as well as artistic director of the Tarragon Theatre for the past 20 years.” Toronto Star 12/27/01

DIETRICH AT 100: “Marlene Dietrich’s 100th birthday is being celebrated in Berlin, the home city of the late Hollywood star.” Among many events celebrating Germany’s dark diva, “the Berlin Film Museum is staging a special exhibition and showing never-before-seen private films of the late star.” BBC 12/27/01

WARHOL TO GET 15 MORE: “The first major retrospective of Andy Warhol’s art in more than a decade will make its only North American stop in Los Angeles next year.” Although reproductions of the American icon’s work are commonplace, the exhibition will be the first major display of Warhol’s work since a New York viewing in 1989. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (AP) 12/27/01

Wednesday December 26

SIR NIGEL HAWTHORNE, 72: The actor died at home. “Sir Nigel achieved world-wide fame as the bumbling yet suave civil servant Sir Humphrey in the TV hit Yes Minister, but was a classical actor with a wide repertoire ranging from Shakespearean leads to raw comedy. It was once said that he spent the first 20 years of his distinguished career being ignored and the rest of it being discovered.” The Guardian (UK) 12/26/01

THE SINGING ICON: Julie Andrews is 66 and facing a career without her famous singing voice. “Ms. Andrews is a rare version of an icon. There is no great enigma that trails her, none of the dark shadings of Judy Garland, or the smokiness of Frank Sinatra, or Madonna’s air of entitlement. This doesn’t mean she will come over to your house for lunch, but if she did, you would talk easily with her, and she would listen closely.” The New York Times 12/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE SCULPTING ICON: Sculptor Louise Bourgeois turned 90 Christmas Day. “She has witnessed most of the art movements of the last century and influenced her share. She is still innovating. She puts demands on her viewers to go with her into a discomfiting zone of trauma and endurance.” The New York Times 12/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday December 23

CARAVAGGIO’S DEATH CERTIFICATE: There has been much speculation in art historial circles over how exactly the great painter Caravaggio died. Now “an Italian researcher claims to have found the death certificate of Caravaggio and cleared up the mystery of how the genius of Baroque art met his end.” BBC 12/22/01

Friday December 21

DOESN’T PLAY NICE WITH OTHERS: Despite the PR, there’s very little “classical” about violinist Vanessa-Mae. “It seems she prefers to use her instrument to engage in mock fights with the others on stage – guitar, bass, keyboards and drums – just like a child attacking its playmates with a wooden sword in the sandbox. In the sandbox, there is always one child who must have its way; otherwise it starts to scream. Here, that child is the sometimes almost unbearable Vanessa-Mae.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 12/21/01

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: A Canadian actor picked to be in the movie Matrix II who overstayed her visa in Australia was detained in jail while her case was processed. She didn’t enjoy the experience: “It was just terrible. I was in jail with prostitutes and people that had been fruit pickers.” She’s been banned from the country for the next six months and will likely have to give up her role in the movie. National Post 12/20/01

Thursday December 20

THE BBC PHIL’S NEW MAN: Gianandrea Noseda, a “37-year-old Italian who cut his teeth as a conductor with Valery Gergiev in St Petersburg, has just been appointed principal conductor of the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic, succeeding Yan Pascal Tortelier.” He likes fast cars – and collecting orchestras. BBC 12/20/01

Wednesday December 19

THE SINGING COP: “If Verdi were to write a new opera, it might run like this: A young man loves to sing, but at first he doesn’t succeed. Then he joins the police, where he sings the national anthem. Thanks to his great voice and the mayor’s patronage, – he cuts a CD and gets to study with Placido Domingo. But Verdi can put his pen down – it’s true.” The Christian Science Monitor 12/19/01

Tuesday December 18

WAYNE’S WORLD: When Wayne Baerwaldt takes the reins at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, it could mark a watershed moment for new and innovative art in Canada, according to observers. Baerwaldt, who curated Canada’s entry at the Venice Biennale, and has, as curator of a high-profile Winnipeg gallery, earned a reputation as a tireless promoter of Canadian art and artists, will take over at the Power Plant in March 2002. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 12/18/01

DYING REQUEST: The words of a terminally ill poet are flying off shelves at Barnes & Noble, and their author has signed a multi-book publishing deal to write more. Six months ago, no one had ever heard of Mattie Stepanek, and never would have, but for the sympathies of a publisher who agreed to his (apparent) deathbed request to have his work publshed. Stepanek is still fighting for survival, and still cranking out the verse. Oh, and he’s eleven years old. Minneapolis Star Tribune (courtesy Washington Post) 12/18/01

MÖDL DIES: “Renowned German mezzo-soprano Martha Mödl has died at the age of 89, the National Theater in Mannheim announced on Monday. Mödl, one of the most respected Wagner singers of her time, died Sunday after a long illness in a Stuttgart hospital.” Andante (courtesy Agence France-Presse) 12/17/01

REMEMBERING SEBALD: When novelist W.G. Sebald was killed last week in a horrifying auto crash, the literary world lost one of its most intriguing stars. From one of his editors at Random House: “His project was the most heroic I know – he looked unflinchingly at things all of us find easy not to look at, and dragged them into the light.” Boston Globe 12/18/01

Sunday December 16

PATRIOTIC FOG: “Because of the events of September 11, John Adams finds himself accused of being an ‘anti-American’ composer, a label with uncomfortable echoes of the McCarthy era of the 1950s.” In the New York Times, musicologist Richard Taruskin charged Adams with “romanticising terrorists” in his 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer – and, by implication, with romanticising the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, too. Taruskin’s article provides some flavour of the atmosphere in the US today. “If terrorism is to be defeated,” he wrote, “world public opinion has to be turned decisively against it.” That means “no longer romanticising terrorists as Robin Hoods and no longer idealising their deeds as rough poetic justice”. The creators of The Death of Klinghoffer – Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellers – have done just that, he argued. The opera was “anti-American, anti-semitic and anti-bourgeois. Why should we want to hear this music now?” The Guardian (UK) 12/15/01

REJECTING CANADA? Actor Jim Carrey announced last week he was taking out American citizenship. Will Canadians take the news as another sign their country is in decline? Probably. But “in fact, Carrey’s citizenship move should not be read as a criticism of Canada. It is simply natural for people to choose to settle in the country in which they have had the greatest financial and popular success. It is natural for movie stars to choose to settle in the country that dominates movie production. There simply aren’t enough movies made in Canada, and they aren’t seen by enough people, to generate the fortune that a big star can make in Hollywood.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 12/16/01

Wednesday December 12

SIR JIMMY: Flutist James Galway is to be knighted this week by Queen Elizabeth. “After his knighthood for services to music was announced, in June, in the Queen’s birthday honours list, he said he was unsure whether to call himself Sir James or Sir Jimmy. The Queen is also presenting a CBE to academic Simon Schama, whose television series A History of Britain has been an enormous success for the BBC.” BBC 12/12/01

Tuesday December 11

MASUR GETS TRANSPLANT: New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur is recovering from a kidney transplant operation. “The 74-year-old conductor suffered no complications during the operation, which was done Nov. 29 in Liepzig.” Andante (AP) 12/10/01

NAIPAUL GETS HIS NOBEL, IF NOT IMMORTALITY: The Nobel Prizes, announced weeks ago, were handed out this week, and author V.S. Naipaul, one of the year’s most controversial recipients, picked up his literature Nobel. But unlike some of the Nobels, which tend to make lifelong heroes of their recipients, the Nobel Prize for Literature has been largely a hit-or-miss thing in the century that it has been awarded. Philadelphia Inquirer 12/11/01

Sunday December 9

CUTTING UP FOR JACK THE RIPPER: American novelist Patricia Cornwell has gone on an elaborate (and expensive) campaign to prove that Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. “Even in the context of the crackpot conspiracy theories, elaborate frauds and career-destroying obsessions that London’s most grisly whodunnit has spawned, Cornwell’s investigation is extreme. Not only did she have one canvas cut up in the vain hope of finding a clue to link Sickert to the murder and mutilation of five prostitutes, she spent £2m buying up 31 more of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing desk.” The Guardian (UK) 12/07/01

Wednesday December 5

BET THE NY PHIL THINKS THIS IS HILARIOUS: In what may be the strangest development to come out of the current world tensions, renowned French conductor/composer Pierre Boulez was detained by Swiss authorities, and informed that he was on their list of potential terrorists. Apparently, back in his impetuous youth in the 1960s, Boulez publicly declared that opera houses should be blown up. BBC 12/04/01

GETTING PAST THE WHOLE UGLY SUICIDE THING: “Ted Hughes was perhaps the greatest British poet of his generation but it was his tragedy to be chiefly known, particularly in North America, as the dastardly husband whose infidelities drove the fragile Sylvia Plath — feminist icon — to gas herself at the age of 30.” But a controversial new biography of the poet claims that such tragedies are no reason to ignore one of the geniuses of 20th-century writing. Toronto Star 12/05/01

DEPRIEST GETS HIS KIDNEY: “After waiting six months for a transplant, Oregon Symphony conductor James DePreist has undergone surgery to receive a kidney from an anonymous donor… He suffers from kidney disease, which is incurable, but DePreist has said a new kidney ‘lasts indefinitely.'” Andante (AP) 12/05/01

WALT’S CENTENARY: “Hollywood is celebrating the life and career of one of entertainment’s most influential figures. Walt Disney, who would have been 100 years old on Wednesday, played a pivotal role in developing family entertainment – most significantly as a pioneering animator. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation which stages the Oscars, is presenting a special tribute at its Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills.” BBC 12/05/01

• HATING DISNEY: What could be more American than the love of that creator of Snow White, that father of The Mouse, that delighter of children worldwise, Walter E. Disney? Um, despising him, actually. Washington Post 12/05/01

Tuesday December 4MY AFTERNOON WITH TOLKIEN: JRR Tolkien spent years writing his Lord of the Rings. But he signed away rights to making a movie of it 30 years ago not because he thought anyone would ever actually make a movie. No, “the deal meant, at least, that film company lawyers would save him from the distraction of guarding his copyrights from people making Hobbit T-shirts or plastic Gandalf toys, and let him get on with his work.” The Telegraph (UK) 12/04/01

• Previously: TOLKIEN FAMILY DISPUTE: A dispute over the soon-to-be-released Lord of the Rings movie has split members of the Tolkien family. “J. R. R. Tolkien signed away the film rights to The Lord of the Rings for just £10,000 in 1968, five years before his death at the age of 81.” New Zealand Herald 12/03/01

Monday December 3

HOSTILE WITNESSES: The trial of Sotheby’s chairman Al Taubman is the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of. (In fact, HBO is already planning a movie about the trial.) Character assassination, barely veiled threats, and repeated assertions that Taubman is a brainless idiot who “couldn’t read a balance sheet if his last million depended on it” are par for the course in a trial that was supposed to be about price-fixing in America’s auction houses. Chicago Tribune 12/03/01

• NOTHING NEW HERE: The Taubman trial is just the latest in a long line of Love-Money-Betrayal in New York stories stretching back to America’s Gilded Age. Chicago Tribune 12/03/01

HSU DIES: “Fei-Ping Hsu, a Chinese-born American concert pianist who built an acclaimed career after spending part of the 1960s banished to a rural rice farm, was killed in a car accident in northeastern China. He was 51.” Nando Times (AP) 12/03/01

THE MUSICAL PSYCHIC: Psychic Rosemary Isabel Brown has died at the age of 85. “She claimed to have been in touch with Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin and some 20 other composers who had employed her as their contact on earth to receive their latest compositions. How was it that a woman apparently of little musical ability had one day sat at a piano and had begun to play Chopin with ease, and Chopin music that no one had heard before?” The Economist 11/30/01

Sunday December 2

REMEMBERING GEORGE: George Harrison’s demise removes the impressionable enthusiast whose inquisitive nature guided the Beatles beyond the frontiers which had hitherto constrained the attitudes and behaviour of four-piece beat groups from the industrial cities of the north. He may not have written the songs for which they will be remembered, but without his gift for discovery the group might have taken quite a different course and possibly a much less interesting and productive one. The Guardian (UK) 12/01/01

• A NEW GEORGE: “A last album of George Harrison’s music was being finished in secrecy in the months before his death. He played tracks from the CD to his family and friends in his private room at a Los Angeles hospital last Sunday, four days before he died.” Sunday Times (UK) 12/02/01
• WHAT GEORGE MEANS TO ME: “He has passed, but he has left us with a few tools to make our own passing easier. His music tells us to savor what matters, what we offer each other and ourselves.” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot 12/01/0

THE NEXT DISNEY? John Lasseter, the animation wiz behind Toy Story is being called the Walt Disney of the 21st Century. “He gives the impression of being a sane man who has, until recently, been considered crazy. ‘In order to work in animation, part of you has to be a child that’s never grown up.” The Telegraph (UK) 12/01/01

CRITIC’S CRITIC: By the end of his life (he died at age 85 last week) former Washington Post music critic Paul Hume had stopped listening to music, said his wife. It didn’t interest him anymore. But “the defining characteristic of Hume’s tenure was an intense love for everything about music and the making of it. That may seem like an awfully obvious thing for a music critic, but it can’t be taken for granted.” Baltimore Sun 12/02/01

Friday November 30THERE GOES THE SUN: “George Harrison, the Beatles’ quiet lead guitarist and spiritual explorer who added both rock ‘n’ roll flash and a touch of the mystic to the band’s timeless magic, has died. He was 58.” Hollywood Reporter (AP) 11/30/01

• COME TOGETHER: In the years since the breakup of the Beatles, the surviving members and their families have often been something of a dysfunctional bunch. But with the death of George Harrison from throat cancer, Paul, Ringo, Yoko, et al, are united in their grief, and their respect for Harrison. BBC 11/30/01

A SEPARATE PASSING: Author John Knowles has died at the age of 75. His classic novel of wartime and adolescent conflict, A Separate Peace, has been required reading since its publication in 1959. Nando Times (AP) 11/30/01

Thursday November 29

DOMB RETURNS TO TSO: “Daniel Domb, the injured cellist involved in a legal battle with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, returns to Roy Thomson Hall tonight to play his first TSO concert in 18 months.” The principal cellist is one of the most respected in North America, but the TSO management tried to have him fired after publicly doubting his claims of disability. Toronto Star 11/29/01

A JAZZ EMPIRE: Jazz impresario Norman Granz “believed in jazz as the great American art form, and insisted that its artists get the same respect as those performing classical music. A non-musician, Granz became one of the most powerful and influential figures in a genre defined by musical invention. In the ’50s, it sometimes seemed the jazz world was the Granz empire because of his omnipresence as impresario, concert promoter, label head and talent manager.” Washington Post 11/28/01

THE BIGGEST BLOWHARD: Call it Dork Wars, if you like. The intellectual battles between New York literary giants of the mid-20th century have become legend in an age where highbrow figures are no longer in the public eye as they once were. But of all the blustering minds the wars brought to the cultural fore, none was more disputatious, more ready for a fight, than Dwight Macdonald. A new collection of letters illustrates the point. National Post (Canada) 11/29/01

QUITE A RAU OVER SOME ART: His name is Dr. Gustave Rau, and he is the owner of one of the world’s greatest privately held collections of European art. He is also quite elderly, and of dubiously sound mind, a condition which has caused his own lawyers to seek for control of the collection to be wrested from him. As it turns out, Dr. Rau, who spent a couple of decades setting up clinics in rural Africa, still has quite a bit of fight left in him. The New York Times 11/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday November 27

THE FIRST BILLIONAIRE AUTHOR: JK Rowling is on her way to becoming the world’s first billionaire author. She’s sold 124 million books, but the real money is coming from numerous merchandising deals. “Rowling received an advance of around $3000 (US) for the first story of her schoolboy wizard hero, ahead of publication in 1997. Her negotiating position has strengthened immeasurably since then.” The Age (Melbourne) 11/27/01

Monday November 26

JARVI RETURNS: Conductor Neeme Jarvi returned to the podium over the weekend with his first concerts since he suffered a stroke last July. “The instant Jarvi appeared from the right stage entrance for the first time Friday night, the audience of 2,200 rose and cheered ‘Bravo, maestro!’ and Bravo, Neeme!’ “ Detroit News 11/25/01

JAZZ IMPRESARIO DIES: “Impresario Norman Granz, who set the agenda for the business of jazz through most of the 20th century by producing legendary recordings and making the music accessible to a wider audience, has died. He was 83.” Los Angeles Times 11/24/01

CONDUCTOR TO WATCH: Conductor David Robertson is a conductor everyone in the music establishment seems to be watching. He was mentioned as a candidate for the Philadelphia and New York Phil top spots this year. And while he got neither, “there is a growing sense in the music world that Mr. Robertson’s day is coming. Traveling the circuit throughout the year, accepting guest assignments with top orchestras like those in Chicago, Cleveland and New York, he has become an audience favorite and a reviewer’s darling.” The New York Times 11/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday November 25

RICH BUT UNKNOWN: Who’s the richest painter in Britain? Forget the usual suspects – it’s Andrew Vicari. This year alone he sold a series of paintings to a Saudi company for $28.6 million. “Unlike his rivals in wealth, though, Vicari is practically unknown in his homeland. No matter that in China they hold loving retrospectives of his work, or that there are three museums devoted to his oeuvre in Saudi Arabia. Or that Vicari is the official painter for Interpol and the CRS, France’s much-hated elite police force. No matter at all.” The Age (Melbourne) 11/25/01

KEYS TO A CAREER: In a time when concert pianists have an ever-tougher time making careers, Jean-Yves Thibaudet is an “unregenerate people-person on a roll: 200 concert dates a year at international music capitals, an exclusive recording contract with Decca and a discography numbering 30-plus.” Los Angeles Times 11/24/01

Wednesday November 21

DEPRIEST TO GET TRANSPLANT: James DePriest, conductor of the Oregon Symphony, will get a kidney transplant December 3. DePriest has been on dialysis for two years, and the donor “is a close, personal friend of his” who wants to remain anonymous. The Oregonian 11/21/01

Tuesday November 20

ARGERICH CANCELS: Pianist Martha Argerich has canceled all her concerts through February, on the advice of doctors. “The 60-year-old Argentine-born pianist, whose melanoma was believed to have gone into remission, had been scheduled to perform in New York, Paris and London. But those concerts have been canceled.” Chicago Sun-Times (AP) 11/20/01

CURATOR JAILED: A former curator with the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum was sentenced to 15 years in jail for stealing American Indian artifacts from the museum. He took items “valued at more than $100,000, including a rare war club, beaded buckskin bag, cradle board cover, quiver and silver earrings.” New Jersey Online (AP) 11/19/01

Sunday November 18

WHAT HO, WODEHOUSE? P.G. Wodehouse, creator of the wildly popular “Jeeves” stories, and a national hero of humor in the U.K., has been dead for more than a quarter of a century now, but still, clouds of controversy continue to swirl around the details of his life. The most disturbing allegations, which dogged the writer for his last thirty years, had Wodehouse betraying his country and siding with Hitler during World War II. In truth, writes his biographer, Wodehouse’s relationship with the Third Reich was much more complex. The Observer (UK) 11/18/01

Thursday November 15

ART OF WINE: Robert Mondavi made millions selling wine. Now he’s giving some of those millions away to the study of wine and the arts. Sacramento Bee 11/14/01

STRASBERG AT 100: Acting teacher Lee Strasberg is a legend (and still a living one). “Because of the on-camera success of so many of Strasberg’s students – Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman among them – he gained a worldwide reputation as the father of modern film acting.” On the other hand, “The estimable director/critic Robert Brustein once labeled Strasberg a ‘highly overrated cultural icon,’ and Marlon Brando wrote that it wasn’t Strasberg who taught him to act but Stella Adler and Elia Kazan.” Backstage 11/14/01

Wednesday November 14

LA STUPENDA AT 75: Joan Sutherland is 75, an amazing age when you consider she was still singing romantic leads until 1990. What does she think about modern opera companies? Too many “don’t care about singing, are not interested in whoever wrote the opera, know nothing of the period and try and dress it out of the cheapest shops”. The Age (Melbourne) 11/14/01

Sunday November 11

PRANKSTER SLEEPS: “Ken Kesey, whose LSD-fueled bus ride became a symbol of the psychedelic 1960s after he won fame as a novelist with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, died yesterday morning. He was 66.” Baltimore Sun (AP) 11/11/01

ISLAND OF GLOOM: VS Naipaul just won the Nobel Prize for literature. But he’s still not very happy. “Asked if he reads reviews of his books, he almost – but not quite – snickered, twitching his head in silent mirth. ‘No, no, no.’ So others’ opinions about his work have no value? ‘No, no, no’.” Chicago Tribune 11/09/01

OUT OF CUBA: “Five years ago, Ibrahim Ferrer, then 68, was a retired singer who could barely scrape a living selling lottery tickets and shining shoes. Then band leader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez unexpectedly asked him to join a recording session produced by the American guitarist Ry Cooder at the Egrem studios in Havana. The session produced the almost surreally successful (six million and still selling) Buena Vista Social Club album.” It’s one of the most amazing turnarounds in pop music history. The Telegraph (UK) 11/10/01

IRON MAN DOMINGO: Five years ago Placido Domingo said he thought he had about five years of singing left in him. But one of the world’s busiest musicians is making vocal commitments five years from now. Will he know when it’s time to quit? “I have a good ear and a good sense, and my wife would tell me.” The Sunday Times (UK) 11/11/01

Friday November 9

A TYPEFACE OF HIS OWN: Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, who died in July, has been honored in a most distinctive way by his publisher, Random House of Canada, and by the Giller Prize. A new typeface has been commissioned and designed in his honor. It will be called, of course, the Richler typeface, and will be used in printing his last book, Dispatches from the Sporting Life. Random House

SONY CHAIRMAN COLLAPSES CONDUCTING CONCERT: “Norio Ohga, 71, the chairman of Sony Corporation, was conducting the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra at the Beijing Music Festival last night when he collapsed during the performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. He is currently recuperating, in a stable condition, at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing.” Gramophone 11/08/01

Thursday November 8

RIFKIN TO HIRSHHORN: “Ned Rifkin, director of the Menil Collection in Houston, will be the new head of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, sources say.” It’s a homecoming; Rifkin spent much of the 80s as a curator at the Hirshhorn. Washington Post 11/07/01

THE GREAT AUCTION HOUSE TRIAL: The trial against Sotheby’s ex-chairman opens this week. “For the incestuous art world, where auction-house proles can grow up to be lordly dealers, the price-fixing trial has a certain Freudian tone. Alfred Taubman, the former Sotheby’s chairman – and still its largest shareholder – plays the role of overbearing father, and Dede Brooks, his former protégée, is the bossy big sister. ‘Of course he’s guilty,’ said one spectator, relishing the Lear-like scene. ‘He’s such a megalomaniac’.” New York Magazine 11/05/01

THE ARTIST WITHIN: When he’s not busy being a disctator, Saddam Hussein is an artist. “Underneath a seemingly tyrannical nature, there lives a passionate soul yearning to share his deepest, most delicate and intimate thoughts. Saddam has written a romance novel. Released earlier this year, Zabibah and the King appears to have won the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and made Saddam Hussein a best-selling novelist – according to the Iraq Press it has been selling out of Iraqi bookstores and there are already over 1,000,000 copies in print.” The Weekly Standard 11/08/01

• Previously: SADDAM ON STAGE: Zabibah and the King, a best-selling novel in Iraq, will be transformed into a big-budget stage play in Baghdad; it is rumored that a 20-part TV version of the story will be filmed as well. Saddam Hussein himself is believed to have written the original story, which is perceived as an allegory of the relationship between Iraq and the Western world. Salon 08/15/01

ARCHITECT OF ANOTHER TIME: When he died in 1974, Louis Kahn was considered by some to be America’s leading architect. “Kahn used the basic tools of architecture—space, proportion, light, texture—sparely and with an almost religious reverence.” But his personal life was messy and produced, on parallel tracks, three families. The New Yorker 11/12/01

ANTHONY SHAFFER, 75: Anthony Shaffer, award-winning playwright and twin brother of playwright Peter Shaffer, has died at his home in London. Anthony Shaffer’s best-known work was Sleuth, which was a success in London, won a Tony on Broadway, and was nominated for two Oscars as a movie with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier. Nando Times (AP) 11/07/01

Wednesday November 7

POET CANNED: The American Academy of Poets has fired its popular executive director. “William Wadsworth, 51, a poet and former wine store owner, ran the 65-year-old organization for 12 years, during which he updated its image, increased its profile, created a popular Web site to encourage poetry reading and turned April into poetry month.” But the organization has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt… The New York Times 11/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ADAMS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE: John Adams has faced resistance, complaining, and outright hostility towards his music on his way to becoming one of this era’s most popular and successful composers. On the heels of the Boston Symphony’s cancellation, for reasons of subject matter, of Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, the composer remains convinced that audiences are more adventurous, intelligent, and willing to be challenged than they are usually given credit for. Andante 11/07/01

• SF CRITIC – BOSTON SCREWED UP: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will now soothe you with its rendition of ‘Kitten on the Keys,’ performed on kazoos. It hasn’t quite come to that, but it just might, given the orchestra’s ridiculous decision last week to cancel performances of “Choruses From ‘The Death of Klinghoffer’ by Bay Area composer John Adams.” San Francisco Chronicle 11/07/01

INTRODUCER TO ART: Ernst Gombrich, who died last weekend at the age of 92, was one of the most influential figures in visual art. His The Story of Art was basic history. In he “past half-century the book, which has gone through 16 editions and been translated into 32 languages since its publication in 1950, has been the chief introduction to western art for millions of people around the world.” The Guardian (UK) 11/07/01

Tuesday November 6

SIR ERNST GOMBRICH, 92: The eminent art historian’s “The Story of Art (1950, 16th edition 1995) has been the introduction to the visual arts for innumerable people for more than 50 years, while his major theoretical books, Art and Illusion (1960), the papers gathered in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) and other volumes, have been pivotal for professional art historians. The Guardian (UK) 11/06/01

WHITHER STOCKHAUSEN? It’s now been over a month since the composer’s ill-timed comments calling the NYC attacks the world’s greatest work of art. What has the controversy done to the cult of personality that has always surrounded the iconoclastic Stockhausen? Um, strengthened it, actually. But at what price? Andante 10/06/01

Monday November 5

MY DINNER WITH MARTHA: Martha Argerich is the day’s reigning piano diva. Alex Ross meets her for dinner: “Argerich is notoriously difficult to pin down. She cancels concerts, even entire tours, at the last minute, changes programs at will, and generally drives the programming people crazy. She has become a substantial presence in New York in recent years, but only because her stardom has given her unprecedented latitude to schedule events on short notice.” The New Yorker 11/05/01

THE ART OF LIGHTING: Previous winners of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize of $250,000 for excellence in the arts include Merce Cunningham, Arthur Miller, Isabel Allende and Bob Dylan. This year’s award goes to lighting designer Jennifer Tipton, who accepts on behalf of her profession: “Lighting, in many areas of the world, is not even considered an art.” New York Times 11/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday November 4

SPANO IN ATLANTA: Robert Spano has taken an unconventional path in his career. Now, as he takes over leading the Atlanta Symphony, some wonder how his theatrical approach will play. Los Angeles Times 11/03/01

THE TWO GEORGES: “George Rochberg tipped the world away from audience-alienating atonality, and is, in many ways, responsible for the neo-tonalists who are embraced by symphony orchestras around the world. George Crumb was a major pioneer of alternative ensembles and new ways of using old instruments, creating universes of sound, and bringing a whole new mystical element to music. Together, they developed the art of musical collage, taking disparate musical sources from pop tunes to primal cries, and showing that in art, as in life, integration and resolution aren’t necessary.” Now at the ends of their careers, two musical pioneers look back. Philadelphia Inquirer 11/04/01

Thursday November 1

SAYING GOODBYE: “It was Isaac Stern’s last standing ovation at Carnegie Hall. After some six decades and 200 performances there, Stern was gone. And yet he wasn’t. A month after his death at age 81, the man who prevented one of America’s citadels of culture from being turned into an office tower was remembered Tuesday with a free concert inside the auditorium named for him.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) (AP) 11/01/01

Tuesday October 30

THE WORLD’S MOST UNPRONOUNCABLE PRIZE: “The first recipient of Canada’s single largest arts prize is Toronto theatre director Daniel Brooks, it was announced last night at a ceremony at the University of Toronto. Brooks, 43, was named the inaugural recipient of the Elinore and Lou Siminovitch Prize in Canadian Theatre, worth $100,000. The award, to be handed out annually, was created in January of this year to recognize an artist in mid-career ‘who has contributed significantly to the fabric of theatrical life through a total body of work.'” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 10/30/01

Monday October 29

FAMILY MATTERS: “The death of the billionaire aesthete Daniel Wildenstein has brought to an end the most revealing chapter so far in the history of perhaps the world’s wealthiest, most secretive family of art dealers.” The Times (UK) 10/26/01

THE PICASSO VIRUS: In a remarkable new book, Picasso, My Grandfather, to be published on November 8, Marina Picasso describes how each member of the family became dependent on and cravenly submissive to Picasso’s towering ego. ‘The Picasso virus to which we fell victim was subtle and undetectable,” she says. “It was a combination of promises not kept, abuse of power, mortification, contempt and, above all, incommunicability. We were defenceless against it’.” Sunday Times (UK) 10/28/01

Friday October 26

THEROUX: UNDERSTANDING NAIPAUL: “About a month ago, without any noticeable provocation, VS Naipaul attacked the work and reputations of EM Forster, James Joyce, Dickens, Stendhal, JM Keynes, Wole Soyinka and the recently deceased RK Narayan. We who know Naipaul understand that gratuitous outbursts such as this nearly always precede the appearance of a Naipaul work. In spirit it is like a boxer’s frenzy of boasting and threats before an important match. The fact is that, even though I have suggested that Naipaul is a sourpuss, a cheapskate and a blamer, I have the highest regard for his work.” Daily Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 10/24/01

BERGMAN’S STILL DIRECTING: “Ingmar Bergman is will stage a play for Swedish Television next year. The reclusive 83-year-old filmmaker will direct his chamber play Anna. Swedish media speculated it would be a sequel to Scenes From a Marriage, a six-part TV series that was made into a movie in 1973.” Nando Times (AP) 10/25/01

Thursday October 25

PROMINENT COLLECTOR DIES: “Daniel Wildenstein, one of the world’s leading art dealers and collectors whose family owns two prestigious Manhattan galleries, has died, the Wildenstein Institute said Thursday. He was 84.” Washington Post (AP) 10/25/01

GLASS IN HOLLYWOOD: Considering the low esteem in which the public has generally held minimalist art, the continued popularity of composer Philip Glass is nothing short of astonishing. Somehow, Glass seems to have managed to bring life and surprise to a musical form designed to remove both, and his forays into the world of film scoring brought his work to a wide audience. A new project in L.A. offers audiences the chance to watch a “live” soundtrack: an ensemble playing Glass’s music accompanies a series of new film shorts. Los Angeles Times 10/25/01

Wednesday October 24

ARTISTS WIN GENIUS AWARDS: The MacArthur Foundation has announced the recipients of this year’s “Genius” awards. Among them, English pianist Stephen Hough; he’ll get $500,000. BBC 10/24/01

HOWARD FINSTER, 84: One of the most well-known outsider artists has died. “Finster was considered a pioneer among self-taught artists, advancing the ‘outsider’ movement with his unique personality, unflagging salesmanship and resolute work ethic. For more than three decades, he traveled Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee preaching at tent revivals and supplementing his income with odd jobs, including plumbing and bicycle repair.” MSNBC (AP) 10/23/01

Tuesday October 23

SO MUCH FOR PRIVILEGED ARTISTS: The Bolshoi’s Maya Plisetskaya was one of the great ballerinas of the 20th Century. “The humiliations she and other artists endured at the hands of government handlers and arts bureaucrats challenge popular notions of the privileged lives of Soviet artists. Always forced to beg — to travel, to prepare new works, to be paid fairly — Plisetskaya and her colleagues more closely resembled Russian serf artists of the 18th century than cultural workers in a modern socialist state.” The New York Times 10/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

SEARCHING FOR THAT OLD FEELING: Few icons of the American essay enjoy the success that Russell Baker has achieved in his life. From his various memoirs of growing up, which still sell quite well, to his popular New York Times op-ed pieces, which he retired from writing several years back, his trademark style has been a constant for countless readers. But these days, Baker isn’t finding much about the world to make light of, and it’s not just the current tensions that are bothering him. Boston Globe 10/23/01

Friday October 19

TALENT ON LOAN FROM GOD? Martin Amis hosts an interview show, and ends up revealing more about himself than his guests. “Amis has created within his own mind a notion of ‘talent’, which he deifies and worships. He says, with the certainty of a man who has never doubted his own ability, that ‘your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent’. Literary talent is his sole criterion for success, and anybody outside that world – a tiler, for example – is worthless. He emerges as obsessed with his own place in literature, and notes with sadness: ‘Usually writers never find out how good they are because that starts with the obituaries’.” New Statesman 10/15/01

JAY LIVINGSTON, 86: Composer and lyricist Jay Livingston, who was nominated for seven Oscar and won three, died at his home in Los Angeles. With partner Ray Evans, he wrote such pop hits as Silver Bells, Mona Lisa, and Que Sera, Sera. Nando Times 10/17/01

RAOUL KRAUSHAAR, 93: Composer Raoul Kraushaar, who wrote theme music for many TV shows, including The Fugitive and The Untouchables, died at his home in Florida. He was probably best known for his work on the film version of Cabaret. Washington Post 10/16/01

Tuesday October 16

MAKING MODERN MATTER: When Nicholas Serota became director of the Tate, contemporary art was seen as a problem in England. “Serota’s efforts have transformed us into a nation that cares about contemporary art, and it is one of his proudest achievements.” London Evening Standard 10/16/01

THE DIRECTOR COMPLAINS: When Australia’s National Gallery director Dr Brian Kennedy appointed John McDonald as head of the museum’s Australian Art, it was a controversial decision. But a few months after the September 2000 appointment, Kennedy regretted the appointment. He outlined his grievances in a five-page memo… Sydney Morning Herald 10/16/01

Monday October 15

DOWNFALL OF A CRITIC: Kenneth Tynan was a great theatre critic. “His reviews invaluably preserve the excitement of performances that would have perished if he hadn’t described them.” But once he left his post as critic at The Observer “the culture decided that it had no further use for the adversary activity of criticism, expecting critics to reinvent themselves as manufacturers of glossy advertising copy. It’s a sad, cautionary tale about false values, professional ethics and the degeneration of journalism in recent decades.” The Observer (UK) 10/14/01

THE ARTIST WHO KEEPS GOING: He lives at the fringe, shunned by galleries and dealers who grew tired of his quirks and neediness years ago. In a world soaked in eccentricity and skewed perspectives, John Grazier is the ultimate at being strange. He swings from bouts of homelessness to raking in $100,000 commissions. When he’s down, he paints on the living room floors of friends’ houses – with no easel, no chair and no dropcloth. And because he can’t rely on others to sell his paintings, he does it himself, like some Wild West art cowboy, blazing trails in his Handi-Van, hawking pictures and making small bursts of money.” Washington Post 10/14/01

GREASING THE WHEELS: Taking a symphony orchestra on an international tour is no easy task. Preparations begin two years in advance, and no detail is left unresearched. Still, on the road, unexpected crises are bound to manifest themselves, and when they do, nearly every major American orchestra has the same reaction. They call Guido. Yes, Guido. Detroit Free Press 10/15/01

Sunday October 14

IMMODEST, MAYBE, BUT STILL NOBEL: This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V.S. Naipaul, is nothing if not aware of his own accomplishments. He claims, among other things, to have helped bring India into modern times through his writing, and to have helped “educate” the country’s population. Not everyone appreciated the help: “The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there is no intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry.” BBC 10/12/01

A REALISTIC WAGNERIAN: Daniel Barenboim encountered a firestorm of protest earlier this year when he broke a long-standing taboo on the performance of Wagner in Israel. But though Barenboim has been a champion of the controversial composer’s work throughout his career, he has never attempted to minimize Wagner’s role in the rise of deadly anti-Semitism in Europe, or to claim that this bigotry does not inform Wagner’s music. Rather, he embraces the contradictory nature of a man who could harbor such vicious hatred in his own mind, yet produce works of such tremendous beauty and intelligence. The New York Times 10/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ONLY IN NEW YORK: A strolling violinist in a gold loincloth and very little else would cause the denizens of most cities to call the police, or at least cross the street. But in New York, such a man can become a minor celebrity, especially when he gains a reputation as the most talented street musician in the city. “In his soloperas, Thoth, a classically trained musician, is the composer, orchestra, singers and dancers. His music has elements of classical, overlayed with primal rhythms, but it defies categorization.” New York Post 10/14/01

Friday October 12

MADRID OPERA HERO DIES: “Conductor Luis Antonio Garcia Navarro, credited with reviving Madrid’s opera house after its 1997 reinauguration and bringing it international fame, has died. He was 60.” Nando Times (AP) 10/11/01

COMING TO TERMS WITH AN OLD FRIEND/ENEMY: Think of Ödön von Horváth as Germany’s answer to Garrison Keillor – a much-beloved writer and teller of tales about his hometown that make locals distinctly uncomfortable. But unlike Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Horváth’s Murnau really does exist, and his airing of the burg’s dirty laundry for his own literary gain has not sat well with the natives. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10/11/01

NO, HE WON’T BE WRAPPING HELMUT KOHL: “Six years after conquering Berlin by wrapping the Reichstag, Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his French wife, Jeanne-Claude, return to the city for two shows, one big, one small.” The Art Newspaper 10/09/01

Thursday October 11

NAIPAUL WINS NOBEL IN LITERATURE: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’. V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.” Nobel Institute (Sweden) 10/11/01

NEW HEAD OF SCOTLAND MUSEUMS: Dr. Gordon Rintoul, who was chief executive of Sheffield Galleries, has been appointed as the new director of the National Museums of Scotland, effective February 2002. He succeeds Mark Jones, who left for the Victoria and Albert in London. The Herald (Scotland) 10/11/01

DSO VIOLINIST HAS REUNION ON TOUR: “When the Detroit Symphony Orchestra arrived in Nuremberg, Germany, on Tuesday, violinist Marian Tanau added another link to the chain of his remarkable destiny. Waiting for him was Joseph Muller, a Romanian-born German national, who in 1989 risked his career to help Tanau, then 22, defect from Romania.” Detroit Free Press 10/11/01

TRACING THREE DECADES OF BRITISH THEATER: Michael Billington has been the theater critic at London’s Guardian newspaper for thirty years now, and he has watched the business evolve in countless ways. Where plays were once dominant, musicals are now the backbone of the industry. Superstar composers and directors have come to wield remarkable power. But “the first, and most striking, fact is that the basic structure of British theatre has more or less survived.” The Guardian (UK) 10/10/01

Wednesday October 10

DIRECTOR ROSS DIES: “Herbert Ross, a choreographer and director who worked on films including Funny Lady with Barbra Streisand and Steel Magnolias with Julia Roberts, died Tuesday. He was 74.” Dallas Morning News (AP) 10/10/01

AND SHE WISHES SHE’D REVIEWED DEEP THROAT: Pauline Kael, who died last month, was the film critic in many minds. Why? Chaplin, she thought, “pushed too hard.” Spielberg has “become so uninteresting now.” In comedy, her favorites were the Ritz Brothers. And those awful taboos: “There’s almost no one you can make fun of now. The women’s movement, in particular, has added many taboos. You can’t have a dumb blonde anymore, and the dumb blonde was such a wonderful stereotype.” The New Yorker 10/08/01

SERRANO COMES TO BRITAIN: The man whose art helped cause one of America’s most notorious political dogfights, Andres Serrano, is being exhibited in London this month, and critics there are showing no mercy. Free speech advocates in the U.S. championed Serrano’s photography when Congressional leaders used it as fodder for their crusade against public arts funding, but in the opinions of several U.K. writers, “he is a third-rate artist, a man who has nothing interesting, important or original to say about the subjects he treats.” The Daily Telegraph (UK) 10/10/01

NEW CHIEF FOR SF OPERA CENTER: “American soprano Sheri Greenawald has been appointed as the new director of the San Francisco Opera Center in California… Greenawald’s appointment is the latest in a series of management changes wrought by Pamela Rosenberg, who recently took over as general director of San Francisco Opera from Lofti Mansouri.” Gramophone 10/09/01

ARTS MAN TO HEAD RUSSIAN TV: “The Hermitage director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, has been elected chairman of the board of Russia’s largest television network, ORT. The move is part of the government’s bid to bring order to the station which has long been embroiled in conflict and corruption.” The Art Newspaper 10/08/01

Tuesday October 9

HERB BLOCK, 91: Herbert L. Block, whose “Herblock” signature marked scathing political cartoons for more than 60 years, died in Washington. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, and shared a fourth. For more than 50 years, he was read – and often feared – at the breakfast tables of the most powerful figures in American government, but he never sought their favor or tried to be one of them. Washington Post 10/08/01

IRISH MUSEUM DIRECTOR TO NEW POST: “Declan Mcgonagle, who quit his post as director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) last April, is to take up a new position with the City Arts Centre in Dublin from December 1st. Though he has as yet no job title, he will head the centre as it begins a two-year process of redefinition and revitalisation.” The Irish Times 10/08/01

Sunday October 7

NOBEL VERSE: Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and the Nobel Prizes had a “wretched” personal life. “But there was one romantic matter which he kept largely confidential: he was a writer himself. To call him a poet is an exaggeration, but Nobel produced enough, in several genres, to suggest that he had serious literary intentions. He wrote fiction in middle life and drama in his last years, but his youthful efforts were in verse – a heavily shod Miltonic blank verse, written in English, none of it published in his lifetime, and most destroyed at the time of his death by the circumspect executors.” The Guardian (UK) 10/06/01

WOMEN’S MUSEUM DIRECTOR SUDDENLY QUITS: After only three months on the job as director of the National Museum of Women in Washington DC, Ellen D. Reeder has suddenly resigned. “The first scholar of international stature to direct the museum, Reeder brought with her the promise of an intellectual heft some felt the museum had always lacked. The museum has had frequent turnover: six directors in the 14 years since it was founded.” Washington Post 10/06/01

THE AMERICAN MAESTRO AT HOME: James Conlon is one of America’s great conductors, admired and respected the world over for his extensive repertoire and precise style. But, like so many other American maestros, he has been forced to spend much of his career overseas. Now, firmly established as one of the top men in his profession, he has the luxury of letting the world (and America) come to him. “Drop in on Mr. Conlon in rehearsal, and you may find him disciplined, diagnostic, in control: a touch schoolmasterly.” The New York Times 10/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday October 5

WHY DID LINCOLN CENTER PREZ QUIT? When Gordon Davis was named president of Lincoln Center last year, he described the post as his “dream job.” But “what actually happened was a study in the treacherous—some would say dysfunctional—politics of the city’s largest and most fractious arts organization. Hamstrung by rivalries among the center’s warring constituent members; undercut by [Lincoln Center chairwoman] Beverly Sills, who seemed unwilling to cede power to her new president; and derided by staff members, who claimed he was unwilling—or unable—to make swift decisions, a disillusioned Mr. Davis finally called it quits on Sept. 27.” New York Observer 10/03/01

THE MAN NEXT DOOR: For 35 years we lived across the hall from Isaac Stern. “One grew used to the steady stream of great musicians—Eugene Istomin, Yefim Bronfman, Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Jaime Laredo, Yo-Yo Ma—who would daily emerge from the elevator, seemingly ordinary citizens until they walked into 19F and started to play. I have a recurring image of running into Isaac in the hallway surrounded by piles of luggage: I’d be on my way to the grocery store to buy a carton of orange juice and some cream cheese; he’d be on his way to Vienna or Paris or Moscow to perform Haydn or Saint-Saëns or Tchaikovsky.” New York Observer 10/03/01

Tuesday October 2

GIRL WONDER: How to explain the wide appeal of Charlotte Church? She’s still only 15 years old, but “although we’ve already had three years of Church’s recording career, her appeal remains rooted in her position as a child wonder. It helps that, so far, she is not a pop singer. There are no Britney v Charlotte wars. Her contemporaries are not interested in her records – after all, teenagers don’t want to listen to either Rossini arias or Men of Harlech. New Statesman 10/01/01

Monday October 1

SAY IT THROUGH ART: Woody Allen says that the September 11th attacks are “fair game” for any artist who has something to say about them. “It is not likely that I would do something like that but I do think that it’s fair game for any artist who has the inspiration or insight into that terrible event.” The Guardian 09/30/01

Sunday September 30

THE DIFFICULT MR. STOCKHAUSEN: Did composer Karlheinz Stockhausen really tell a journalist that the attack on the World Trade Center towers was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”? He says not and that he was misquoted. “Stockhausen the composer, and indeed the man, has always generated both horror and adulation. His total dedication to his work is admired and feared, his criticisms of almost every other musical genre (other than his own) are legendary, his demands that we throw away our attachments to ‘the music of the past’ seem like the strictures of a feared schoolmaster, and his grandiose spiritual pronouncements are often greeted with derision. And yet he is universally regarded, even by his opponents, as one of the key figures in contemporary music, and he is revered by a new generation of electronic pop and dance acts as a mentor.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/29/01

• DID HE MISS THE POINT, OR DID WE? “Stockhausen, in focusing on the formal and visual elements of the terrorist deathwork, forgot the idea that (as Bach indicated in all of his manuscripts) all art should be created for the greater glory of God — unless, of course, you have some perverted notion of what God is.” Andante 09/30/01
• HELP CREATE OR DESTROY IT? “Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the great figures in modern comosition, a revolutionary whose shadow stretches across contemporary music in all its incarnations. Along with such avant garde goliaths as Pierre Boulez and John Cage, he embodies the iconoclastic spirit that has torn away old certainties such as melody and fixed time-signatures, and recast the fundamentals of music in the 20th century.” The Guardian (UK) 09/29/01

LIVING LIFE BACKWARDS: Kenneth Tynan was the 20th Century’s greatest theatre critic. But his biggest accomplishments were made by his 30s, and he was irrelevant by the time he dies. A new book examines his life. “It is, of course, gratifying for a theatre critic to discover that Tynan, undoubtedly the greatest dramatic critic of the 20th century, probably the greatest since Hazlitt, should, 21 years after his death, be one of the publishing sensations of the year.” The Telegraph (UK) 09/29/01

Friday September 28

IMPERIAL SAX PLAYER: Sax-player Ornette Coleman Wins the Japanese “Praemium Imperiale” arts award. Worth $140,000, “the prestigious award was given ‘under the high patronage of his Imperial Highness Prince Hitachi of Japan,’ and would be presented to Coleman by former French Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who is on the board of the Japan Art Association.” Culturekiosque 09/27/01

A POET LAUREATE FOR THE MASSES? America’s new poet laureate, Billy Collins, is funny, dry, and accessible to a wide range of readers. He’s not entirely certain that he’s happy about that last one. “Being called ‘accessible’ is something he both fears and aspires to, comparing it to a girl endlessly labeled ‘cute.'” Arizona Republic (AP) 09/27/01

UNDERSTANDING WARHOL: “The great glory of Warhol is that, even more than with Moses or Mozart, you can believe anything, and find a wealth of material to complicate your theory into a self-sustaining object of study. He is a blank-check metaphor to be spent time and again. The only trouble comes if you try to cash in, mistake hypothetical for history.” Salon 09/27/01

Thursday September 27

JENS NYGAARD, 69: Jens Nygaard, founder and conductor of the Jupiter Symphony, died at his home in New York. His energetic conducting was legendary, as was his idiosyncratic programming. “I never programmed a piece I was not completely, 100-percent committed to,” Mr. Nygaard said. “And I’m fortunate because I can love a Stephen Foster song, a Spohr symphony, a Caccini motet and a Beethoven symphony equally.” The New York Times 09/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday September 26

GETTING UGLY: A Chinese website has been ordered to pay Zang Tianshuo, one of China’s best-known singers, damages for voting him China’s third-ugliest singer. The singer said his life had fallen apart after the poll was published last year. “The court decision fell far short of the original 950,000 yuan ($A225,000) claimed by Mr Zang, which included 200,000 yuan for ‘spiritual damage’. The Age (Melbourne) 09/26/01

Tuesday September 25

POWELL PULLS OUT: Actress Linda Powell, daughter of the US Secretary of State, has pulled out of a role in London’s National Theatre. “She was due to arrive here in October, but has withdrawn from the show for obvious security reasons.” BBC 09/25/01

ANOTHER STERN TRIBUTE: Violinist Isaac Stern “changed the very idea of what a classical musician does. Musicians once stayed on the political sidelines, practicing scales and bringing beauty to the world. Stern was a highly effective activist, so much so that he was too often guilty of not practicing scales.” Philadelphia Inquirer 09/25/01

Monday September 24

MASUR TO GET TRANSPLANT: New York Philharmonic music director Kurt Masur is cancelling weeks of performances in December so he can undergo an organ transplant. “The orchestra did not specify which organ, saying only that it was not his heart. A suitable donor is said to have been found.” The New York Times 09/24/01 (one-time registration required for access)

APPRECIATING ISAAC STERN, 81: “Never a particularly dazzling virtuoso, Isaac Stern was notable rather for the integrity, vigor and emotional honesty of his playing, especially in the standard works of the Classical and Romantic repertoire. In his later years, the quality of his performances often slipped, but even then he was capable of great feats of intellectual bravura and dramatic force, and many of his early recordings document his finest endeavors.” San Francisco Chronicle 09/24/01

• MORE THAN MUSIC: “He left behind three pillars of a legacy: a vast body of recordings that inspired the loyalty of audiences; an adoring circle of colleagues, who remained loyal to him throughout the years of his artistic decline; and a building, Carnegie Hall, to which he remained loyal at a time when it appeared all but certain it would fall to the wrecking ball.” Washington Post 09/24/01
• MASTER PERSUADER: “Despite his musical prowess, Stern’s efforts to save New York City’s Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball in 1960 remain perhaps his greatest legacy. With reasoned arguments, political savvy and boundless charisma and enthusiasm, he rallied support from musicians and audiences to save the historic hall, later becoming head of the nonprofit Carnegie Hall Corporation. In 1997 the hall’s main auditorium was named for him.” Boston Herald 09/24/01
• BREAKOUT ARTIST: Stern was one of those rare artists who was passionately involved with the arts beyond his own career and chosen instrument.” Chicago Sun-Times 09/24/01
• ALL-ROUND AMBASSADOR: “What was most extraordinary was his gestalt: Packed into Stern’s roly-poly frame was an innovative violinist; an indefatigable advocate for such causes as his beloved Carnegie Hall, the National Endowment for the Arts, music education and the support of Israel; and a mentor to several generations of younger musicians, including Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and Midori.” Detroit Free Press 09/24/01

OF WOMEN AND TAXES: Pavarotti talks about his career and tax problems as his trial for tax evasion begins. “If convicted, the big man could get three years’ jail and a crippling fine. Little wonder he looked uneasy – even shaken – in Modena as he denied charges that he had filed falsified tax returns between 1989 and 1995. The prosecution alleged that in some years when Pavarotti earned millions, he declared only a few thousand dollars.” The Australian 09/24/01

• CHILD’S PLAY: Pavarotti’s secretary testifies she began an affair with the aging tenor three weeks after she began working for him, and describes the singer as “so unworldly” that he doesn’t even know how to write a check. The Independent (UK) 09/23/01

Sunday September 23

ISAAC STERN, 81: Isaac Stern, one of the leading violinists of the mid-20th Century and one of the most powerful voices in the music world, has died. He was a foudning member of the National Endowment for the Arts and spurred the drive to save Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball. Washington Post 09/23/01

• CLASSIC IMAGE: “The American classical music world has produced few images as characteristic as that of Mr. Stern, a violin in his hand and a pair of horn- rimmed eyeglasses perched atop his head. It was the image of a musician at work — typically rehearsing and persuading rather than performing, casual rather than formal, engaged rather than passive.” The New York Times 09/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday September 20

SORRY FOR COMMENTS: Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has apologized for comments he made comparing last week’s attack on the World Trade Center to a work of art. The City of Hamburg canceled four concerts of his music this week. “Stockhausen told Hamburg officials he meant to compare the attacks to a production of the devil, Lucifer’s work of art.” Nando Times (AP) 09/19/01

Wednesday September 19

SAYING THE WRONG THING: Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said in a German radio interview Monday that last week’s attacks on the World Trade Center were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there.” The comments didn’t play well; four concerts of his music that were to have formed the thematic focus of the Hamburg Music Festival this weekend were promptly canceled. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 09/19/01

Monday September 17

PAVAROTTI IN COURT (AGAIN): Pavarotti goes to court to defend charges of tax evasion. “Italian prosecutors allege that Pavarotti still owes the government unpaid taxes for the period 1989 to 1995 – despite the tenor’s payment of 24 billion lira in back taxes (£7.8m) in 2000.” BBC 09/17/01

Sunday September 16

CRITICAL RESPONSE: Violinist and national ArtsCentre Orchestra music director Pinchas Zukerman takes criticism personally: “If I hear some really outlandish feedback from subscribers, I pick up the phone and call them. I say ‘What the f— did you mean by that?’ And they go, ‘Oh my God! Is that you?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it’s me. What do you think I should be doing here?’ And usually they say, ‘I didn’t mean it like that’ or ‘I was misunderstood’.” Saturday Night (Canada) 09/15/01

RETURNING OSCAR: Actor Kevin Spacey was the anonymous buyer who paid $150,000 for an Academy Award up for auction. He’ll return it to the Academy. ”I strongly feel that Academy Awards should belong to those who have earned them – not those who simply have the financial means to acquire them.” Chicago Sun-Times (AP) 09/15/01

Friday September 14

ART, DEATH AND TAXES: At the time he died in 1992, Sydney Nolan was Australia’s best-known artist. “Nolan was knighted in 1981, but a decade later, despite his fame, his prolific output and success at marketing his work for more than 50 years, he owed the British tax office a considerable sum. The subsequent death duties are believed to have increased the amount to more than $3 million.” Now the remaining 95 paintings in his estate are to be auctioned to pay taxes. The Age (Melbourne) 09/14/01

ANOTHER MAJOR AWARD FOR ARTHUR MILLER: American playwright Arthur Miller “is among five recipients of the Japan Art Association’s 2001 Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award, which is intended to honor lifetime achievement in categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes.” With all his prizes and honors, Miller, at 85, might seem like a man who has figured things out. He says not. “I don’t have any big answers offhand,” he insists. “I struggle with everything, just like everyone else does.” USAToday 09/14/01

CRITICISM FOR TOO MUCH AND TOO GOOD: Joyce Carol Oates has just published her 94th book. “Her recent Oprah pick, We Were the Mulvaneys, was the author’s first No. 1 best seller and has sold 10 times more than any other book she’s written.” Yet she’s criticized by some for her prolific output. Newsweek 09/17/01

Wednesday September 12

PINNING DOWN WILDE: Oscar Wilde’s wide-ranging body of work has always defied attempts to pigeonhole the author’s legacy. Last year, the British Library presented an exhibition that attempted to capture the many faces of Wilde through manuscripts, letters, and critiques. A somewhat-revised version of “Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts” is scheduled to open in New York this weekend. The New York Times 09/12/01 (one-time registration required for access)

CONLON LEAVING PARIS: “James Conlon, chief conductor of the Paris Opera since 1995, said he will leave his job at the end of his contract in July 2004.” Andante (AP) 09/12/01

Tuesday September 11

MISSING DIGERIDOO-ER: Australia’s most famous digeridoo player is missing. Is he dead? “His community has become caught up in a supernatural rumour mill and both black and white spiritualists claim to be in contact with him. David Blanasi is said to have wandered off to collect wood to make digeridoos on August 6.” Despite an extensive search, he’s still missing. The Australian 09/11/01

Monday September 10

THE ANONYMOUS CHAMPION: Bobby Fischer won the world chess title 30 years ago, then disappeared into obscurity. Now, a grandmaster believes Fischer is playing chess anonymously on the internet. “Nigel Short, Britain’s most celebrated grandmaster of chess, is convinced he has played 50 speed games of chess against Mr. Fischer through the Internet Chess Club, a service that allows players worldwide to play each other online.” National Post (Canada) 09/10/01

Sunday September 9

INSIDE FROM THE OUTSIDE (OR THE OTHER WAY ‘ROUND): Writer VS Naipaul, 69, has “always sought to position himself as a lone, stateless observer, devoid of ideology or affiliation, peers or rivals – a truth-teller without illusion. As Edward Said says, ‘He’s thought of as a witness against the postcolonial world because he’s one of “them”; that there’s an intimacy with which he can tell the truth about their pretensions, lies, delusions, ideologies, follies.’ Yet how convincing are these claims? And how far does the writer’s vision transcend the prejudices of the man?” The Guardian (UK) 09/08/01

Friday September 7

A FALLING GIANT: Last year at the first Latin Grammys, producer Emilio Estefan was named Person of the Year. “Such has been Estefan’s impact on the industry that admirers and detractors alike ascribe him almost supernatural power.” But this year his top artists are pulling out of his company, and the 2001 Latin Grammys, set to be held in Miami, his home town, pulled out at the last minute. Miami New Times 09/06/01

Tuesday September 4

PAULINE KAEL, 82: Film critic Pauline Kael has died at the age of 82. “Kael was probably the most influential film critic of her time. She reviewed movies for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1979, and again, after working briefly in the film industry, from 1980 until 1991. Earlier, she was a film critic for Life magazine in 1965, for McCall’s in 1965 and 1966 and for The New Republic in 1966 and 1967.” The New York Times 09/04/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday August 30

FRANK EMILIO FLYNN, 80: Blind pianist Frank Emilio Flynn has died in his home town of Havana. With the Symphonic Orchestra of Havana, he performed music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven which had been transcribed into Braille. He was best known, however, as a pioneer of Latin jazz. Nando Times (AP) 08/29/01

Tuesday August 28

BASICALLY BARENBOIM: Conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim has had a controversial year. Prodigiously busy musically, he’s also been embroiled in spats from Berlin to Israel. Though critics increasingly pick holes in his musical interpretations, “he remains one of the most discussed musicians of our age — not least because, among his Protean gifts, is a talent for stirring up controversy that borders on genius. That is evident from the battles he has fought over the past few months.” The Times (UK) 08/28/01

SCHNABEL, 92: Legendary piano teacher Karl Ulrich Schnabel died Monday in Connecticut at the age of 92. “Schnabel taught master classes in Europe, Asia and in North and South America. He began teaching at age 13, preparing students who wanted to study with his father.” Nando Times (AP) 08/28/01

Monday August 27

DECIDING ARCHER’S ART: Playwright and British MP Lord Archer is in jail for perjury, and he’s facing big claims on his fortune. Does this mean he’ll lose his art collection, reportedly worth tens of millions of pounds? The Art Newspaper 08/24/01

Friday August 24

BERKOFF IN THE DOCK: Playwright Steven Berkoff is considered a genius by some, a true original.”This is the dramatist who recently declared that he should take over the National and fire all its existing staff. This is the dramatist who has caused stir after stir in the theatre, back in 1975 shocking Edinburgh by using the c-word 29 times in the course of a 90-second speech. Now Berkoff faces a damages claim for £500,000 from a woman, who cannot be named, alleging that she was raped, assaulted and racially abused by him.” The Times (UK) 08/24/01

• BERKOFF DEFENDS: Berkoff says the law should be changed so that men like him couldn’t ne charged with rape. “It’s the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to me, but it will be resolved. It’s ironic that it should happen now when everyone is finally beginning to see that I am sensitive.” The Guardian (UK) 08/24/01

Thursday August 23

ARTS CZAR STEPS DOWN: Evan Williams, Sydney’s de facto arts Czar, is retiring. “Williams was the boss of the bosses of the Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Museum, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (the Powerhouse), the NSW State Library, the Historic Houses Trust, the Sydney Opera House, the State Records of NSW, and the NSW Film and Television Office.” Sydney Morning Herald 08/23/01

Wednesday August 22

CLEVELAND CURATOR LEAVES: Diane De Grazia is leaving the job of chief curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “An expert on 17th-century European paintings and drawings, De Grazia came to Cleveland from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 08/22/01

WHEN THEY REALLY REALLY DON’T WANT YOU: Last week the Scottish Ballet informed Robert North it wouldn’t be renewing his contract as artistic director. Now North has been told by the Scottish government he has to leave the country within eight days or he’ll be thrown in prison… Glasgow Herald 08/22/01

Tuesday August 21

IT’S A MONEY THING: Why did David Ross leave as director of San Francisco’s SFMOMA? It was money. Ross saw some opportunities for himself to make some money. The museum’s board thought Ross’s being the head of a website that sells art was a conflict. And, as the economic downturn was affecting the museum, Ross was thought not to be the person to get the museum through it. “David is an entrepreneur – he comes up with 15 ideas an hour – and it’s hard for nonprofits to deal with that. Now he has come to a point where there is an opportunity to go to a for-profit and benefit financially from his ideas. We understand. When you tell someone like David to stop, you destroy him.” San Francisco Chronicle 08/21/01

Monday August 20

THE GREAT ART SCAMMER: Michel Cohen was such a successful player in the art markets that he could borrow $100 million to buy paintings, with few questions asked. But he also couldn’t resist trying to double his money in the stock market, and when the market crashed, he vanished with a lot of other people’s money. National Post (Telegraph) (Canada) 08/20/01

Friday August 17

NEW RODGERS BIO SAYS: Outwardly, Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, who died in 1979 at 77, seemed to have led a charmed life. But he was an alcoholic, and “the drinking increased throughout his life – playwright Moss Hart once saw him down 16 scotch and sodas in one sitting – and in 1957, he was hospitalized for depression and alcoholism at Payne Whitney, which the novelist Jean Stafford called a ‘high-class booby hatch’.” New York Post 08/17/01

Wednesday August 15

ACCIDENTAL CAREER: Christopher Wheeldon is the hottest young choreographer around right now. Not long ago the 28-year-old British-born dancer was a star with New York City Ballet. How he got there, though, started with an ankle injury. The Guardian (UK) 08/15/01

Tuesday August 14

TALL AND TAN AND SUED: The Girl from Ipanema (she of the song’s inspiration) is now 57, and she owns a boutique called Girl from Ipanema in Sao Paulo, where she now lives. The families of the men who wrote the song – claiming copyright – are suing to stop her from using the name on the store. National Post (Canada) 08/14/01

Monday August 13

REMEMBERING JOHN GIELGUD: “Now that Gielgud, who seemed immortal, nevertheless died in 2000 at the age of 96, a century of Anglophone theater seems to have gone with him. Partly because theater has changed, the dashing romantic leading man à la Olivier and the sensitive, musical-voiced protagonist à la Gielgud are seldom called for nowadays, even in Shakespeare.” The New York Times 08/12/01 (one-time resistration required for access)

WHAT WRECKED BRANDO: Marlon Brando was poised to be one of the great actors of the 20th Century. But his contempt for his profession and the way Hollywood was set up to accomodate him made for the unraveling of his career. The New Republic 08/13/01

Sunday August 12

MENOTTI AT 90: Gian-Carlo Menotti is turning 90. “So much fuss. All of a sudden I’m famous not because I write good music but because I’m old and still here. My advice to composers is, try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.” But though he is beloved in Italy and still has some champions, elsewhere his music has been passed by. The New York Times 08/12/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday August 10

LIFE AFTER VIRGINIA: What was Leonard Woolf’s influence and contribution to Virginia Woolf’s work? A set of letters, written by Leonard after his wife’s suicide to a woman he had a prolonged afair with, shed some light on Virginia’s creative life. Irish Times 08/10/01

Thursday August 9

ONLY TWO MORE YEARS OF MISHA? Mikhail Baryshnikov is 53 and still dancing. “He has had six operations to one of his knees. Some mornings he is so stiff that he has to crawl to the bathroom and get under a hot shower before he can move easily. He is convinced he will die at 60. He says, ‘All my relatives died very young. I really believe in genetics. I hope I am wrong. I will go when I am 55, when I am 60. I am prepared: at least I can speak about it. . ‘.” The Telegraph (UK) 08/09/01

Wednesday August 8

POETRY CON: Ravi Desai pledged millions of dollars for poetry programs at major American universities. But after fanfare over the gifts died down, Desai failed to come through with the money. “Most business cons are for riches. This was a con whose payoff was to rub shoulders with poets. What did he gain, except for an engraved ax?” Poets & Writers 08/01/01

JORGE AMADO, 88: Jorge Amado was Brazil’s most popular and most successful novelist; his 32 books have sold millions of copies in more than 40 languages. Perhaps his best known – at home and abroad – was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, which sold two million copies in Brazil alone. Amado had been in ill health for several years. The New York Times 08/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Tuesday August 7

BIG BUCKS, BIG THANKS (EXPECTED): Alberto Vilar has given more than $200 million to the cause of opera. “The magnitude of his giving would guarantee his fame; the conditions often attached to those gifts, however, have given him a quirky notoriety. Vilar persuaded the Met to give the names of major underwriters greater prominence in its programs; this took some effort.” Opera News 08/01

TAKING IT PERSONALLY: Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize-winning opera critic Manuela Hoelterhoff is every bit as outspoken in her personal life as she is in her reviews. Now she’s in court defending herself from a lawsuit brought by one of her most powerful New York suburban neighbors. Seems she made a cutting remark about part of his anatomy and he took it personally… New York Magazine 08/07/01

HARMONICA MASTER DIES: “Highly-acclaimed musician Larry Adler, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest harmonica player, has died at the age of 87.” BBC 08/07/01

COULD SOMEONE FETCH MR. CLINTON $10 MIL? “Former President Clinton has agreed to write his memoirs for Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher announced Monday, in a deal expected to involve one of the biggest advances ever for a nonfiction book. The book is expected to be out in 2003.” Ottawa Citizen (AP) 08/06/01

Monday August 6

WHOLE LOTTA CONTEMPT GOIN ON: Writer Arunhati Roy has been protesting a court decision in India not to stop work on construction of a dam. The court charged her with contempt of court for her characterization of the decision. And now the court is deciding whether her response to the contempt charges is further contempt. The Times of India 08/04/01

READING IS BELIEVING: Victor Hugo is widely considered to be the greatest French poet of the 19th century by scholars and lay readers alike. But aside from repeated viewings of the musical version of Les Miserables, most English speakers have never had much of a chance to judge Hugo’s work for themselves, most of his work having never been well-translated. A new collection aims to change all that. The Weekly Standard 08/06/01

LETTERS SPECULATE ON PLATH’S DEATH: “A set of unpublished letters written by the late former poet laureate Ted Hughes – including one blaming anti-depressants for Sylvia Plath’s suicide – have been acquired by the British Library. The collection of over 140 letters and other documents were written to literary critic, biographer and friend of Hughes, Keith Sagar, over a period of nearly 30 years.” BBC 08/06/01

Sunday August 5

ADAMS EXHIBIT OPENS IN SF: “The first comprehensive exhibition of Ansel Adams’ work since his death in 1984 reinforces his status as America’s foremost nature photographer and secures a place for his work on museum walls.” Detroit News (AP) 08/05/01

• WHAT IF ADAMS HAD GONE DIGITAL? With the advent of digital technology, the art of photography is likely to change forever. Many famous photographers of the pre-digital era would likely have had little use for the new technology, but Ansel Adams, who was so eager to control every aspect of his work, would likely have embraced the form. San Francisco Chronicle 08/05/01

CAPTURING A SOLDIER’S GROWTH: Photographer Rineke Dijkstra has always been fascinated by the changes people go through as their lives progress, and her photos reflect the uncertainties of such change: “frankly expressive, roughly life-size, head-on views of people at points of change in their lives or moments when they are vulnerable or not quite composed before the camera.” Her newest project finds her following a new recruit to the French Foreign Legion. Arizona Republic (NYT News Service) 08/05/01

Thursday August 2

EINAR SCHLEEF, 57: German actor, author, and director Einar Schleef has died in Berlin. “Schleef worked in the mid-1970s at East Berlin’s Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht. In 1976, in the face of resistance to his work from the communist authorities, he left for the west. After Germany was reunited, he returned to the Berliner Ensemble.” Nando Times (AP) 08/01/01

Wednesday August 1

JAZZ KING: Jazz at Lincoln Center has named Bruce MacCombie, dean of the School for the Arts at Boston University, as its new executive director. He’s a composer and former dean of Juilliard, and he replaces Rob Gibson, who was removed from the job in February in part because of his “divisive” management style. The New York Times 08/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ART DONATIONS: Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who died last week, left much of her art collection to Washington’s Freer Gallery and the National Gallery of Art. The National gets “a cubist still life by Diego Rivera; it will be the second Rivera painting in the gallery’s collection.” Washington Post 07/28/01

Tuesday July 31

PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG COMPOSER: Stuart MacRae is only 24, but his career as a composer is thriving. But ‘when you have been touted as the next big thing in British classical music, the weight of expectation becomes almost impossible to bear.” The Guardian (UK) 07/31/01

DUBUFFET AT 100: Americans are generally protective of their beliefs and priorities, and react badly against those who challenge them. So it is difficult to explain the success in the U.S. of an artist like the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet, who would have turned 100 this week. Dubuffet’s art was/is beloved by U.S. collectors, and the devotion to his work is so great that his fans seem inclined to overlook the artist’s frequent calls for the destruction of the American artistic canons. Chicago Tribune 07/31/01

BOWING OUT GRACEFULLY: It is never easy for a dancer to retire. Unlike performers in nearly every other discipline, dancers are forced to hang up their toe shoes when their bodies give out on them, usually sometime in their late 30s. For some, being told that it’s time to go is an unbearable insult, and the occasional ugly battle between dancer and dance company results. But one Canadian dance legend decided to take the quiet route to retirement this year, earning her even greater affection from colleagues and audiences alike. National Post (Canada) 07/31/01

STILL GOING STRONG: “Agatha Christie’s name is synonymous with the arsenic-and-old-lace school of whodunits. Modern mystery writers rarely praise her or cite her work as an influence. She is not as writerly as Dorothy Sayers or Robert Goddard, and her plots – often unfairly lumped together – seem to boil down to ‘Colonel Mustard with a candlestick in the drawing room.’ But in Great Britain she remains the best-selling writer of all time, save for one William Shakespeare and God Herself, author of the Bible.” Boston Globe 07/31/01

Sunday July 29

MY IN-CREDIBLE LIFE: Tristan Foison listed an amazing resume when he moved to Atlanta in 1987: “winner of the 1987 Prix de Rome, first Prize in the Leningrad Conducting Competition, 1989; First Prize in the Prague Conducting Competition, 1985; First Prize in the Busoni Piano Competition, 1980…” Trouble is, none of it was true, and when he plagiarized note for note a piece he “composed” for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in May… Atlanta Journal-Constitrution 07/29/01

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CURATOR: Frederick Ilchman doesn’t believe in cappucinos after the breakfast hour, insists his martinis be shaken, and likes to help women navigate the bridges of Venice. He’s the new assistant curator of Renaissance art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and he seems to have come from a different time. Boston Globe 07/29/01

QUESTIONS OF GREATNESS: Conductor Riccardo Muti is 60 this year, a milestone at which great conductors are supposed to be arching to greatness (if they’re ever going to). Is Muti that great conductor? The mixed evidence suggests… Philadelphia Inquirer 07/29/01

Friday July 27FUTURE UNCERTAIN FOR JÄRVI AND DSO: Neeme Järvi’s recent illness was in fact a stroke, according to family members. The music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was stricken at a music festival in Estonia; he now is recuperating at a hospital in Helsinki, Norway. It still is unknown – and perhaps unknowable – whether he will be able to return to the DSO and his career. Detroit News 07/25/01

REYNOLDS PRICE, ON EUDORA WELTY: “Her main pleasure toward the end was the company of her friends. Surprisingly, for one whose work is so marked by the keen double knife-edge of satire and remorseless honesty, she was treated as the genial and polite Honorary Maiden Aunt of American letters. No other maiden aunt in history can have been, in her heart, less a maiden and less like the greeting-card aunt of one’s dreams. To almost the end, Eudora Welty was both a fierce observer of the wide world around her and its loving consumer.” The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

THE CHIEF LEGAL COUNSEL DONE GONE: As chief legal counsel for CNN, Eve Burton joined The New York Times and Dow Jones filing a brief in support of a recent Houghton Mifflin book, The Wind Done Gone. However, AOL-TimeWarner, which owns CNN, has come out in opposition to publication of the book. Eve Burton is now the former chief legal counsel for CNN, and the network’s staffers aren’t happy about it. The New York Times 07/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

DEPRESSION CAN BE, WELL, DEPRESSING: Being published to high critical praise and still being unknown might affect your outlook, as seems to be the case with novelist Hugh Nissenson, who has battled severe depression throughout his career. His latest work is a tale of an artist who has had his destiny forced upon him by a world that confuses technology with humanity. The New York Times 07/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday July 25

DOWNFALL OF A PATRON: What happened to Shanghai’s best-known arts patron? He’s in jail, and it looks like he’ll be there a long time. “Though little is known about the charges against him, Bonko Chan, 37, is known for spending lavishly on financing operas, buying oil paintings and offering rides in his corporate jet, activities that gave him an unusually high profile in a town where circumspection is the norm.” The New York Times 07/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

RIPPING OFF THE ORCHESTRA: The director of the Honk Kong Sinfonietta has been arrested and charged with stealing $6.2 million from the orchestra. Police allege that between 1993 and 1999, Henry Yu “issued a number of cheques totalling $6.2 million, under the name of the orchestra, to himself, his wife and daughter, and the money was deposited into their personal bank accounts.” Hong Kong Mail 07/25/01

CALDER ON THE MOVE: “Elaine Calder is leaving her position as managing director of Hartford Stage to return to her native Canada, where she has accepted a position as president and chief executive officer of the Francis Winspear Centre for Music and its resident orchestra, the Edmonton Symphony in Alberta.” Hartford Courant 07/25/01

Tuesday July 24

EUDORA WELTY, 92: “She was one of the finest Southern writers of the 20th century. She could be as obscure as William Faulkner. As violent as Flannery O’Connor. As incisive as Richard Wright. But more genteel and straightforward than just about anyone. And at 92 she outlived them all.” Washington Post 07/24/01

Monday July 23

MENAGE A TROIS ANYONE? A new film is about to reveal the wild bohemian lives of some of Australia’s most prominent artists. “The movie, When We Were Young, will centre on the six years from 1942 which are billed as the start of the modern art movement in Australia.” Sydney Morning Herald 07/23/01

Sunday July 22

PORTRAIT OF AN (AMERICAN) CONDUCTOR: Robert Spano is considered by some to be the leading conductor of his generation. His innovative programming of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is widely admired, and he’s begun recording with his new orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony. Boston Globe 07/22/01

THE MAN WHO REMADE SALZBURG: “There are those who discount the importance of arts administrators, preferring (rightly, perhaps, in the greater scheme of things) to concentrate on creators and recreators, also known as performers.” But Gerard Mortier’s leadership of the Salzburg Festival shows how an institutions can be remade by one person with a vision. The New York Times 07/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday July 20

BEN BRITTEN REMEMBERED: Twenty-five years after Britten’s death a colleague and friend remember England’s greatest 20th Century composer. The Guardian (UK) 07/20/01

ARCHER CONVICTED: Best-selling novelist and aspiring politician Jeffrey Archer has been convicted of perjury in London, and sentenced to four years in prison. The Clintonesque scandal has come as little surprise to observors in the U.K., where Archer had become something of a national joke for his tendency to self-destruct just as true power seemed within his grasp. The Times of London 07/20/01

SO THERE’S THIS KID IN MONTREAL, and she’s playing the bagpipes out on the city streets, when some cop with nothing better to do collars her and invokes some law about street musicians needing permits, and permit applicants needing to be at least 14 years old. (The kid is 11.) Tough break, but a couple news stories later, the kid has the last laugh: she opened for mock rock legends Spinal Tap at a festival on Wednesday. Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/20/01

Thursday July 19

ATTACKING BARENBOIM: Conductor Daniel Barenboim has long reigned supreme musically in Germany, where he heads the Berlin Staatsoper. But since he conducted Wagner in Israel earlier this month, a debate about his role in German musical life has been underway. Chicago Tribune 07/19/01

Wednesday July 18

DOING THE DIVA: Divas are a proud tradition in America. But in London? “Can one really be a diva in Britain, a country that privileges self-effacement at the expense of naked ambition?” A number of female stars are descending on London stages eager to test divadom. The Times (UK) 07/18/01

Tuesday July 17

ESCAPING MOTHER? NO, SMUGGLING ARMS: In 1866, James McNeil Whistler sailed from Britain to South America. The conventional story is that he wanted a break from his mother, who had come to live with him (and with his model). Seems that wasn’t it at all. Jimmy was running munitions to Chile, to be used against Spain. Chicago Sun-Times 07/17/01

HITTING RAY BRADBURY AT 81: “Science-fiction author Ray Bradbury seems more a one-man film factory than a retiree. Set to go before the cameras are The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, The Sound of Thunder, The Illustrated Man, and Frost of Fire.” Nando Times 07/17/01

Monday July 16

THE TALE OF TINA AND HARRY: It’s not long ago that Tina Brown and Harry Evans were the power literary couple in New York, she running The New Yorker, he steering the fates of Random House. A new book that hit bookshelves this weekend chronicles the couple’s rise to power: “they emerge from the book as a couple so consumed by the naked ambition of the American arriviste, and so willing to consume others as fuel for their flight, that their crash from the heights of the sun became inevitable.” National Post (Canada) 07/16/01

• POWER MAP: “What the book outlines is a Horatio Alger story of get-up-and-go, shoulder-to-the-wheel, how-to-do-what-you’ve-got-to-do-to-get-ahead-in-the-media-business savvy. I’d recommend it to anyone who is starting out. It’s a fine manual.” New York Magazine 07/16/01

Sunday July 15

AN AMERICAN IN LONDON: American conductor Leonard Slatkin is taking on that most British of institutions, the summer Proms concerts. But is he too American for the job? Too conservative? The Guardian (UK) 07/14/01

Thursday July 12

JÄRVI MAY MISS DSO TOUR: Detroit Symphony music director Neeme Järvi “must remain hospitalized at least two more weeks, his doctor said Wednesday, and the conductor’s wife said his illness may prevent him from going on tour with the Gothenburg (Sweden) Symphony early next month. Jarvi, 64, remains in intensive care.” Detroit News 07/12/01

Wednesday July 11

JÄRVI HOSPITALIZED: Conductor Neeme Järvi has been hospitalized. “The 64-year-old musical director of the Detroit Symphony was taken to the hospital Monday from his hotel in Pärnu, Estonia, 75 miles south of the capital, where he was attending a classical music festival. Media reports said he apparently had a stroke.” Andante (AP) 07/10/01

A SMALL INVESTIGATION: Controversial Smithsonian chief Lawrence Small has made a lot of enemies. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reopened an investigation into the private collection of Amazonian tribal art owned by Small. Washington Post 07/10/01

Tuesday July 10

LAWRENCE SMALL IN THE HOT SEAT. AGAIN: Actually, that seems to be his native habitat. The recently-installed and constantly-embattled head of the Smithsonian has antagonized much of his staff – and some political figures – with his management style. Now, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has reopened an investigation into [his] private collection of Amazonian tribal art.” Washington Post 07/10/01

Monday July 9

THE BOOK ON CALLAS: “The fallen grandeur of Maria Callas has fuelled quite an industry since her death in 1977, aged just 53; and it wasn’t doing too badly when she was alive. Mystique, though, is no friend to scholarship. Living legends make bad history. And with bad history already running riot in at least 30 books devoted to the diva, I am not sure that this one takes us any closer to the truth.” The Telegraph (UK) 07/09/01

MENOTTI AT 90: One of the 20th century’s most successful composers celebrated his 90th birthday in style yesterday. Gian Carlo Menotti, who won Pulitzer Prizes for his operas and founded both the Italian and American versions of the Spoleto Festival, was feted in Italy by a gathering of some of the music world’s biggest stars. BBC 07/09/01

FIRE, BATONS, AND BRIMSTONE: The conductor who brought alternate doses of success and controversy to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra is jumping across Western Canada to Vancouver. Bramwell Tovey put the WSO on the map during a 12-year tenure during which he helped create one of the world’s most successful new music festivals, but sparred endlessly with the Manitoba Arts Council and local critics. He insists, however, that such an outspoken style may not be necessary in his new home, saying, “I’m not the political hot potato I once was.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 07/09/01

Sunday July 8

STAYING POWER: The 20th century was a period of intense upheaval in the music world – composers’ stars rose and fell with astonishing speed as new methods of composition came into vogue and then quickly fell out of favor. Philip Glass, who came to prominence in the 1960s as the leader of the new “Minimalist” movement, should, by all rights, have been just another flash in the pan. But where others stagnated, Glass constantly adapted, and his music continues to be some of the most often heard (and appreciated) of any contemporary composer. The New York Times 07/08/01 (one-time registration required for access)

REDEEMING THE SCAPEGOAT: Few prominent composers have ever inspired as much hatred in audiences as the father of twelve-tone music, Arnold Schönberg. Even today, a Schönberg listing on a concert program is nearly guaranteed to draw a smaller crowd than might attend otherwise. But there was much more to Schönberg than the dense atonality he has become known for, and, thanks to the efforts of persistent musicians, his works may finally be gaining acceptance with the concertgoing public. The Telegraph (London) 07/07/01

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN: Ruth Crawford Seeger was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. An atonalist and liberal activist in the fledgling days of the labor movement, the Chicago composer was stonewalled at every turn of her career, and the result was a tragically sparse output from a woman who might have become one of the century’s greatest composers. The Guardian (UK) 07/07/01

AND HE WANTED THIS JOB? “The backstage drama at the Bolshoi saw the arrival this week of a young musical director whose mission is to drag the theatre out of the crisis that has shattered its reputation. . . A traumatic season has already seen the brutal dismissal of one of his predecessors and the enraged resignation of another. Now Alexander Vedernikov has the job of restoring the pride of Russia’s most famous institution in the performing arts.” The Guardian 07/06/01

Thursday July 5

REMEMBERING MORDECHAI: Mordechai Richler’s books were selling briskly Wednesday as Canadians remembered one of the country’s best-known writers. “He gives you a nostalgic feeling of the good old days when immigrants were building up the city, building up the country.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/04/01

• IN HIS OWN WORDS: Mordecai Richler’s last column for a Canadian newspaper shows much of his trademark wit and self-deprecating attitude towards his chosen profession. National Post 07/05/01

LOFTI GOODBYE: San Francisco Opera honors retiring director Lofti Mansouri. “His old friend and colleague Frederica von Stade was on hand to present Mansouri with the company’s highest honor, the Opera Medal, roughly equivalent to the Medal of Honor in the world of the San Francisco Opera.” SFGate 07/04/01

• MANSOURI LEAVES SF: Lofti Mansouri says goodbye to San Francisco Opera, retiring after 14 years with the company. The inventor of supertitles back in 1983, Mansouri says he’s most proud of “the work I have done to spread the notion that opera is for everyone.” Opera News 07/01

LEGENDS DON’T WALK, APPARENTLY: Promoters are forever grumbling about the unusual requirements some star performers include in their contract riders – exotic foods, cases upon cases of expensive mineral water, etc. – but the folks organizing Luciano Pavarotti’s concert in London’s Hyde Park later this month may have more reason than most to grumble. Among other demands from the legendary tenor is the unprecedented requirement that he “and his limo will be transported to the stage by an industrial jack.” New York Post 07/05/01

Wednesday July 4

MORDECHAI RICHLER, 70: Mordechai Richler, one of Canada’s best-known writers, has died of cancer. “The Quebec author of 10 novels is best known for his works on Montreal Jewish life.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 07/03/01

FRIDA-MANIA: Overshadowed by her husband – famous muralist Diego Rivera – during her lifetime, Frida Kahlo is now a global cult figure. The feisty woman with the striking stare and tempestuous love-life has inspired ballets, operas, books, biography, films and plays. Dozens, if not hundreds, of websites pay homage. A religion, Kahloism, worships her as the one, true god. Kahlomania is about to hit Australia. The Age (Melbourne) 07/04/01

MISTER ROGERS’ CYBERHOOD: After 33 years, Fred Rogers has taped his last TV shows. But he isn’t retiring, just moving to a new venue – the Internet. He’s developing an interactive program for the PBS website, and children’s stories for his own site. Newsday (AP) 07/04/01

Tuesday July 3

CREEPY BOB, THE TAMBOURINE MAN: Bob Dylan’s 60th birthday has come and gone, but the encomiums keep on coming. So do the brickbats. In the course of reviewing a couple Dylan biographies, John Leonard goes heavy on the brickbats. “Because Joan Baez loved him a lot, I have to assume that he is not as much of a creep as he so often seems. But I’m entitled to doubts about anybody whose favorite Beatle was George.” New York Review of Books 07/19/01

Sunday July 1

THE CERTIFIED GUITAR PLAYER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Legendary guitarist Chet Atkins, who rose to fame as one of the architects of the Nashville Sound, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 77. BBC 07/01/01

THE BIONIC FIDDLER: “Although born without a right hand, 17-year-old Adrian Anantawan seems poised for a very real career as a violinist. He’s headed this fall to the Curtis Institute of Music, arguably the world’s most selective and prestigious music conservatory.” Philadelphia Inquirer 07/01/01

BROADWAY HAT TRICK: Remember the name, because director John Rando is about to do something that few others have even attempted – have three of his productions running on Broadway at one time. “He may not have the credentials of proven English hitmakers like Nicholas Hytner (“Miss Saigon”) or Trevor Nunn (“Les Misérables”), but Mr. Rando is on his way.” The New York Times 07/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday June 29

MY PRESIDENCY FOR A STAGE: “Bill Clinton tells a graduating class in Manhattan: “The greatest artists have given not only their genius but a new take on our common humanity.’ He said he had dreamed of becoming a performer but didn’t have the talent to make it as a singer or saxophone player.” New York Daily News 06/28/01

Thursday June 28

MY FAKE PAST: Why does an accomplished historian lie about his past, embellishing what is already a stellar career, as Joseph Ellis did? It’s not just historians who do it, though. “The practice of grown men claiming to have played major league baseball is much more common than one would think, and the variety and creativity of stories told are mind numbing. The circumstances of the telling often defy any notion of human rationality.” MobyLives 06/25/01 

JACK LEMMON, 76: Jack Lemmon, who won Oscars for Mister Roberts and Save the Tiger, died in California of complications from cancer. Best remembered for the half-dozen comedies he made with Walter Matthau, he was actually a highly-accomplished actor – of his seven Oscar nominations, five were for drama. In 1973, in order to get studio approval for Save the Tiger, he cut his own salary to the guild minimum of $165 a week. The New York Times (AP) 06/28/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday June 24

RECAPTURING RESPECTABILITY? Clive James was once described in The New Yorker as being “a great bunch of guys” who seemed unable to settle on which personality should be dominant. James, who has been writer, TV personality, and Japanese game show host, is releasing two volumes of essays this year, and he admits that this renewed attempt at “seriousness” is prompted in part by the fear that the more frivolous aspects of his career would define his place in history. The Observer (UK) 06/24/01

NUNN’S HABITS: Trevor Nunn has come under almost continuous fire since taking over the helm of Britain’s National Theatre, yet, under his leadership, the National has achieved near-unprecedented success. This contradiction doesn’t surprise one critic: “Nunn is a hard man to warm to – there is something defensive in his manner, and a touch of the martyr about him. But it seems to me that his first three-and-a-half years at the NT, though troubled at times by flops and disappearing directors, have produced an often outstanding body of work in which quality has been mixed with the best kind of populism.” The Telegraph (London) 06/23/01

CLASSICAL MULTITASKING: Thomas Zehetmair is one of those musicians who never seems satisfied with his own accomplishments. Having risen to the ranks of the top violin soloists, he decided to form a string quartet. When the quartet met with early success, Zehetmair turned to conducting as a further sideline. Moreover, he seems determined to learn the baton-wielding craft the right way, refusing to use his reputation as a soloist to secure conducting engagements that he’s not ready for. Financial Times 06/24/01

Friday June 22

NO, YOU CAN’T SIT IN HIS CHAIR NOW: If ever anyone managed to elevate the lowly sitcom to the level of high art, it was Carroll O’Connor, whose portrayal of lovable bigot Archie Bunker in Norman Lear’s All in the Family pushed the TV envelope like nothing that had come before. O’Connor died Thursday of an apparent heart attack. He was 76. The New York Times 06/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

• BLUES LEGEND DIES: John Lee Hooker, whose growling baritone and masterful guitar playing made him one of the most-beloved stars of the blues genre, died in his sleep yesterday. Hooker had his first hit record in 1948, and was still touring as late as last weekend. BBC 06/22/01\

A POET LAUREATE FOR THE MASSES: The U.S. has a new poet laureate, and if you were hoping for a seriously high-minded, no-nonsense craftsman, you’re going to be disappointed. Billy Collins, who teaches at Lehman College in upstate New York, believes that humor “is a door into the serious,” and his irreverent style has made him a favorite of magazines like The New Yorker and radio programs like A Prairie Home Companion. Dallas Morning News 06/22/01

Thursday June 21

A HISTORIAN WHO MAKES UP HIS OWN HISTORY? Joseph Ellis is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and professor of history at prestigious Mt. Holyoke College. Make that beloved professor of history. With an incredible resume and loads of talent, why did he make up some crucial parts of his past? MobyLives 06/21/01

• ELLIS GONE: Holyoke College has removed Ellis from teaching his class on Vietnamese and American culture for lying about his past. “Ellis’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, won the 1997 National Book Award, and he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.” Washington Post 06/21/01
• Previously: A FAKED HISTORY: Esteemed historian Joseph Ellis taught a class on Vietnam and America at Mt. Holyoke College, but the “personal recollections” he included in the course were fabricated. Ellis, reports the Boston Globe, had never served in Vietnam. Boston Globe 06/18/01

Wednesday June 20

STANLEY KUBRICK’S SECRET: HE WAS SHY: Stanley Kubrick, who died two years ago, was an enigma: a high-powered and highly-successful Hollywood director who maintained a very private personal life. A new documentary, made with the cooperation of his family, suggests he was anything but the eccentric, abusive tyrant he was often thought to be. Salon 06/18/01

Tuesday June 19

GRIBLER’S LAST DANCE, PART 2: “The Academy of Music was empty and silent when Jeffrey Gribler arrived a little after 8 a.m. Saturday to begin his last day as a principal dancer for the Pennsylvania Ballet. . . He hoped it would be a good day. He had no idea just how remarkably it would end.” Philadelphia Inquirer 06/19/01

A LAUGHMASTER HANGS IT UP: How to explain to non-Canadians what John Morgan’s retirement means to fans of the CBC’s Royal Canadian Air Farce? It’s like Dana Carvey leaving Saturday Night Live or John Cleese departing Monty Python. Morgan, who has been writing and performing comedy for the CBC since 1967, is retiring at the age of 70. Two of his fellow cast members offer some memories and thoughts on what made the man so funny. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 06/19/01

Monday June 18

A FAKED HISTORY: Esteemed historian Joseph Ellis taught a class on Vietnam and America at Mt. Holyoke College, but the “personal recollections” he included in the course were fabricated. Ellis, reports the Boston Globe, had never served in Vietnam. Boston Globe 06/18/01

DANCERS MAKE BETTER LEADERS? Ex-Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau once did a pirouette behind the Queen’s back. Trudeau, it turns out, had taken six months of ballet lessons. He and a friend quit when their teacher “proposed to include us in the spring show that Pierre and I looked at each other. We told her, ‘Well dear, I’m sorry, but we’re going to be very busy.’ So that ended that.” Ottawa Citizen 06/16/01

• DANCE TO THE BALL: British rugby players are turning to ballet classes to help with their game. “The gentle training methods come as a shock to squads used to heaving and sweating in a gym before a run around the touchline. Sports exercises tend to concentrate on building the muscles in limbs, while dance techniques strengthen the trunk so that the body’s power can be transferred more precisely to the area it is required.” Sunday Times 06/17/01

Sunday June 17

AWARD THIS: So the awards event for the recent Griffin Prize for poetry wouldn’t get too high-toned and dull, a comedian – Scott Thompson from The Larry Sanders Show – was hired. “If his intention was to scandalize the cream of the cultural establishment, he certainly succeeded. Playing their assigned role to the hilt, they reacted with shock and dismay. During a break, Thompson was cornered in the kitchen and was told he was not going back on.” Toronto Star (2nd item) 06/17/01

Friday June 15

SOMETHING’S SOAPY HERE: A month ago a young Canadian theatre director disappeared on a trip to New York. This week he mysteriously walked off a plane from Lisbon in New York, claiming to have no memories of the past three weeks. “It’s been so bizarre. You think amnesia and everyone laughs and thinks of Days Of Our Lives. We were so ecstatic to find out he was alive.” Ottawa Citizen (CP) 06/14/01

MEL BROOKS, AS YOU’VE FREQUENTLY HEARD HIM BEFORE: In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard Mel Brooks talk about The Producers, his recent interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air in online. His modesty is at best elusive, but his humor is not. [.ra format; requires free player from RealAudio] Fresh Air (NPR) 06/13/01

200 MILLION BOOKS SOLD, BUT NO RESPECT: Mickey Spillane, still writing at 83, thinks his current publisher doesn’t appreciate him. “It’s not like the old days when they appreciated books and readers.” Still, all is not lost. “I’ve got a guy from another publisher coming down to see me. He wanted to know if I had written anything lately. I told him, ‘I got the books. You got money?'” Nando Times 06/13/01

Thursday June 14

SO HARD TO SAY GOODBYE: Dance is as much sport as art, and the toll it takes on the human body is comparable to that of any athletic endeavor. Because of this, dancers face a reality that most other performing artists never do: they will have to give up what they have trained their entire life for when their life is only half over. For many dancers, the decision to retire is the most painful one they will ever make, and the much-beloved principal dancer of the Pennsylvania Ballet has had to make it this year. He offers an inside look. Philadelphia Inquirer 06/14/01

A FAMILY TRADITION: For decades, the Wyeth family has quietly produced beautiful, if old-fashioned, works of art from their family homestead in rural Pennsylvania. Three generations of Wyeths (illustrator N.C. Wyeth, his son Andrew of “Helga” series fame, and Andrew’s son Jamie) have each carved their own personal niche, but all three are bound together by a long tradition of complete disregard for what the critics think. Chicago Tribune 06/14/01

Tuesday June 12

STILL FIDDLING ON THE ROOF: Zero Mostel was the first, but Theo Bickel is the one who endures. He’s been playing the lead in Fiddler on the Roof semi-regularly for 34 years, some 1700 performances. Not surprisingly, Theo and Tevye have a lot in common. Boston Herald 06/11/01

Monday June 11

WOODY ALLEN IN COURT AGAIN: Woody Allen is suing a long time friend and financier of his movies, claiming she owes him profits from eight of his projects from the 1990s. The New York Times 06/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOW MOZART DIED? There are about 150 theories about how Mozart may have died. The latest? A tainted pork chop. “The composer, who died in 1791, showed the symptoms of a disease caused by eating badly-cooked pork infected by a worm, an American doctor has said.” BBC 06/11/01

Friday June 8

A PRODIGY COMES OF AGE: Pianist Lang Lang is used to getting attention. He won his first competition at age 5, and just finished touring his native China with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But as Lang, now 18, attempts to make the transition from child prodigy to mature virtuoso, he finds that there is much still to be accomplished, and overcoming the music world’s skepticism of former child stars is at the top of the list. Boston Herald 06/08/01

CRACKING THE TIC CODE: Jazz pianist Michael Wolff has achieved no small measure of success, and has done so despite a disability that has sidelined countless other peformers. Tourette’s Syndrome is one of the most misunderstood conditions out there, but in the eccentric world of jazz performers, Wolff has had no trouble being accepted. Washington Post 06/08/01

Thursday June 7

BEING PHILIP GLASS: “You spend your whole life pining for the moment when you can play as much music as you want to, and write as much as you want to, and interact and collaborate with anyone you want to, practically — and it’s taken me 40 years to get to this point from the time I was a student — and the trouble with it is that it’s a very demanding but very exciting life.” CNN 06/04/01

Wednesday June 6

READY TO PILE ON? As a critic, James Wolcott is brutal in his assessment of others – especially other critics. Now he’s about to release a book. A novel. About a cat. Revenge, anyone? New York Magazine 06/04/01

A GAY PLAY? REALLY? NY theatre critics Ben Brantley and John Simon were guests on Charlie Rose last week, when the conversation took a bizarre turn: ” ‘There’s a type of play that Ben likes that I don’t,’ Simon said. ‘For lack of a better word, I would call it the homosexual play.’ Brantley looked stun- ned. ‘I don’t quite categorize it like that,’ he replied. ‘Well . . . sometimes categories creep up on one without one’s even realizing that they’re there,’ lectured Simon.” New York Post 06/06/01

Tuesday June 5

ANTHONY QUINN, 86: Quinn appeared in more than 100 films and won Oscars for his performances in Viva Zapata and Lust for Life, but was probably best known for his role in Zorba the Greek. “I never get the girl,” Quinn once joked in an interview. “I wind up with a country instead.” He died of respiratory failure. JOHN HARTFORD, 63: Composer of the standard “Gentle on My Mind,” Hartford turned down a Hollywood career to return to bluegrass, and was one of the featured performers on the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? He died of cancer. NIKOLAI KORNDORF, 53: Well-known as a composer in Europe, Korndorf left Russia for Canada ten years ago. He died of a heart attack. Washington Post & Nando Times & CBC 06/05/01

Friday June 1

THE CRITIC THEY LOVED TO HATE: Joan Altabe was an award-winning architecture and visual art critic for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the newspaper’s most controversial writer. But her acid word processor won her lots of enemies, and after she was laid off last month, many wondered if her foes had finally got her fired. St. Petersburg Times 05/31/01

UP NEXT – POTHOLE COLLAGE! Anything can be art if you look at it right. Today’s supporting example: Ottawa’s Louise Levergneux, who has made quite a nice little career out of photographing, collecting, and marketing – get ready – manhole covers. Ottawa Citizen 06/01/01

Wednesday May 30 THE ART OF BEING MISHA: Mikhail Baryshnikov has “sustained injuries, primarily to his knee, that render ballet’s huge, abandoned jumps and turns impossible for him. But rather than slink off and rest on his substantial laurels, the artist who was perhaps the premier danseur of his generation has made a virtue of necessity. He’s forged a new career as a dancer, producer, and promoter of the seminal experimental work created by American postmodern pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s, and of the pieces they’re making now.” Village Voice 05/30/01 Tuesday May 29 PERLMAN FALLS: Violinist Itzhak Perlman falls onstage on his way to performing the Barber Concerto with the Minnesota Orchestra. “He landed hard. Face-down on the stage between his podium and the conductor’s, his arms still in the crutches, the upturned soles of his shoes facing the audience. The applause stopped as if it’d been guillotined. And the sound—that’s what I’ll remember years from now—1,500 people in a choral gasp, then pin-drop silence.” Minnesota Public Radio 05/23/01 Monday May 28 MY NEW ARTISTIC LIFE: Michael Stone was “one of the most notorious terrorists in Northern Ireland.” But since getting out of jail he says he’s become an artist. His supporters are threatening to demonstrate against a Belfast gallery if it won’t show Stone’s work. Sunday Times (UK) 05/27/01 HARRY’S WORLD: Harry Partch has always been one of those composers whom philosophers adore and musicians fear. First of all, he insists that there are 43 distinct pitches in a single octave (rather than the standard 12.) Furthemore, he finds traditional instruments sadly lacking in the sound quality his works demand, and so he invents new ones. Constantly. Los Angeles Times 05/28/01 Friday May 25 WHAT AILS YOU: “Anyone now catching up on medical literature from the past few years can’t help being struck by the vast amount of attention devoted to intriguing cases from long ago. Investigations by modern doctors have suggested that Catherine the Great suffered from syphilis, that Kant suffered from Alzheimer’s, and that Brahms suffered from sleep apnea; that Van Gogh and Saint Teresa of Avila were afflicted with temporal-lobe epilepsy; that Chopin was felled by emphysema or cystic fibrosis; and that Mozart was done in by streptococcus, not by Salieri. The Atlantic 05/01 BERGMAN WILL DIRECT IBSEN FOR THE STAGE : Film legend Ingmar Bergman is preparing to direct his own version of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. The production will have a brief run in New York next year. Bergman, whose last film was more than 20 years ago, insists he’ll never direct for the screen again. CBC 05/25/01 WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CASTLE? Jeremy Irons’ is pink. Well, more like peach. Up close, its sort of terracotta. Whatever it is, his Irish neighbors don’t like it. BBC 05/24/01 Thursday May 24 DYLAN AT 60. THINGS HAVEN’T CHANGED MUCH: “His seeming discomfort with the world and his place in it help keep him a fascinating figure. Dylan has remained an embattled presence whose every move has been dissected and debated. Dylan has shown no inclination toward mellowness.” Boston Herald 05/24/01 Wednesday May 23 PERSONA NON GRATA: Betty Oliphant, the Canadian dance legend who helped to found the National Ballet School and the National Ballet of Canada, has been virtually banned from both of the institutions she brought to prominence. “Oliphant is the vivid personification of the Dylan Thomas poem advising us not to go gentle into that good night. Time has not withered her formidable mind. Neither has it softened her acid tongue.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 05/23/01 Monday May 21 SIR PETER PLAYWRIGHT: Playwright Peter Shaffer is knighted by the Queen. “A unique figure among modern dramatists, for three decades he produced a series of successful plays which tackled huge themes, making him the playwright who makes mainstream audiences think about the big ideas of their times.” The Times (UK) 05/21/01 JEROME ROBBINS, MEANY? A new 600-page biography of choreographer Jerome Robbins says he was difficult to work with and frequently screamed at dancers. So… what about the work and what it means? The New Yorker 05/21/01 Wednesday May 16 SHAKESPEARE’S PICTURE: A painting that purports to be a portrait of William Shakespeare has surfaced. “The painting appears to be authentic. Radiocarbon dating reveals it to be 340 years old, give or take 50 years. It shows a ruddy-haired, hazel-eyed young man sporting a short beard, sideburns, a hint of a mustache, and a bilateral receding hairline of fluffy sprouts.” National Review 05/15/01 Tuesday May 15 JASON MILLER, 62: Actor and playwright Jason Miller has died of a heart attack. In 1973, Miller was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist. The same year he won both a Pulitzer and a Tony for his play That Championship Season. Philadelphia Inquirer 05/15/01 Monday May 14 NARAYAN DEAD AT 94: “R. K. Narayan, the literary chronicler of small-town life in South India and one of the first Indians writing in English to achieve international acclaim, died yesterday in Madras, India. He was 94.” The New York Times 05/14/01 (one-time registration required for access) MARCEAU SPEAKS: Marcel Marceaux has been named a United Nations ambassador for the aged. “I make the visible invisible and the invisible visible. People think that when we are silent, you have nothing to say. But you can make people laugh and cry through the tragedy and the comedy of life.” New York Times Magazine 05/13/01 (one-time registration required for access) Sunday May 13 PERRY COMO DIES: “Perry Como, the crooning baritone barber famous for his relaxed vocals, cardigan sweaters and television Christmas specials, died yesterday after a lengthy illness. He was 87.” Akron Beacon Journal (AP) 05/13/01 A TRULY HOOPY FROOD PASSES ON: Douglas Adams, author of the sci-fi cult classic book trilogy “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has died of a heart attack at age 49. There is no word on who inherits his towel. Nando Times (AP) 05/12/01 AND A FRIEND REMEMBERS HIM: “To his friends Douglas Adams will be remembered as a giant of a man with a kindness to match. But to his fans I think he will be seen as someone who brought wit into science fiction. With the greatest respect to Gene Roddenberry and others, that had not been done before.” The Observer (London) 05/13/01 Wednesday May 9 CONDUCTOR OF THE YEAR: Pierre Boulez has been named “conductor of the year” at the annual Royal Philharmonic Society awards in London. BBC 05/09/01 A CARFUL OF FLOWERS WILL DO THAT FOR YOU: Ismail Merchant is the salesman half of the Merchant-Ivory team, which has made such movies as Room With A View and Remains of the Day. As a boy, he once went to a movie with an actress: “We arrived at the theater surrounded by people. And they were throwing marigolds on us. And we were submerged in flowers – actually submerged. I said, ‘My God, if you’re making a movie, you’re submerged in flowers!'” He’s been hooked ever since. Nando Times 05/08/01 Tuesday May 8 CALLAS, THE TEEN YEARS: Given her turbulent childhood and neurotic upbringing, it’s a wonder Maria Callas ever had a career, let alone one that lasted as long as it did. A new 670-page biography traces the Diva from age 14 to 22. The Times (UK) 05/08/01 ARNE SUCKSDORFF, 84: Swedish documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff died at his home in Stockholm. He was the first Swede to win an Oscar, which he earned with his 1949 short film Rhythms of a City. Nando Times (AP) 05/07/01 Sunday May 6 THE POET AND THE PEAT: Seamus Heaney could be a character in any one of a dozen stock Irish working-class plays. A son of the land, called to highbrow undertakings by an artistic power he cannot explain, Heaney is best known these days for winning the Pulitzer Prize last year for his new translation of Beowulf. But his own poetry has been called the most profound stuff being written in the English language today. Dallas Morning News 05/06/01 CROSSING THE LINE? Celebrated novelist Gore Vidal has never shied away from expressing his political views, whether they are wrapped up in one of his fictional narratives or not. But now, Vidal prepares to tangle with the status quo as never before: he has announced plans to attend the execution of terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and to do so as a sympathizer, declaring, “The boy has a sense of justice.” Nando Times (AP) 05/05/01 Friday May 4 THE CONDUCTOR WITH TWO FACES: In Boston, Keith Lockhart is conductor of the Boston Pops and known for his relaxed, informal style. In Salt Lake City, Lockhart is music director of the Utah Symphony, and a much more serious pillar of the community. The skiing is better in Utah. Boston Herald 05/04/01 Thursday May 3 IT’S TAX TIME: Pavarotti thought he’d settled his tax difficulties with the Italian government last year. But no – this week he goes to trial. “The biggest-earning opera virtuoso in history is accused of dodging £13 million between 1989-95.” He could face three years in jail. The Guardian (UK) 05/02/01 THE MARKETING OF CHARLOTTE CHURCH: The teen singing sensation is making a tour of America, and everything’s been calculated for maximum hype. Who cares if the classical world is turned off by the marketing, say her managers. “One reason she’s controversial is that she’s not really classical. I call it `popera’.” Chicago Tribune 05/03/01