2008年9月30日 星期二

Osborn Elliott, Father of Newsweek’s Rebirth, Dies at 83

Osborn Elliott, Father of Newsweek’s Rebirth, Dies at 83


Published: September 28, 2008

Osborn Elliott, the courtly editor who revitalized Newsweek magazine in the 1960s before he went on to serve as a $1-a-year deputy mayor in charge of economic development for a financially desperate New York City, died at his home in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 83.

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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Osborn Elliott in 2000. In the 1960s, he revitalized Newsweek magazine, and later was dean of Columbia’s journalism school.

He died of complications of cancer, said his daughter Dorinda Elliott.

When Mr. Elliott became Newsweek’s managing editor in 1959, the magazine lagged appreciably behind its chief competitor, Time, in circulation and advertising, and aped the sort of terse and idiosyncratic writing that Time had introduced.

But Mr. Elliott, who rose to editor in 1961, was willing to experiment with formula and take a more ambitious journalistic path for Newsweek. The magazine began shunning the backward-running sentences that Time and its founder, Henry R. Luce, favored, and it started giving reporters bylines, breaking a long news magazine practice of anonymous writing.

More substantively, it began producing in-depth polling on national issues. In cover articles, often to attract a younger readership, it examined the war in Vietnam and the mounting opposition to it, the civil rights movement, racial unrest in the cities, popular culture, and the counterculture. The perspectives were generally liberal, as had been the case from the beginning of Newsweek’s rivalry with Time, which generally reflected the conservative outlook of Mr. Luce.

On Nov. 20, 1967, in a departure from its tradition of neutrality, Newsweek moved toward open advocacy with a 23-page section titled ‘The Negro in America: What Must Be Done.” In an editorial — the first in what was then the magazine’s 34-year history — Newsweek offered a 12-point program on how to accelerate the passage of black Americans into all aspects of society. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recognized the series in giving Newsweek its Magazine of the Year Award.

Newsweek also gave prominent coverage to the women’s movement — “Women in Revolt,” one cover said — though in 1970 the magazine itself was the subject of a federal discrimination complaint by 46 young women on its news staff, most of them hired as researchers to check facts, saying they had been denied writing positions because of their sex.

Mr. Elliott, defending the magazine, said that most researchers were women because of a “news magazine tradition going back to almost 50 years.” In a negotiated agreement, the magazine promised to accelerate recruitment and promotion of women.

During Mr. Elliott’s tenure, Newsweek’s circulation, which stood at almost 1.5 million in 1961, rose to more than 2.7 million by 1976, the year he left, though even then it still trailed Time by nearly a million readers.

Mr. Elliott reveled in the job. “I had interviews with five presidents, audiences with two popes and the emperor of Japan,” he wrote in 1977, reflecting on his career in an article in The New York Times Magazine, adding that he had “spent the most interesting and moving week of my life living, and learning, in the black ghettos of America.”

But he conceded that the pace in running the magazine was grueling and that he had promised himself to lessen his burden when men had landed on the moon. Thus, in 1969, he moved on to what he called the nonexistent job of editor in chief. He later had the titles of president, chief executive and board chairman.

Mr. Elliott left Newsweek in 1976 to become New York’s first deputy mayor for economic development. The year before, at the urging of Senator Jacob K. Javits, he had formed and led the Citizens Committee for New York City, a private group founded to organize volunteers for projects the city could no longer afford to finance.

The city was nearly bankrupt and had lost almost 650,000 jobs in the previous seven years. Its economic development administrator had resigned. Mayor Abraham D. Beame asked Mr. Elliott to take over the development agency and restructure it as the Office of Economic Opportunity.

In taking the job at $1 a year, Mr. Elliott said a nominal salary would put him above the political process and give him more credibility with businesses. Charged with attracting businesses to the city, he shifted the emphasis from large corporations to smaller enterprises with fewer than 100 workers.

His turn as a public servant was brief. In 1977, he resigned to become dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a position he held until 1986, when he stepped down, although he stayed on as the George T. Delacorte Professor until 1994.

With his liberal urban enthusiasms — he helped organize a Save Our Cities march on Washington in 1992 — his polka-dot bow ties and his conservatively cut suits, Mr. Elliott was a familiar, old-money figure in some of the city’s citadels of power: the Century Association, the Harvard Club, the Council of Foreign Relations and the board rooms of the New York Public Library and the Asia Society. The composer Lukas Foss, a friend, occasionally tutored him in his piano playing at Mr. Elliott’s Connecticut house.

In 1983, his hospitable nature was exploited in a bizarre encounter that was to help inspire John Guare to write his award-winning play “Six Degrees of Separation.” An engaging young man had approached Mr. Elliot claiming to be the son of the actor Sidney Poitier and a classmate of one of Mr. Elliott’s daughters. When the young man said he had been mugged, Mr. Elliott invited him into his home and gave him money and clothes. It later turned out that the man was an imposter who had bilked other prominent New Yorkers.

Osborn Elliott was born on Oct. 25, 1924, a descendant of Stephen Coerte van Voorhees, who came to New Amsterdam from Holland in the early 17th century. The boy grew up in a town house on East 62nd Street, where his parents, John Elliott, a stockbroker, and the former Audrey Osborn, a prominent real-estate broker who had campaigned for women’s suffrage, entertained friends like the columnist Walter Lippmann and the author John Gunther.

Mr. Elliott attended the Browning School in New York, St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., and Harvard. In World War II, he saw combat in the Pacific aboard the heavy cruiser Boston. Discharged as a lieutenant, junior grade, in 1946, he considered pursuing a career in finance or following his elder brother, John, into advertising. (John, known as Jock, became chairman of Ogilvy & Mather. He died in 2005.)

Instead, Mr. Elliott, who was known as Oz, chose journalism, joining The New York Journal of Commerce as a reporter.

He had been working there for three years when his first wife, the former Deirdre Marie Spencer, who was working in the personnel department of Time, urged him to apply for a job with the magazine. He joined the staff as a contributing editor specializing in business and advanced to associate editor.

In 1955, Newsweek, historically the weaker of the two weeklies, asked Mr. Elliott to be its business editor, and he took the job, beginning his long association with the magazine. In 1959 he published a book, “Men at the Top” (Harper), examining the qualities that had propelled executives to the upper ranks of corporations.

In 1961, Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, bought controlling interest in Newsweek and promoted Mr. Elliott from managing editor to editor. He continued in the job when Katharine Graham assumed control after her husband’s death in 1963.

Mr. Elliott’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. The following year he married the former Inger Abrahamsen McCabe, founder of China Seas, a fabric and carpeting importer. She survives him, as do three daughters by his first marriage, Diana Elliott Lidofsky of Providence, R.I.; Cynthia Elliott of Manhattan; and Dorinda, of Brooklyn; three stepchildren, Kari McCabe of Manhattan, Alexander McCabe of Brooklyn and Marit McCabe of Manhattan; 17 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. He is also survived by two foster sons, Samuel Wong of San Francisco and David Wong of St. Paul.

“I was hooked on journalism,” Mr. Elliott wrote in his Times Magazine article, recalling his earliest days as a reporter and summing up his career. “Impressed by its demands for compression and clarity. Enchanted — mostly — by its practitioners and their often feigned cynicism. Flattered by the access it offered to heads of state, artists and tycoons. Infuriated by its imperfections — though as often as not, no doubt, blind to them as well. In love with its humor. Humbled, sort of, by its power.”

2008年9月27日 星期六

Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies

Paul Newman, 83, Magnetic Hollywood Titan, Dies


Published: September 27, 2008

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.

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Paul Newman in 2006. More Photos »

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In the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” a pivotal scene captured Paul Newman’s charm. More Photos >

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Paul Newman with his wife, Joanne Woodward, in 2002 outside the Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Conn. More Photos >

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The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicists.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.

Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.

Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice.” Stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Mr. Dean had been killed in car crash before the screenplay was finished.

It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of “The Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks’s gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last onscreen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.” “Rachel, Rachel,” which he directed, was nominated for best picture.

“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”

But the movies and the occasional stage role were never enough for him. He became a successful racecar driver, winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles. He even competed at Daytona in 1995 as a 70th birthday present to himself. In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman’s Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.

Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.

Several years before the establishment of Newman’s Own, on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman, the oldest of Mr. Newman’s six children and his only son, died at 28 of an overdose of alcohol and pills. His father’s monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.

Mr. Newman’s three younger daughters are the children of his 50-year second marriage, to the actress Joanne Woodward. Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward both were cast — she as an understudy — in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953. Starting with “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1958, they co-starred in 10 movies, including “From the Terrace” (1960), based on a John O’Hara novel about a driven executive and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984), which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write; and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), James Ivory’s version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels, in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life’s changes.

When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled, Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968. Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film, a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love, brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations. (She won the award on her first nomination, for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,” and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)

Mr. Newman also directed his wife in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972), “The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980). As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), based on the Ken Kesey novel.

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward’s was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”

Beginnings in Cleveland

Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland. His mother, the former Teresa Fetzer, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.

Teresa Newman, an avid theatergoer, steered her son toward acting as a child. In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays, graduating in 1943. After less than a year at Ohio University at Athens, he joined the Navy Air Corps to be a pilot. When a test showed he was colorblind, he was made an aircraft radio operator.

After the war Mr. Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio on an athletic scholarship. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.

Arthur Newman, a strict and distant man, thought acting an impractical occupation, but, perhaps persuaded by his wife, he agreed to support his son for a year while Paul acted in small theater companies.

In May 1950 his father died, and Mr. Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress he had met in summer stock. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Mr. Newman intended to concentrate on directing.

He left Yale in the summer of 1952, perhaps because the money had run out and his wife was pregnant again. But almost immediately, the director Josh Logan and the playwright William Inge gave him a small role in “Picnic,” a play that was to run 14 months on Broadway. Soon he was playing the second male lead and understudying Ralph Meeker as the sexy drifter who roils the women in a Kansas town.

Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of “Picnic.” But he was a married man, and Ms. Woodward has insisted that they spent the next several years running away from each other.

In the early 1950s roles in live television came easily to both of them. Mr. Newman starred in segments of “You Are There,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse” and other shows.

He was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York, where he took lessons alongside James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and, eventually, Ms. Woodward.

Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Mr. Newman $1,000 a week to star in “The Silver Chalice” as the Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Mr. Newman, who rarely watched his own films, once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through “The Silver Chalice,” which he called the worst movie ever made.

His antidote for that early Hollywood experience was to hurry back to Broadway. In Joseph Hayes’s play “The Desperate Hours,” he starred as an escaped convict who holds a family hostage. The play was a hit, and during its run, Jacqueline Newman gave birth to their third child.

On his nights off Mr. Newman acted on live television. In one production he had the title role in “The Death of Billy the Kid,” a psychological study of the outlaw written by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn for “Philco Playhouse”; in another, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Battler,” he took over the lead role after James Dean, who had been scheduled to star, was killed on Sept. 30, 1955.

Mr. Penn, who directed “The Battler,” was later sure that Mr. Newman’s performance in that drama, as a disfigured prizefighter, won him the lead role in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” again replacing Dean. When Mr. Penn adapted the Billy the Kid teleplay for his first Hollywood film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958, he again cast Mr. Newman in the lead.

Even so, Mr. Newman was saddled for years with an image of being a “pretty boy” lightweight.

“Paul suffered a little bit from being so handsome — people doubted just how well he could act,” Mr. Penn told the authors of the 1988 book “Paul and Joanne.”

By 1957 Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted that his drinking was out of control during this period.

With his divorce granted, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were married on Jan. 29, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Conn.

That same year Mr. Newman played Brick, the reluctant husband of Maggie the Cat, in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with “The Hustler,” he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.

Directed by Martin Ritt

Many of his meaty performances during the early ’60s came in movies directed by Martin Ritt, who had been a teaching assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio when Mr. Newman was a student. After directing “The Long, Hot Summer,” Mr. Ritt directed Mr. Newman in “Paris Blues” (1961), a story of expatriate musicians; “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962); “Hud” (1963), which brought Mr. Newman a third Oscar nomination; “The Outrage” (1964), with Mr. Newman as the bandit in a western based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”; and “Hombre” (1967), in which Mr. Newman played a white man, reared by Indians, struggling to live in a white world.

Among his other important films were Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) and Jack Smight’s “Harper” (1966), in which he played Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer.

In 1968 — after he was cast as an ice-cold racecar driver in “Winning,” with Ms. Woodward playing his frustrated wife — Mr. Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife racing became his obsession. A Web site — newman-haas.com — details his racing career, including his first race in 1972; his first professional victory, in 1982; and his co-ownership of the Newman/Haas Indy racing team, which won eight series championships.

A politically active liberal Democrat, Mr. Newman was a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention and appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a United Nations General Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

When Mr. Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role — “with just the right blend of craftiness and stupidity,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times — of Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” (1977); and the disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s “Verdict.”

Most of Mr. Newman’s films were commercial hits, probably none more so than “The Sting” (1973), in which he teamed with Mr. Redford again to play a couple of con men, and “The Towering Inferno” (1974), in which he played an architect in an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.

After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, for his portrait of an innocent man discredited by the press in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981), and his sixth a year later, for “The Verdict,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Mr. Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award. In a videotaped acceptance speech he said, “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn.”

His best-actor Oscar, for “The Color of Money,” came the next year, and at the 1994 Oscars ceremony he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The year after that he earned his eighth nomination as best actor, for his curmudgeonly construction worker trying to come to terms with his failures in “Nobody’s Fool” (1994). In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for his work in “Road to Perdition.” And in 2006 he took home both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing another rough-hewn old-timer, this one in the HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”

Besides Ms. Woodward and his daughters Susan and Nell, he is survived by three other daughters, Stephanie, Melissa and Clea; two grandchildren; and his brother.

Mr. Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as the Stage Manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” The performance was nominated for a Tony Award, though critics tended to find it modest. When the play was broadcast on PBS in 2003, he won an Emmy.

This year he had planned to direct “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, in October at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. But in May he announced that he was stepping aside, citing his health.

Mr. Newman’s last screen credit was as the narrator of Bill Haney’s documentary “The Price of Sugar,” released this year. By then he had all but announced that he was through with acting.

“I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”

But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing children a camp at which to play.

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

2008年9月23日 星期二

Mauricio Kagel, 76, Writer of Avant-Garde Music, Is Dead

Arts on the Air | 24.09.2008 | 05:30

Influential 20th century composer Mauricio Kagel dies (Interview)

On September 18th, the composer Mauricio Kagel died at the age of 76.

Although born and educated in Argentina, Mauricio Kagel was a long-time resident of Germany, and for more than half a century he was one of the most inventive and wide-ranging figures in contemporary music. Kagel’s work defied easy characterisation. He adhered to no recognisable idiom or style, and he was at pains throughout his career to establish no school.

Mauricio Kagel was born in Buenos Aires in 1931, to a polyglot Jewish family who had arrived in South America from Eastern Europe in the late 1920s. Preferring to read philosophy and literature at university rather than attend a conservatory, he studied music intensively with private teachers, taking lessons in theory, piano, organ, cello, singing and conducting. As a composer he was self-taught, his work influenced as much by his literary and philosophical studies as by any musical studies. In this week's Arts on the Air we remember the vivacious Mauricio Kagel in one of his last interviews ever.

Interview: Mauricio Kagel / Breandáin O’Shea


Mauricio Kagel, 76, Writer of Avant-Garde Music, Is Dead


Published: September 19, 2008

Mauricio Kagel, an avant-garde composer whose often absurdist works blurred the boundaries between music, theater and film, died on Wednesday in Cologne, Germany. He was 76.

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European Pressphoto Agency

Mauricio Kagel in 2000.

His death was announced by his music publishing house, C. F. Peters Musikverlag. No cause was given.

By temperament a dadaist and provocateur, Mr. Kagel drew on the musical examples of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In “Anagrama,” a work from the 1950s, singers and instrumentalists were called on to emit notes, squeaks, whispers and shouts corresponding to an elaborate system derived from the letters in a Latin palindrome.

In works like “Der Schall” (1968) and “Acustica” (1968-70), he made use of cash registers, car horns, ratchets and walkie-talkies to create bizarre aural effects, and in works he described as “instrumental theater” he prescribed specific attitudes and gestures for the performers to enact.

Mauricio Raúl Kagel grew up in Buenos Aires, where his parents had fled from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Although he took private lessons on piano, organ and cello, as well as in singing, conducting and theory, he was self-taught as a composer.

After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, he collaborated with an avant-garde group, the Agrupación Nuevo Mundo; helped found the Cinémathèque Argentine; and wrote film criticism. In 1955 he became the chorus director and rehearsal accompanist at the Teatro Colón.

At the encouragement of the composer Pierre Boulez, he left for West Germany in 1957 and settled in Cologne, where he conducted concerts of contemporary music with the Rhineland Chamber Orchestra and was a visiting lecturer at the Darmstadt summer courses for new music.

In 1969 he was named director of the Institute of New Music at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and the successor to Stockhausen as the director of the Cologne Courses for New Music. He helped found the Cologne Ensemble for New Music. In 1974 he became the professor of new music and theater at the Musikhochschule in Cologne.

Among his more notable works are “Staatstheater” (1967-70) a disassembled opera, minus plot and libretto, consisting of nine sections to be performed in any order, and the film “Ludwig van” (1970), whose soundtrack derives from pages of Beethoven’s music plastered on the walls of a set representing the composer’s studio. Because the sheet music wraps around edges and curves, Mr. Kagel in effect held Beethoven up to a fun-house mirror.


2008年9月21日 星期日

Ian Hibell

"Cream tea".

Wikipedia article "Cream tea".

Ian Hibell

Sep 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Ian Hibell, a long-distance cyclist, died on August 23rd, aged 74

Nic Henderson

IN A man’s life there comes a time when he must get out of Brixham. He must leave the boats bobbing in the harbour, the Devon cream teas, the holiday camp and the steam railway; he must bid farewell to the nine-to-five job at Standard Telephones and Cables, up the A379 in Paignton, and hit the more open road.

Some might get no farther than Bristol. But Ian Hibell went so far in one direction that his eyebrows crusted with frost and his hands froze; and so far in another that he lay down in the hot sand to die of dehydration (as he expected) under a thorn tree; and so far in another that the safest place to be, out of range of the mosquitoes, was to burrow like an alligator into black, viscous mud.


In the course of his 40-year travelling life he went the equivalent of ten times round the equator, covering 6,000 miles or so a year. He became the first man to cycle the Darien Gap in Panama, and the first to cycle from the top to the bottom of the American continent. He went from Norway to the Cape of Good Hope and from Bangkok to Vladivostok, wheeling or walking every inch of the way. Every so often he would come back, showing up at STC (from which he had taken, in the beginning, only a two-year leave of absence) with vague murmurings of an apology. But pretty soon the panniers would be packed, the brakes checked, the tyres pumped, and he would be off again.

His cycle, loaded with 60-80lb of clothes, tent, stove, biscuits, sardines and water, was sometimes a complication. In the Sahara it sank to its hubs in fine, talc-like sand. In the Amazonian jungle he could not squeeze it between the trees. Crossing the great Atrato swamp, where the track became a causeway over slimy logs and then a mat of floating grass, the bike would sometimes sink into nothingness. He became expert at feeling for it in the morass with his feet. Every tricky traverse in mountain, stream or forest needed doing twice over: once to find a way for himself, then to collect the steed, often carrying it shoulder-high through sharp palmetto, or water, or rocks.

Yet Mr Hibell’s love for his bikes was unconditional. He took them, muddy as they were, into hotels with him, and clung fiercely on to them whenever tribesmen robbed him of the rest of his things. His favourite had a Freddie Grubb frame of Reynolds 531 tubing on a 42-inch wheelbase, reinforced to take the extra weight of goatskins holding water; Campagnolo Nuevo Record gears front and rear; Robregal double-butted 14-16-gauge spokes; and Christophe pedal-straps. It was so lightweight, as touring bikes go, that a group of boys in Newfoundland mocked that it would soon break on their roads. Instead, it did 100,000 miles.

Bikes rarely let him down. Escaping once from spear-throwing Turkana in northern Kenya, he felt the chain come off, but managed to coast downhill to safety. He crossed China from north to south—in 2006, at 72—with just three brake-block changes, one jammed rear-brake cable and a change of tape on the handlebars. In his book, “Into the Remote Places” (1984), he described his bike as a companion, a crutch and a friend. Setting off in the morning light with “the quiet hum of the wheels, the creak of strap against load, the clink of something in the pannier”, was “delicious”. And more than that. Mr Hibell was a short, sinewy man, not particularly swift on his feet. But on a good smooth downhill run, the wind in his face, the landscape pelting past, he felt “oneness with everything”, like “a god almost”.

A teapot in the desert

Human company was less uplifting. His travelling companions usually proved selfish, violent and unreliable, unappreciative of Mr Hibell’s rather proper and methodical approach to putting up a tent or planning a route, leaving (sometimes with essential kit) to strike off by themselves. But there were exceptions. One was the beautiful Laura with whom, after years of shyness towards women, he found love as they skidded down rocky tracks in Peru. Others were the strangers whose kindness he encountered everywhere. Peasants in China shared their dumplings with him; Indians in Amazonia guided him through the jungle; and in a wilderness of sand a pair of Tuareg boys produced from their robes a bag of dates and a small blue teapot, which restored him.

In a career of hazards, from soldier ants to real soldiers to sleet that cut his face like steel, only motorists did him real damage. The drivers came too close, and passengers sometimes pelted him with bottles (in Nigeria), or with shovelfuls of gravel (in Brazil). In China in 2006 a van drove over his arm and hand. He recovered, but wondered whether his luck would last. It ran out on the road between Salonika and Athens this August, where he was knocked out of the way by a car that appeared to be chasing another.

At bad moments on his trips he had sometimes distracted himself by thinking of Devonian scenes: green fields, thatched cottages and daffodils. He would return to a nice house, a bit of garden, the job. But that thought could never hold him long. Although his body might long for the end of cycling—a flat seat, a straight back, unclenched hands—his mind was terrified of stopping. And in his mind, he never did.



2008年9月13日 星期六

葉振麟

民視介紹台灣55-65年代第一歌詞作家 葉振麟 (千首以上)
internet竟然無資料 希望是我打字錯誤

2008年9月9日 星期二

賴鼎銘

恭賀 賴鼎銘 榮任世新大學校長

賴校長 宴客
明目幫 書友



時間 : 2008年9月11日 1830
地點 : 台電大樓旁 醉紅小酌



今天洪老師說
8年前的讀書會的人 在東部任教的毛 張等
都會趕飛機回來


周前
賴鼎銘 說我如果11月去 Madson
請幫他買 博士服



....14天前

tony 問:中文維基 的正確開法 如何? 我試開 結果老是「沒有回應」

hc答:· 中文維基百科 維基百科- 維基百科,自由的百科全書

進去再轉正體字等

例:

賴鼎銘

維基百科,自由的百科全書

賴鼎銘,台灣圖書館學研究者、教育工作者,1956年在雲林縣出生。……現在是世新大學資訊傳播學系專任教授兼校長(200881起)。

賴鼎銘部落格

---

傍晚,洪老師安排他在9/12 請客:明目之友

2008年9月7日 星期日

Robert Giroux (1914-2008)

Robert Giroux, Editor, Publisher and Nurturer of Literary Giants, Is Dead at 94


Published: September 6, 2008

Robert Giroux, an editor and publisher who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century and ultimately added his name to one of the nation’s most distinguished publishing houses, died on Friday in Tinton Falls, N.J. He was 94.

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Arthur W. Wang

Robert Giroux in the 1980s.

Related

‘Not For Us’: His Lost Masterpiece (September 7, 2008)

He died in his sleep at Seabrook Village, an independent-living center, a niece, Kathleen Mulvehill, said.

If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, presiding over the business end, Mr. Giroux made his mark on the inside, as editor in chief, shaping the house’s book list and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste. The publisher Charles Scribner Jr., in his memoir, “In the Company of Writers” (1991), wrote, “Giroux is a great man of letters, a great editor and a great publisher.”

Mr. Giroux was T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.

He introduced a long roster of illustrious writers, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott and William Golding.

In one instance he persuaded William Saroyan to transform “The Human Comedy” (1943) from a film script into a novel by suggesting that he simply remove the camera directions from the manuscript. The novel sold well and became a book-club selection.

But to his lasting regret Mr. Giroux also saw two momentous books slip from his grasp, J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Mr. Giroux was attracted to editing while a student at Columbia University, when he took an honors seminar with Raymond Weaver.

“Weaver was the first biographer of Herman Melville, and the first person to read the manuscript of ‘Billy Budd,’ in 1919,” Mr. Giroux told the poet Donald Hall in an interview for The New York Times Book Review in 1980. “This left a mark on me. I thought, ‘Imagine discovering a literary masterpiece.’ ”

How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any list of the century’s best: “To the Finland Station,” Edmund Wilson’s 1940 masterwork on the rise of socialist thinking. Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.

Born on April 8, 1914, in Jersey City, Mr. Giroux was the youngest of five children of Arthur J. Giroux, a foreman for a silk manufacturer, and Katharine Lyons Giroux, a grade-school teacher. He attended Regis High School in Manhattan but dropped out shortly before he was to graduate in June 1931, deciding instead to take a newspaper job with The Jersey Journal.

“It was the Depression, and jobs were hard to find,” Mr. Giroux told The Times in 1988, when Regis finally did give him his diploma. “If I didn’t take that one in April, I wouldn’t have gotten it at all.”

Despite his lack of high school credentials, he received a scholarship to Columbia University and set out to study journalism. But he was soon won over to literature by classes with Weaver and Mark Van Doren, the poet and critic. He went on to become editor in chief of The Columbia Review, the campus literary journal, publishing Thomas Merton and John Berryman, both fellow students then.

Graduating in 1936, Mr. Giroux set his course for a career in editing. But with publishing jobs scarce, he joined the public relations department at the Columbia Broadcasting System, waiting four years before he found his first editing job, in 1940, at Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Two years later, with the outbreak of World War II, he entered the Navy as an intelligence officer and served on the aircraft carrier Essex, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander — partly, he said later, because his hair was white, having turned so in his youth.

In 1952 he married Carmen de Arango, who worked at the United Nations. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969. In addition to Ms. Mulvehill, Mr. Giroux is survived by two other nieces.

After leaving the Navy, Mr. Giroux took an article he had written, about the rescue of a fighter pilot downed at the Battle of Truk Lagoon in the Pacific, to a Navy public information 0ffice in New York. There, he said, he found the officer in charge, Lt. j.g. Roger W. Straus Jr., sitting with his feet up on his desk. Lieutenant Straus said he liked the article and could get him $1,000 for it by selling it to a mass publication. “Rescue at Truk” ran in Colliers magazine and was widely anthologized.

Rejoining Harcourt, Mr. Giroux became executive editor in 1948. The company’s founders, Alfred Harcourt and Donald Brace, encouraged him to sign up books rejected by other publishers, like “Wise Blood,” by O’Connor, and “The Natural,” Malamud’s first novel.

But he also missed opportunities. Mr. Giroux had edited Kerouac’s first book, “The Town and the City,” but was unprepared later when Kerouac showed up at Harcourt, Brace with a manuscript written on sheets of onionskin and teletype paper pasted together and delivered in a roll about 120 feet long. When Mr. Giroux would not agree to the author’s demand that he make no changes in the manuscript, which consisted of a single sprawling paragraph, Kerouac stalked out, taking his book, “On the Road,” with him. Viking eventually published it to wide acclaim, and Mr. Giroux expressed his chagrin long afterward.

Mr. Giroux had also written to Mr. Salinger offering to publish his short stories, which had been appearing in The New Yorker. He got no response, until one day his secretary announced that a Mr. Salinger was there to see him. Mr. Giroux repeated his short-story offer. Mr. Salinger argued that his stories wouldn’t sell until he had published a novel, which he said he was working on. It was about a prep school student named Holden Caulfield, he said, on Christmas vacation in New York City. He assured Mr. Giroux that he would like it, and they shook hands on an agreement to publish it.

More than a year later, Mr. Salinger sent Mr. Giroux the manuscript of “The Catcher in the Rye.” Mr. Giroux was all set to publish it, certain it would be a winner. Then Harcourt’s textbook department intervened, saying “Catcher” wasn’t right for the house. Mr. Giroux retreated, forced to reject what turned out to be one of the great successes of the century.

Furious at the interference, Mr. Giroux began looking to move to another house, and in 1955 he joined Farrar, Straus & Company as editor in chief. Almost 20 of his writers at Harcourt eventually followed him, among them Eliot, Lowell, O’Connor and Malamud. It was a display of loyalty returned; Mr. Giroux was known for the care he lavished on his writers, whether visiting Stafford in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic while she recovered from a breakdown or insisting that Eliot raise his fee for poetry readings.

Farrar, Straus — founded in 1946 by Mr. Straus and John C. Farrar — made Mr. Giroux a partner in 1964. He ultimately became chairman. The first book to bear his imprint was Lowell’s book of poems “For the Union Dead.”

But his relations with Mr. Straus were not without friction. Where Mr. Giroux was the man of letters, Mr. Straus was a hard-bargaining businessman and something of a showman, giving gossipy parties at his Upper East Side townhouse. In the late 1960s, as the company’s 25th anniversary approached, Mr. Giroux proposed an anthology in celebration. Mr. Straus approved and told him to edit the selections and to write a preface. But when Mr. Straus read what Mr. Giroux had written, he demurred. His wife, Dorothea, he said, objected to how Mr. Giroux had described him on their first meeting, at the naval office — as having his feet on his desk.

“But you did, Roger,” Mr. Giroux recalled saying.

“Dorothea doesn’t like it,” Mr. Straus replied.

Mr. Giroux, convinced that it was really Mr. Straus who didn’t like it, angrily canceled the project, which never appeared. Mr. Straus died in 2004; Mr. Farrar in 1974.

Mr. Giroux did write several books of his own, including “The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (Atheneum, 1982) and “A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor” (Knopf, 1990), each of which was reviewed respectfully.

From 1975 to 1982, Mr. Giroux was president of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, an organization that fights movie censorship. Late in life he began a literary memoir but never completed it, saying he found it distasteful to write negatively about Mr. Straus.

His ambition to write might have prompted an exchange with Eliot, then in his late 50s, on the day they met in 1946, when Mr. Giroux, “just past 30,” as he recalled the moment in “The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes,” was an editor at Harcourt, Brace. “His most memorable remark of the day,” Mr. Giroux said, “occurred when I asked him if he agreed with the definition that most editors are failed writers, and he replied, ‘Perhaps, but so are most writers.’ ”

鲍彤

德语媒体 | 2008.09.06

监狱和软禁不能动摇理念


二十多岁的中国年轻一代中,很少有人知道赵紫阳,更不知道鲍彤。明镜周刊驻中国记者近日访问了现年76岁的鲍彤,明镜文章一开始介绍了鲍彤今天的处境:

"在北京要见到这位老人很不容易。二十年前,他是中国最有影响力的政界人士之一。现在,他当年的朋友和同事试图阻止他会见外国人,他们也不愿意看到他与中国记者和历史学家交谈。甚至他的朋友、哲学家刘晓波也不能来看他。他们把鲍彤视为危险。

一群国安部的特务在鲍彤居住的24层大楼前游荡,十分引人注目。他们查看来访者的证件,一名穿制服的人把来客的姓名登记入册。他很客气,请客人在楼道坐下,他的桌子上安装着电子设备,墙上挂着摄像机。"

明镜周刊的文章介绍了鲍彤的经历:鲍彤曾是中共中央委员。八十年代时,他为当时党的首脑赵紫阳撰写发言稿,主张党政分开,改革政治体制。但1989年"六四"事件改变了鲍彤的人生:

"赵紫阳遭到指责,要他对'反革命'事件承担责任,他失去了一切职务,被软禁在家中,直到2005年1月逝世。鲍彤在北京郊区的秦城监狱被关押了七年,罪名是'出卖国家机密、进行反革命宣传'。释放后,他一再受到软禁,当然始终处于监视之下。

但他们不能使他保持沉默。2007年8月,他与42名知识分子一起向共产党领导人发出公开信,要求重视'普遍的人权原则',并公开审查奥运财政。"

鲍彤认为,中国"并不是真正的市场经济,因为它一如既往受党的控制",中国称为"人民共和国",但是却没有"民主选举和言论自由",他希望"奥林匹克'公平比赛'的原则能在中国社会传播开来"。但明镜周刊的记者也看到,鲍彤对此并不乐观:

"他认为,国内那些满足于房子、汽车和手提电脑、不愿动摇一党统治的的新中产阶层很近视,这是因为如果普通民众的权利不断受到侵犯,这些人希望拥 有、共产党向他们保证的稳定将不能保持下去。只要人们聚集起来,争取自己的权利,警察就对他们大打出手。'我也主张稳定,但稳定应建筑在公正和宪法的基础 之上',鲍彤如是说。

对共产党害怕实现更多自由的原因,鲍彤解释说:'一些党员担心,他们会失去自己的生命,就象当年东方集团崩溃时罗马尼亚共产党首脑齐奥塞斯库的遭遇一样'。他认为这样的害怕没有道理,因为更多的自由意味共产党将更有活力,意味着人民更为信任共产党。"

2008年9月1日 星期一

Ernst Cassirer

手頭上 卡西爾《盧梭康德歌德》 北京:生活·讀書·新知三聯書店 2002
翻翻 不過這不是他的主要著作


Ernst Cassirer的作品 日本和漢文翻譯的 大異其趣


作品

出典: フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』

カッシーラー
カッシーラー

エルンスト・カッシーラーErnst Cassirer, 1874年7月28日 ブレースラウ - 1945年4月13日)は、ユダヤ系のドイツ哲学者思想史家

マールブルク大学コーエンに学び、新カント派マールブルク学派の中心的な存在となる。 『認識問題』で中世思想から近代思想を認識論の問題を中心に論じ、 『実体概念と関数概念』で近代的な科学の認識論的な転回として、実際に見ることの出来る、実体概念から、関数的な記述によってのみ捉えられる、関数概念への移行を分析し、 『シンボル形式の哲学』での人文社会科学の横断的な研究から独自の哲学的人間学を構築した。 これらの著作によって、マールブルク学派とは一線を画すようになる。

1929年にかの有名なハイデガーとのダヴォス討論を行なう。一般的にはこの世紀の対決はハイデガーの勝利だと言われている。 ハンブルク大学の学長となるが、ユダヤ系のためナチス政権樹立とともに、英国、スウェーデン、米国と転々とし、ニューヨークで亡くなった。

他にも、ルネサンス研究、科学論等の業績があり、カッシーラーの思想は新カント派の射程に収まらないもの持ち、ドイツの哲学者ブルーメンベルクにも影響を与えている。

[編集] 著作


Partial bibliography

  • Substance and Function (1910), English translation 1923
  • Kant's Life and Thought (1918), English translation 1981
  • Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29), English translation 1953–1957
  • Language and Myth (1925), English translation (1946) by Susanne K. Langer
  • Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), English translation 1951
  • The Logic of the Humanities (1942), English translation 1961
  • An Essay on Man (written and published in English) (1944)
  • The Myth of the State (written and published in English) (posthumous) (1946)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

王叔岷先生

王叔岷先生 (1914-2008)
2008年9月2日 星期二 王叔岷 教授 追思會 0900-1200
我約1200到場 大家開始吃飯
拿"王叔岷先生行述" 和他弟子張以仁僎的 無聲之琴

見說梅花北嶺開 抱琴塵外自徘徊 清標幽韻何姿采 聽否心絃雅奏來
問道還思問字情 忘言得意道潛生 瑤琴虛憮心誰醉 便覺無聲勝有聲

2008年1月1日 星期二

《慕廬憶往︰王叔岷回憶錄》古韻

憶往-- 王叔岷回憶錄。

,號慕廬,一九一四年生,四川簡陽人。幼習詩書,及長,喜讀《莊子》、《史記》、《陶淵明集》,兼習古琴。一九三五年,就讀於四川大學中文系,……

這本書在約1980年代末台北出版。今版加其女小文和1995年等近文。

「(北京)中華書局最近推出14卷本王叔岷著作集【精裝 繁體】,對於絕大多數讀者來說可能比較專業,他的回憶錄《慕廬憶往》(中華書局,20079 平裝簡體 5000)更適合我這種外行閱讀。……

…..中華書局《慕廬憶往︰王叔岷回憶錄》,追溯海外學人、台灣史學家、曾為傅斯年和湯用彤學生的王叔岷的學術追求…..(陳子善︰適合自己的書,就是好書)。--此說法甚粗略。書中說他只與湯用彤先生通過一封信,{廬述學}一文引其「痛下功夫」一語。文中說明{孟子}之萬章、告子等都有:孔子曰:『舜其至孝矣,五十而慕。』」。似乎未明說「在人境…..

此書甚佳
王先生有絕學和知古琴韻
所以略記兩書於此

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