Category: people

“It’s something that hits close to home for [Aaron] Pedersen, who is of Arrernte-Arabana descent and grew up poor in the Northern Territory town of Alice Springs. His childhood with an alcoholic mother was chaotic and even violent, and Pedersen and his seven siblings bumped around in foster homes as wards of the state.” – The New York Times

A career newspaperman, he started as a film journalist in his native South Africa and went on to be a theatre and TV critic for two London tabloids; he moonlighted as a song lyricist, writing the words for “Goodness Gracious Me,” “Yesterday When I Was Young,” and Charles Aznavour’s “She.” Then came the offer to write the English adaptation of an old flop, a French musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables — and, as he later said, “I was able to give up my day job at 61.” – Variety

A finalist at the 2003 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, she went on to perform with symphony orchestras and major opera houses throughout Europe and North America. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2018. – CBC

“Over the course of a long writing life, Steinbeck had won many prizes, among them the Pulitzer and then, remarkably enough, the Nobel, but no matter how many hundreds of critics and millions of readers declared him a national treasure, he not only raged at those who refused to extend him the accolades he hungered for, he scorned those very accolades when they came his way.” – The New Republic

He does Instagram Live interviews, for instance, and a lot of virtual work: “We write something that we like, then I work by phone with Tim Lauer, who is the keyboard player in the nucleus of the band that Daniel will use. I’ll write out a framework for where this could go. Then Tim puts down a keyboard part and I get a temporary vocal from Daniel. Now you have a piano and a vocal and you start adding things.” – Washington Post

Paumgarten opened Steps in 1979, in a dingy one-room studio. She “went on to nurture three generations of New York dancers, becoming an instantly recognizable presence with her long silver hair and stylish black outfits as she presided over roomfuls of bodies in motion.” – The New York Times

“A musicologist and record producer best known for influential, lucidly written biographies of Beethoven and Mozart as well as a hotly debated scholarly article on Schubert’s sexuality,” he was, as Donal Henahan once put it in a review, “one of the most persuasive voices on behalf of the perilous intellectual voyage known as psychobiography — or, less kindly, ‘psychobabblography’.” – The New York Times

“In prose that might have leapt from best-selling novels, [he] portrayed the last minutes of thousands who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001; detailed the terrors of innocent Black youths pulled over and shot by racial-profiling state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike; and told of the coronavirus besieging a New York City hospital. … Colleagues called him a fast, accurate and prolific writer who crusaded against injustice, worked for six metropolitan dailies and wrote or co-wrote six books.” – The New York Times

He started as a camera operator for such landmarks as Klute, The Godfather, and Jaws; he went on to be cinematographer on movies ranging from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Personal Best to Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid to All the Right Moves (one of three titles he directed) to the big-screen remake of The Fugitive (his second Oscar nomination). His most admired work, perhaps, was in four films by Martin Scorsese: American Boy, The Last Waltz, Taxi Driver, and (his first Oscar nomination) Raging Bull. – The Guardian

“[He] was perfectly cast. Large, broad, and jovial-seeming, a Santa of the buffet table, … the happy stout man showed that you could eat well without being frightened of eating incorrectly. … The role that Beard invented and played was vital in creating a new idea of what American cooking was.” – The New Yorker