Obituaries
Edward Sanders dies at 87; advisor to President Carter on the Middle East
Thomas J. Graff, an Expert on West Coast Water Use, Is Dead at 65
Robert Cameron, High-Flying 'Above' Photographer, Dies at 98
Jeanne-Claude, Part of a Creative Powerhouse Behind Ephemeral Artworks
Col. Lewis Millett, Who Led 'Bayonet Hill' Charge, Dies at 88
Allen Hughes, Music and Dance Critic for The Times, Dies at 87
John J. O’Connor, a Times TV Critic in Years of Industry Upheaval, Dies at 76
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Edward Sanders dies at 87; advisor to President Carter on the Middle East
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (12-7-09)
Edward Sanders, an attorney and leader in the Jewish community who served President Carter as a special advisor on Mideast policy, died Monday at his Los Angeles home. He was 87.
The cause was cancer, according to his son-in-law, Stanley Witkow.
Sanders gained prominence during the 1973 energy crisis when, as president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, he challenged a letter from Standard Oil Co. to 300,000 stockholders that appeared to support a pro-Arab Mideast policy. He later became president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
In 1976, he resigned the latter post to organize Jewish support for Carter's presidential campaign. In 1978 he was named to a new post as advisor to President Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance on Mideast policy and the Jewish community. He quickly became involved in planning the historic Camp David summit, which culminated in a signed accord between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin...
Attorney Who Raised the Bar on Drunk-Driving Defenses
Source: WSJ (12-8-09)
"I hate drunk driving," Richard Essen once told The Wall Street Journal. Yet he was also one of the nation's leading defenders of those accused of it.
Mr. Essen, who died Nov. 30 at age 70, was among a handful of lawyers who in the early 1980s developed what became a legal specialty with practitioners across the nation.
"He was one of the first attorneys to recognize the need for aggressive defense for people charged with drunk driving," says Patrick Barone, a Michigan lawyer and editor of the legal publication DWI Journal.
Thanks in part to a federal initiative in 1983 that encouraged states to adopt a more stringent approach to drunk driving, laws were tightened, mandating jail time and license suspensions for first offenses.
Mr. Essen, a Miami-based defense attorney, developed strategies for defending against the new laws by filing reams of pretrial motions challenging police conduct and the accuracy of breathalyzers.
"He was the king of the pretrial motions," says William Head, an Atlanta, attorney who specializes in DUI law.
In 1986, during one three-month period, Mr. Essen handled dozens of cases without a single one going to trial, according to a Wall Street Journal article. At one point, he claimed his firm had handled 1,800 straight cases without a loss.
Monday, December 7, 2009
James F. Brown, Radio Free Europe Chief, Dies at 81
Source: NYT (12-7-09)
James F. Brown, who as the director of Radio Free Europe in the early 1980s played a seminal behind-the-scenes role in the rise of the Solidarity movement, which eventually toppled the Communist Party in Poland, died in Oxford, England, on Nov. 16. He was 81 and lived in Oxford.
The cause was an infection after a broken leg, his wife, Margaret, said.
Although he was a British citizen, Mr. Brown was named director of Radio Free Europe, a network financed by the American government, in 1978, bringing a deep knowledge of Eastern European history to the job. He was director until 1984, when he resigned because of disagreements with the Reagan administration.
Based in a white stucco building on the edge of the fashionable English Gardens section of Munich, Radio Free Europe was started in 1951 with the intent of undermining Communist regimes in five Soviet-bloc countries: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Its broadcasters were mostly exiles from those countries.
Until 1972, Radio Free Europe and its sister network, Radio Liberty, were covertly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Radio Liberty, which Mr. Brown did not lead, broadcast into the Soviet Union. When the C.I.A.’s role was exposed, Congress made the networks quasi-governmental agencies with an independent board of directors.
In their early years Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts were hard-edged, emphasizing the likelihood of Communism’s impending demise. That changed after Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in November 1956, crushing the Hungarian revolution.
“Just prior to and during the revolution, R.F.E. did broadcasts that were incendiary, very polemical,” Arch Puddington, the author of “Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty” (University of Kentucky, 2000), said Thursday. “After the revolution collapsed, there were investigations, leading to a change in the tone of the broadcasts.”
Mr. Brown and the tonal change proved a good fit. He joined the network as a research analyst soon after the Hungarian revolution. By 1969 he was director of research. In 1976 he was named deputy director; two years later he took over as network director...
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Paula Hawkins, 82, Florida Ex-Senator, Dies
Source: NYT (12-4-09)
WASHINGTON — Paula Hawkins, a tart-tongued conservative Republican who served a single term as a senator from Florida, fighting to protect children and blazing a trail for women while shunning the label of “feminist,” died Friday in Orlando, Fla. She was 82 and lived in Winter Park, Fla.
The cause was complications of a fall after several health problems, including a stroke, in recent years, her daughter Genean McKinnon said.
In her 1980 campaign, Mrs. Hawkins described herself as “feminine” as distinct from “feminist.” Her opposition to abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment made her anathema to the National Organization for Women, which picketed her appearances and accused her of embracing positions strictly in accordance with her Mormon faith.
Mrs. Hawkins was elected in the Reagan landslide, and despite the opposition of NOW, her victory scored some firsts for women. She was the first woman elected to a full Senate term without being preceded in politics by a husband or father. (Hazel Abel of Nebraska, who also had no political family ties, was elected to the Senate in 1954, but only to serve the final two months of the term of the incumbent, who had died in office.) She was also the first woman to be a senator from Florida.
At a news conference soon after her victory, a male television reporter condescendingly asked Mrs. Hawkins who would do the laundry now that she was going to be busy in the Senate.
“I don’t really think you need to worry about my laundry,” she replied, smiling with her lips but not with her eyes. “O.K.?”
Friday, December 4, 2009
'His Highness' Helped Put a Micronation on the Map
Source: WSJ (12-3-09)
Giorgio Carbone ruled for four decades over the tiny realm of Seborga, a self-proclaimed ministate in the Ligurian hills of northwest Italy.
Mr. Carbone, who died Nov. 25 at age 73, was first elected Prince of Seborga in 1963, and was henceforth properly addressed as "His Serene Highness Giorgio I," although local wags joking about his size and enthusiasm preferred "His Tremendousness."
The former head of the local flower raisers' agricultural cooperative, Mr. Carbone strode around Seborga, pop. 320, dressed in princely raiment of a white Nehru jacket adorned with medals and a blue sash. Coins in the local currency, called Luiginos, featured the prince's bearded profile and bore a fitting motto for Seborga's flower-strewn region in the Italian Riviera: sub umbra sede -- sit in the shade.
Mr. Carbone liked to greet tourists who flocked to the mountain village to see what seemed more a fairy tale princedom than a professed political reality.
Seborga's history stretches back to the Middle Ages, when a local monastery and then crusading Knights Templar ruled it under a constitution that local historians assert make its parliament the oldest in Europe. Mr. Carbone said that Seborga had been recognized by the Vatican as an independent state, and had never officially been made a part of Italy.
"He was right as a matter of law," says Guy P. Dancosse, a Montreal lawyer hired by Seborga to pursue its legal claims at the International Court of Justice. But, adds Mr. Dancosse, "the international bodies are not inclined to recognize what we call the ministates."
Actor who immortalised Soviet spy Stirlitz dies at 81
Source: BBC (12-4-09)
Russian actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who immortalised a fictional wartime spy called Stirlitz in a 1973 Soviet TV series, has died in Moscow at 81.
Tikhonov, more familiar to Western audiences as Prince Andrei in an epic Soviet adaptation of War And Peace in the 1960s, had suffered a heart attack.
As Stirlitz, he was as familiar to Soviets as James Bond in the West.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tommy Henrich, Yankees Clutch Hitter, Dies at 96
Source: NYT (12-1-09)
Tommy Henrich, the right fielder known as Old Reliable who helped propel the Yankees to seven World Series championships, died on Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio. He was 96.
His death was announced by the Yankees.
Playing with the Yankees for 11 seasons, Henrich was a timely hitter, an outstanding defensive player and a leader who epitomized the image of the classy Yankee who nearly always won.
He was part of a celebrated outfield, teaming with Joe DiMaggio in center and Charlie Keller in left. Making his debut under Manager Joe McCarthy and concluding his career with Casey Stengel’s powerful postwar clubs, he played on Yankees teams that won eight pennants.
Babe Ruth, Roger Maris and Reggie Jackson are the most illustrious names in right field at Yankee Stadium, and Henrich’s statistics, though impressive, were hardly eye-popping. But he was renowned for getting a hit when a game was on the line and for his all-around play and dedication.
“He was at his best in the big games, and he never made a mistake in the outfield,” Bobby Brown, the former Yankees third baseman, said Tuesday in an interview. “And as he grew older, he was very helpful to younger players. He told them what it was like to be a Yankee.”
At his death, Henrich (pronounced HEN-rick) was the oldest living Yankee and the last survivor of their teams of the 1930s, the Elias Sports Bureau said.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Yang Xianyi, Translator of Chinese Works, Dies at 94
Source: NYT (11-28-09)
Yang Xianyi, a translator renowned for his skill at rendering both classic and contemporary Chinese literature into English, died on Monday in Beijing. He was 94.
His death was announced by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Mr. Yang, who was given a lifetime achievement award in September by the Translators’ Association of China, was widely regarded as the greatest translator of 20th-century China. Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and later for his own company, Panda Books, he translated scores of major Chinese works, written from the 10th century to the present, into English, usually in collaboration with his wife, Gladys, who died in 1999. He also translated works by George Bernard Shaw and other English-language writers into Chinese.
Yang Xianyi was born on Jan. 10, 1915, into a banking family in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. After studying at a missionary school, he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 to study classical languages and literature. Three years later he met Gladys Margaret Taylor, the Beijing-born daughter of a British missionary, who was studying French literature at Oxford and later became the first person to obtain a degree in Chinese literature there.
The couple began working together as translators and, despite opposition from their families, married in China in 1940.
Mr. Yang said he considered his most important accomplishment to be the translation of “A Dream of Red Mansions,” an 18th-century novel viewed by many scholars as the greatest Chinese literary work in history. He and his wife began working on that translation in the early 1960s and finished it in 1974. When asked to help translate the selected works of Mao Zedong, he declined, citing work on “A Dream of Red Mansions” as his priority.
Viewed with some suspicion by the government because of his outspokenness and his family background, Mr. Yang, who belonged to the Communist Party, was imprisoned from 1968 to 1972 on charges of being a British spy. His wife spent those years in a separate prison, denied contact with him. The couple’s only son, Yang Ye, also a victim of political persecution, committed suicide...
Friday, November 27, 2009
Hugh Morgan Hill, the Storyteller Brother Blue, Dies at 88
Source: NYT (11-26-09)
Hugh Morgan Hill, who as the storyteller known as Brother Blue captivated passers-by on the streets of Boston and Cambridge, Mass., with his parables, life stories and idiosyncratic retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, and who became a fixture at storytelling conferences and gatherings in the United States and abroad, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Cambridge. He was 88.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Ruth.
Mr. Hill, a playwright by training, began attracting audiences in the late 1960s when he took to the streets and started declaiming as Brother Blue.
He was hard to miss, a gangly black man dressed from head to toe in blue, with blue-tinted glasses, a blue stocking cap or beret, and blue butterflies drawn on his face and palms with a felt-tip pen. Blessed with a resonant voice and a commanding stage presence, he was equal parts entertainer, shaman, motivational speaker and, as he liked to say, “holy fool.”
“He was the John Coltrane of storytelling,” said Warren Lehrer, author of the 1995 book “Brother Blue: A Narrative Portrait of Brother Blue, a k a Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill,” who first encountered Mr. Hill in the early 1980s. “He had his repertoire, but he would improvise, working off news items, or things he was seeing at the moment, or people in the audience, with parenthetical digressions as thoughts occurred to him.” ..
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wizards owner helped transform D.C.
Source: The Washington Post (11-25-09)
He arrived in Washington more than 75 years ago, the gangly son of a Russian metal worker named Morris Pollinovsky who came to America a poor man speaking no English. Through decades of hard work and a seemingly unstoppable will, Abe Pollin rose to the top of the worlds of business, philanthropy and professional sports. In the process, he transformed his adopted home town by bringing professional basketball and hockey franchises here and spending $220 million to build a massive sports and entertainment arena that has dramatically changed the face of downtown Washington.
Mr. Pollin, 85, died Tuesday of the rare neurological disease corticobasal degeneration. He was among the last of the old-school pro sports owners, running the National Basketball Association's Washington Wizards and earlier the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals as a family business, shaped by his strong personality and his intense loyalties. His teams lost more than they won, and fans often criticized his personnel moves or his failure to spend more money, but Mr. Pollin invariably remained set in his ways.
Mr. Pollin, through his indomitable drive and fierce devotion to his adopted home town, left his imprint on the city as no other sports owner or businessman has done. In addition to building thousands of units of housing for a range of incomes, he was the pillar of countless charitable and civic efforts, culminating in his building MCI Center (now Verizon Center) in 1997 and triggering a stunning renaissance of Gallery Place and surrounding neighborhoods.
Former D.C. mayor Anthony A. Williams said the city benefited greatly from Mr. Pollin's largess, including small projects such as endowing a Boys and Girls Club. "He was a wonderful guy, and, unlike some, he was just very plain-spoken and never one to do a lot of self-promotion" about his charitable work, Williams said...
H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn and Mozart Scholar, Dies at 83
Source: NYT (11-26-09)
H. C. Robbins Landon, an American musicologist whose research helped to restore many of Haydn’s works to the active repertory after more than a century of neglect, and whose popular books about Mozart countered many popular myths about that composer’s life, died on Friday at Rabastens, near Toulouse, France. He was 83.
Rabastens town officials confirmed his death but did not specify the cause.
Though a serious and prolific scholar, Mr. Landon also had a knack for making musicology seem exciting to the general public. He was a founder (or “instigator,” as he put it) of the Haydn Society, which started in Boston in 1949 and later moved its center of activities to Vienna. The society produced a series of recordings including previously unrecorded Haydn symphonies and Masses as well as the first recordings of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” and Mass in C minor.
In the 1950s Mr. Landon provided commentary for BBC orchestral broadcasts, and in the 1960s he collaborated with the television producer Humphrey Burton on a series of BBC television documentaries about Italian Baroque composers — a subject he returned to in “Maestro,” a 1990 series he produced with John Julius Norwich for Channel 4 in Britain (and which also yielded a book, “Five Centuries of Music in Venice,” in 1991).
He published a useful introduction to the life and music of Handel, “Handel and His World” (1984), as well as five books about Mozart, published between 1988 and 1995. In “1791: Mozart’s Last Year,” he dismissed the notions, popularized in Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, “Amadeus” (and the 1984 movie), that Mozart had been poisoned, that he had a fraught relationship with the composer Antonio Salieri, and that his Requiem was commissioned by a mysterious stranger.
But Mr. Landon’s true life’s work was bringing Haydn and his music fully into the spotlight. He said he decided to undertake that mission in 1939, when he was a 13-year-old at a boarding school in North Carolina, fascinated by concert broadcasts from New York. After hearing a few Haydn symphonies — at the time only a handful were regularly performed — he told a teacher, Mathias Cooper, that he wanted to study music. In a 2008 interview with the early-music magazine Goldberg, Mr. Landon said it was Mr. Cooper who suggested that he specialize in Haydn...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The 'King of the Pop-Ups' Made Books Spring to Life
Source: WSJ (11-24-09)
An impresario of printed extravaganzas, Waldo Hunt led a renaissance of pop-up books.
Mr. Hunt, who died Nov. 7 at age 88, was a one-time advertising executive who developed a specialty in creating pop-up magazine inserts. But what started as eye-catching marketing for Wrigley's gum and Dodge pickup trucks grew into a literary subgenre.
Fascinated by what had become a lost art in the U.S. by the 1960s, Mr. Hunt built on his experience developing pop-up marketing materials into a focus on books. While not an artist himself, Mr. Hunt was adept at coordinating the complex process of assembling the books, from design to production and assembly. Leading publishing houses including Random House hired him to package pop-up titles for adults and children.
The companies he founded, Graphics International and Intervisual Books, produced hundreds of books, including some that were translated into more than a dozen languages. "King of the pop-ups" became Mr. Hunt's moniker in professional circles.
Mr. Hunt produced dozens of books for Walt Disney; a series based on Babar; and popular titles including "Haunted House" and "The Human Body." A 1967 pop-up published by Random House, "Andy Warhol's Index," came about at the suggestion of the artist. It combined celebrity photos with pop-up versions of signature Warhol touches like a cardboard can of tomato paste.
"He single-handedly kept the torch of pop-up books alive from the 1960s through the 1990s," says Robert Sabuda, the best-selling creator of elaborate children's pop-up books. "Those of us who are in the newer generation of pop-up books would have no career without Wally Hunt."...
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Herbert J. Miller Jr., 1924-2009
Source: The New Nixon (11-21-09)
Last Saturday, Herbert J. Miller Jr., known as “Jack” to his friends and colleagues, died at age 85 in Rockville, Maryland. Miller, a native of Minnesota, came to Washington after service in WWII, graduated from George Washington University’s law school in 1949, and went to work at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the city’s best firms. Thus began one of the most varied and impressive legal careers in a city that hardly lacks great lawyers.
In 1961, Miller was persuaded by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to leave private practice and join the Justice Department as head of its criminal division. For the next four years, he was the leading figure in the successful prosecutions of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa; political fixer Bobby Baker; and many of the biggest names in organized crime. On several occasions his opponent in the courtroom was that legendary advocate, the late Edward Bennett Williams.
In 1965, Miller went into private practice and founded Miller, Cassidy, Larocca & Lewin, which, until its dissolution in 2001, was among the handful of Washington’s most high-powered firms. In his years with the firm, Miller represented organizations as diverse as National Public Radio and NASCAR. He kept in touch with Robert Kennedy and was a pallbearer at the latter’s funeral in 1968; the following year he was retained by Sen. Edward Kennedy for a time after the Chappaquiddick accident. (However, Miller’s own views were those of a liberal Republican; he ran for lieutenant governor of Maryland on the GOP ticket in 1970, his only venture into the political fray, but was defeated.)
But as famed as some of Miller’s clients were, all of them pale in prominence compared to the man whom the attorney represented for nearly two decades: Richard Nixon. Miller was first engaged by the former President just after his resignation in 1974, and from then until RN’s death (and for a number of years afterwards, representing his estate) Miller diligently labored on behalf of his client’s legal interests.
In the first weeks of this work, his task was to deal with Gerald Ford’s White House regarding the pardon which the thirty-eighth President gave his predecessor in September 1974. Then, through the years, Miller carefully worked on the litigation over the ownership and accessibility of the White House tapes, which culminated in the agreement which made them accessible to the public. Among the other Nixon-related cases in which he was involved was the one which led to the 1982 decision by the Supreme Court that the former President could not be sued in civil court for his actions during his time in office – a decision whose ramifications are felt every time a Chief Executive returns to private life.
But to say all this still does not indicate how versatile Miller was. He could argue the profoundest constitutional issues before the Supreme Court and then – as he did once – defend his mother-in-law on a speeding charge in traffic court. His bulldog tenacity in a courtroom was offset by amiability and good humor outside it. Truly, he was an exemplary figure in his profession.
Thomas J. Graff, an Expert on West Coast Water Use, Is Dead at 65
Source: NYT (11-20-09)
SAN FRANCISCO — Thomas J. Graff, a leading environmentalist who championed the idea of offering financial incentives for environmentally friendly behavior, an approach that had far-reaching impact on state and federal policies, especially on water use in the drought-prone West, died Nov. 12 in Oakland, Calif., where he lived. He was 65.
The cause was thyroid cancer, his family said.
Mr. Graff, who founded the first California office of the Environmental Defense Fund and led it for 37 years, dealt with a host of environmental issues, including AB 32, the first-of-its-kind legislation, adopted in 2006, that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions in California. But he made his biggest impact in the realm of water use, a constant source of vexation in the West.
Mr. Graff’s early support for using market forces to encourage environmentally friendly behavior was a somewhat radical idea at the time. But it has since become increasingly common in environmental negotiations nationwide and has echoes in “cap and trade” policies around the world involving things like airborne pollutants and carbon emissions.
“If a resource is scarce, we ought to put a price on it that reflects its value,” Mr. Graff said in an interview in 2008. “Otherwise there’s an incentive to over-consume.”
Mr. Graff’s theory was put to wide use in 1992, when he cajoled federal lawmakers into passing the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, a landmark bill that established a new accounting system to assure that diversions of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, whose waters help irrigate millions of acres of farmland to the south, would not outstrip the delta’s own ecological needs...
Robert Cameron, High-Flying 'Above' Photographer, Dies at 98
Source: NYT (11-21-09)
One of Robert Cameron’s thousands of vibrant color aerial photographs zeroes virtually straight down from above the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge to its anchorage, the reddish hue of the majestic structure glowing in a setting sun.
Another captures a stretch of Queens Boulevard, the multilane vehicular spine of one of New York City’s five boroughs, showing its cars, walkers, stores and trees dotting into the distance.
Then there is a close-up of rock climbers dangling from El Capitan, the 3,000-foot sheer granite peak in Yosemite National Park.
Three months after he last rode shotgun in a helicopter, pointing his Pentax camera (mounted on a gyroscope to offset the vibrations), Mr. Cameron, the creator and publisher of the popular “Above” series of photography books for the coffee table, died on Nov. 10 at his home in San Francisco. He was 98.
The death was confirmed by his son Tony.
Mr. Cameron’s last shoot traced the steep hairpin turns of Lombard Street, one of his favorite spots — from the air or on the ground — in his beloved San Francisco.
Although he produced four “Above San Francisco” books since starting the series in 1969, Mr. Cameron’s passion for panoramic, yet often vividly detailed photography took him far afield. His 19 “Above” books, each with about 150 photographs, include neighborhood-by-neighborhood overviews of Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, San Diego and Seattle. Then there are the volumes showing the natural wonders of places like Yosemite, Big Sur and Hawaii.
In “Above Paris,” Mr. Cameron’s bird’s-eye shots of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame reveal the Gothic structure’s gargoyles and flying buttresses. In his New York book two overlapping panoramas show the virtual wall of buildings stretching along Central Park West from Columbus Circle to 110th Street. But a close-up of the American Museum of Natural History focuses on its Romanesque stonework, and even shows which of its windows have their shades drawn.
“He had a very knowing eye,” Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine and a professor of architecture at the New School, said in an interview on Thursday.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Jeanne-Claude, Part of a Creative Powerhouse Behind Ephemeral Artworks
Source: WSJ (11-20-09)
With her husband, Christo, Jeanne-Claude was part of an inseparable artistic duo that produced some of the world's most well-known and monumental works of art.
Jeanne-Claude, who died Nov. 18 in New York City at age 74 after suffering a brain aneurysm, created landmark public displays using textiles, including the 18-foot-high, 24-mile-long "Running Fence" in California and "Surrounded Islands" in which the couple installed giant lily pad-like structures in Florida's Biscayne Bay with 6.4 million square feet of bright-pink fabric. Their 2005 creation, "The Gates," a series of 7,503 orange nylon panels erected for 16 days in New York's Central Park, drew crowds in the middle of winter.
One of their most notable works was the 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament in Berlin, in silvery fabric, a project the couple had contemplated for more than two decades. The logistical headaches were so large, Jeanne-Claude once said, that it turned her husband's hair gray and hers red.
Forceful and outspoken, Jeanne-Claude was fond of telling interviewers that there were only three things the couple never did together: fly in an airplane (they took separate flights); make sketches (Christo's job); and manage their taxes (Jeanne-Claude's job). Adding to the vision of two artists merging their creativity was the fact they shared the same birthday.
Jeanne-Claude took the lead in raising funds for projects through the sale of Christo's sketches and other materials to collectors and museums. Such self-financing of large projects is rare in the art world, but the couple said they feared relying on sponsors would compromise their artistic freedom, said their longtime lawyer, Scott Hodes.
Jeanne-Claude avoided galleries, selling directly to collectors. When funds were scarce, she would offer prospective buyers a discount for cash upfront.
To finance a project, Jeanne-Claude told The Wall Street Journal in 1984, "I'll sell almost anything but our son."
Christo often said Jeanne-Claude's contributions to their work went beyond finance and logistics; the basic conception of "Surrounded Islands," he insisted, was hers...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Col. Lewis Millett, Who Led 'Bayonet Hill' Charge, Dies at 88
Source: NYT (11-18-09)
Col. Lewis L. Millett, an Army veteran of three wars who received the Medal of Honor for leading a rare bayonet charge up a hill in Korea, died Saturday in Loma Linda, Calif. He was 88.
His death was announced by his sister Ellen Larrabee.
Colonel Millett’s forebears fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War I. He was so eager to follow in their footsteps that he deserted the American armed forces in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack and joined the Canadian military in the hope of seeing combat quickly. He was eventually court-martialed for desertion, but not before he had returned to the American Army and fought with distinction.
When he became a company commander in the Korean War, serving as a captain in the 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, he seemed a visage from battlefields past with his red handlebar mustache. On Feb. 7, 1951, he employed a tactic of bygone wars with a fury that overwhelmed the enemy.
During the fighting near Osan, South Korea, Captain Millett’s unit encountered Communist troops atop a spot called Hill 180.
It would be remembered as Bayonet Hill for what the military historian Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall would call “the most complete bayonet charge by American troops since Cold Harbor,” a reference to the carnage at an 1864 Civil War battle in Virginia.
After ordering his men to fix bayonets, Captain Millett charged up the hill in front of them in the face of heavy fire, blasting away with his carbine, throwing grenades and, most spectacularly, wielding his bayonet when he encountered three enemy soldiers in a V-shaped gun position.
“I assaulted an antitank rifle crew,” he told Military History magazine in 2002. “The man at the point was the gunner. I bayoneted him. The next man reached for something, I think it was a machine pistol, but I bayoneted him — got him in the throat.”
The third soldier had a submachine gun.
“I guess the sight of me, red-faced and screaming, made him freeze,” he recalled. “Otherwise he would have killed me. I lunged forward and the bayonet went into his forehead. With the adrenaline flowing you’re strong as a bull. It was like going into a watermelon.”
Captain Millett was wounded by grenade fragments, but his men took the hill. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor in July 1951. As the citation put it, “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Allen Hughes, Music and Dance Critic for The Times, Dies at 87
Source: NYT (11-17-09)
Allen Hughes, a longtime music and dance critic for The New York Times who was known for his encouragement of experimental dance companies and his love of the 20th-century French musical repertory, died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87 and had lived in Sarasota since 2003.
The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his wife, Nina.
Mr. Hughes was an urbane observer of the musical and dance worlds, covering them for The Times for 26 years, starting in 1960. He continued to write about dance for the paper after retiring in 1986. He also wrote a book review column for Chamber Music magazine from 1998 to 2002.
Although he spent most of his career writing about music, Mr. Hughes regarded his dance criticism as his most important work. From 1963 to 1965, when he was the chief dance critic of The Times, he championed avant-garde groups, often to the consternation of mainstream ensembles, and advocated for multimedia presentations and other innovations.
He also took up causes. When the Ford Foundation announced $7.7 million in grants to classical ballet organizations in 1963, he objected that the allocation unduly favored George Balanchine’s City Ballet.
“The New York City Ballet,” he wrote, “received $2 million for a 10-year period. Fine. It is a great and glorious company. What did other New York companies get, the American Ballet Theater and the Robert Joffrey Ballet, for example? Not a penny.” ...
Monday, November 16, 2009
John J. O’Connor, a Times TV Critic in Years of Industry Upheaval, Dies at 76
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
John J. O’Connor, who as a television critic for The New York Times for more than 25 years covered the medium as it expanded from a business dominated by three networks to a universe of hundreds of diverse cable and broadcast channels, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.
The cause was lung cancer, which had been diagnosed only four weeks ago, said Seymour Barofsky, his partner of 47 years.
Mr. O’Connor joined The Times as a television critic in 1971 and retired in 1997. His tenure coincided with sweeping industry changes, beginning with the advent of the mini-series.
He found the 12-hour “Rich Man, Poor Man” (1976), the first mini-series produced for American television, “somewhat short of great art” and guilty of sentimentality but better than average television fare. In 1977 he criticized “Roots” for stereotypical portrayals and questioned its historical accuracy but concluded that with its premiere, “popular entertainment has, flaws and all, taken a significant step forward.”
No matter what his subject, he kept the industry in mind. When “Masterpiece Theater” imported the British series “Upstairs, Downstairs” in 1974, Mr. O’Connor praised it as “marvelous television.” But he also took the opportunity to compare the show with domestic productions, calling it “another contrast demonstration of the paucity of imagination on American television series.”
Over the years he reviewed both light and serious programming. He called David Frost’s 1977 series of paid interviews with former President Richard M. Nixon “a program with extraordinary impact” that nevertheless raised “serious questions about the contemporary crafts of marketing and communication.”...
Serb Patriarch Pavle dies, spoke for Balkan peace
Source: Miami Herald (11-15-09)
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Pavle, who called for peace and conciliation during the Balkan ethnic wars of the 1990s but failed to openly condemn extreme Serb nationalism, died Sunday. He was 95.
There have been reports of an internal struggle over who would succeed Pavle, a respected theologian and linguist known for personal humility and modesty. The favorite is influential Bishop Amfilohije, a hard-liner known for his anti-Western and ultra-nationalist stands.
The seven-million member church said its highest body, the Holy Synod, could announce Monday when Pavle's successor will be chosen. At least 40 days must pass after Pavle's death before a new patriarch can be elected.
Pavle took over the church in 1990 just as the collapse of communism ended years of state policy of repressing religion. He often spoke against violence in the ethnic wars Orthodox Serbs fought against Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims during the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
"God help us understand that we are human beings and that we must live as human beings, so that peace would come into our country and bring an end to the killing," Pavle had appealed - mostly in vain - in 1991 as fighting raged between Serbs and Croats over disputed territories in Croatia.
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