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Sunil Kothari, Eminent Scholar of Indian Dance, Dies at 87

Sunil Kothari, Eminent Scholar of Indian Dance, Dies at 87

Few critics or historians have been as central to the performing arts as Sunil Kothari has been to the world of traditional Indian dance. As a critic, scholar and teacher of youthful energy, he explored India’s rich dance spectrum in at least a dozen books. Choreographers and dancers across the country met him both as an authority and as a friend.

He died on December 27 at the age of 87 at the Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in Delhi. Three weeks earlier He had announced on social media that he had Covid-19 but had recovered. Shortly after his release, he suffered cardiac arrest and was taken to the hospital.

Mr. Kothari, who lectured frequently in the United States, studied the traditions and techniques of dance forms from north India south and east to west and interviewed hundreds of gurus, many of whom in a country that remains largely ethnocentric, declined his efforts to because he didn’t speak their national language.

“He worked hard,” wrote Maya Kulkarni Chadda, his longtime friend and Indian scholar, in an email, “with no money, no real support and no encouragement.”

Even so, he made progress and lived in extreme simplicity while working as a dance critic for The Times of India for over three decades. As he told The Hindu newspaper in 2016, he discovered India through his research. He also helped India discover itself. In his books, each examining one Indian dance genre – Bharatanatyam, Chhau, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Sattriya – he opened up a different facet of Indian society and history.

Studying the languages, rhythms, and traditions of each genre was no easy task. Bharatanatyam, for example, existed in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu in two forms: the traditional one, passed down by the temple dancers and developed by the dancer Balasaraswati; and the relatively new academic system developed by dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale in Chennai.

Although the two styles were often at odds, Mr. Kothari admired and drew both in books and conversed with both Balasaraswati and Devi. He also followed developments that opened the older genre to new sociological and feminist thinking, as well as yoga.

Sunil Manilal Kothari was born on December 20, 1933 in the Kheda district of Gujarat on the west coast of India as the youngest of ten children of Dahiben and Manilal Kothari into a middle-class family.

In the 1940s the family moved to Mumbai, where Mr. Kothari began studying the Kathak at the age of 10, one of India’s eight classical dance genres that combines Muslim and Hindu elements, statuary poses, quick turns and sudden stops to create brilliant musical resonance .

As in most other classical Indian genres, the movements in Kathak are performed barefoot, with straps of tiny bells attached to the ankles and eloquent use of the face, eyes, hands and torso.

Sunil was 13 years old when India became an independent nation in August 1947. When the country rediscovered itself in a post-colonial era, Mr. Kothari observed its cultural developments in dance. A polymath full of literature, film, and other genres, he loved dance both for its own sake and because of its deep connections to the religion, philosophy, scripture, and music of India.

However, his professional training was initially in accounting. He taught at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai for several years in order to make lasting friends while maintaining his fascination with the dance forms of India.

After Mr. Kothari’s death, the writer Salil Tripathi, a long-time friend from the period who later moved to New York, wrote in homage: “He taught bookkeeping because he knew how to do it; He celebrated dance because he wanted to. “

When Mr. Kothari gave up accounting for dance writing, the decision went against his father’s will. He graduated with a Masters degree in 1964 and began publishing serious dance research four years later.

His subsequent research led him not only to travel through India with a British Council Fellowship and other cities, but also to London to broaden his horizons. By 1970 he became a dance critic for the Times of India and held that position until the beginning of the 21st century.

In 1977, Mr. Kothari obtained his doctorate. at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, with a focus on the dance drama traditions of South India and the ancient dance manual Natyashastra. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Rabindra Bharti University for his research on dance sculpture in the medieval temples of North Gujarat.

His scholarship was rewarded with a number of academic offices and a 2005 Fulbright scholarship. He was a member of UNESCO’s International Dance Council.

In the West, Mr. Kothari had encounters with dance figures such as Rudolf Nureyev, the choreographers Pina Bausch and Maurice Béjart, and the British theater director Peter Brook. As a frequent lecturer in the United States, he made his last trip to New York City in May 2019 when he spoke at the New York Public Library about mid-20th century dance greats Ram Gopal and Mrinalini Sarabhai. He carried his expertise easily and often spoke with an innocent-sounding delight.

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

By the time of his death, Mr. Kothari had completed an autobiography that has yet to be published.

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Entertainment

Eugene Wright, Longtime Brubeck Quartet Bassist, Dies at 97

Eugene Wright, Longtime Brubeck Quartet Bassist, Dies at 97

Eugene Wright, a respected bassist who toured the world with the Dave Brubeck Quartet in his decade and recorded around 30 albums, including the landmark “Time Out”, died on December 30th in the Valley Glen neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 97 years old.

Caroline Howard, the executor of Mr. Wright’s estate, confirmed his death in an assisted living facility.

Mr. Wright, a solidly swinging timekeeper known for his work with the Count Basie Orchestra in the late 1940s, may not seem the ideal choice in 1958 for the complex modern jazz compositions that make up most of Mr. Brubeck’s repertoire made out.

“It shouldn’t have worked, but Dave had an ESP about musicians and knew Eugene would work somehow,” said Philip Clark, the author of Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time (2020), in a telephone interview. “Eugene was a light-fingered player who could swing a lot, but his sound was spongy, which gave a chamber music quality to albums like ‘Time Out’ and very complicated pieces like ‘Three to Get Ready’.”

Bassist and trombonist Chris Brubeck, one of Dave Brubeck’s sons, said that Mr. Wright was an “egoless” musician who did not push to be a soloist – although he played a prominent role in that role – with Mr. Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone and Joe Morello on drums.

“Gene was the rhythmic bedrock of the band,” said Mr. Brubeck, who played with Mr. Wright on special occasions over the years. “He wanted to anchor Joe, Dave and Paul. His fame was when the band was boiling. “

“Time Out,” the group’s best known and most successful album, was unusual in that most of the tracks featured unusual time signatures. “Take Five,” a track from this album, written by Mr. Desmond in 5/4 time, was released as a single and peaked at number 25 on the Billboard pop charts, a rare achievement for a jazz record.

The quartet was one of the few racially mixed jazz groups in the fiery early years of the civil rights movement. This led to showdowns between Mr Brubeck, who was firmly against segregation, and some concert promoters and university officials.

On February 5, 1958, before a performance at East Carolina College (now University) in Greenville, NC, the quartet was on stage to do a sound check when the Dean of Student Affairs asked why Mr. Wright was there. The school did not allow blacks to appear on the stage.

“If Eugene can’t play, we won’t play,” Brubeck told the dean, and the dean reported the stalemate to the school’s president, John D. Messick, who sought advice from Governor Luther Hodges’ office in an article last year in Our State, a North Carolina magazine. Mr. Messick made a deal with Mr. Brubeck: the quartet could go on but with Mr. Wright in the background.

Mr. Brubeck quickly interrupted the deal by telling Mr. Wright that his microphone was broken and that he had to play his solo on the announcement microphone in front of the band.

“We waited to go on for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and man, when we finally went on, we were smoking,” Mr. Wright was quoted as saying in Mr. Clark’s Brubeck biography. “The audience knew what had happened. They had stepped on the floor and sang because they wanted us to play and boy I remember the roar when we got on stage. “

Soon after, the quartet embarked on a long tour, sponsored by the Foreign Ministry, of Poland, Iran, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

In 1960 Mr. Brubeck refused to play 23 dates at colleges and universities of the South because he would not replace Mr. Wright with a white bassist. And in 1964 the quartet defied the picket line and threats of violence by the Ku Klux Klan and performed before an integrated audience in the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Eugene Joseph Wright was born on May 29, 1923 in Chicago to Mayme (Brisco) Wright and Ezra Wright. His mother played the piano, and after Gene studied the cornet in high school, he taught himself the double bass. In the early twenties he founded his own group, the Dukes of Swing, and played bass with Basie, saxophonist Gene Ammons and vibraphonists Red Norvo and Cal Tjader, among others. Mr. Wright’s idol was Walter Page, known for his long time as Basie’s bass player.

When Norman Bates stopped playing bass with the Brubeck Quartet in 1958, Mr. Morello suggested Mr. Wright try to get the slot. Mr. Wright called at Mr. Brubeck’s home in Oakland, California.

“There was a big, beautiful piano and Dave said, ‘What do you want to play?'” Mr. Wright told Mr. Clark in a 2017 interview for his biography. They agreed, “Brother, can you save a dime?”

“He started playing his version of the tune” – which the quartet had recorded in 1955 – “and we played the first chorus well, but he made a mistake in the second that didn’t happen too often,” said Mr. Wright, recalled . “Now I had never played with him before, but I knew how to listen and I had a good ear and he kept playing and I waited until I caught up with him and got it right.

“Dave loved how this afternoon went and offered me the job.”

Mr. Wright stayed with the quartet until late 1967 when Mr. Brubeck broke it up to focus on composing. The group came back together occasionally over the years. Mr. Wright was the last surviving member.

He is survived by his daughters Adrianne Wright and Rosita Dozier and a son, Stewart Ayers. His marriage to Jacqueline Winters ended in divorce. His second wife, Phyllis (Lycett) Wright, died in 2006.

In the decades following the breakup of the Brubeck Quartet, Mr. Wright played with pianist Monty Alexander’s trio and worked on soundtracks for film and television studios. He also performed at private parties until 2016 and gave private lessons until three years ago.

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Entertainment

Claude Bolling, Jazzman With Crossover Enchantment, Dies at 90

Claude Bolling, Jazzman With Crossover Appeal, Dies at 90

Claude Bolling, a jazz pianist and composer with remarkable crossover appeal, whose 1975 album “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano” had been on the Billboard Classic Album list for more than 10 years, died on December 29 in Garches, a suburb of Paris. He was 90 years old.

His death was announced on his website, which did not provide any further details.

Mr. Bolling played and composed in various styles – the Claude Bolling Big Band played regularly for years at the Hotel Méridien Etoile in Paris – and wrote the scores for dozens of films and TV shows in France and Hollywood. But “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano”, written for and recorded with the famous classical flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, made him a new name.

Although the record was criticized by both classics and jazz purists as “watered down jazz with a thin classical veneer”, the listening audience was enthusiastic. News reports from the mid-1980s that found it was still in the charts after a decade said that only Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon” had achieved such longevity at that point. (“Dark Side” stayed in the Top 200 album list until 1988 and has returned regularly.)

Mr. Bolling was inspired to pursue other crossover projects, including the 1980 album Picnic Suite, recorded with Mr. Rampal and guitarist Alexandre Lagoya. A picture on Mr. Bolling’s website shows the classic Billboard album table from September 4, 1982. “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano” is in the 343rd week of the table at number 5, “Picnic Suite” 5th place 22, his “Toot Suite for Trumpet and Jazzpiano” on place 27, his “Concert for Classical Guitar and Jazzpiano” on place 30 and his “Original Boogie Woogie” on place 39th.

“Claude’s music was so engaging,” said flautist Pamela Sklar, who toured with Mr. Bolling for eleven seasons, via email, “because it distilled attributes of sophisticated classical and esoteric jazz styles into accessible palettes of happiness, excitement, innocence.” Pathos, playfulness and sincerity. “

Ms. Sklar interviewed Mr. Bolling in 2010 for an article in The Flutist Quarterly. He remembered how the success of the 1975 album had changed his fate.

“At the time, when I was thinking about a concert in the US, all I could think of was a little jazz club in the small American town,” he said. “Thanks to Jean-Pierre Rampal and this ‘suite’ it was my first concert in Carnegie Hall!”

Mr Bolling was born on April 10, 1930 in Cannes, France, in a hotel of which his father was the manager. His mother played the piano and he turned out to be a child prodigy. He spent most of his life in Paris, but during World War II, during the occupation, his mother took him to Nice with her.

“During World War II when I was a kid, the Nazis all but banned jazz in my country,” he told The Hartford Courant in 1991. “So I got most of my jazz from recording at 78 rpm.”

At the age of 14 he won an amateur jazz piano competition. At the age of 15 he returned to Paris at the end of the war and became the youngest member of the French Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers.

He played with various jazz stars who came through Paris and also had his own septet. He particularly admired Duke Ellington and formed a big band in 1956 to play Ellington’s music. In the 1960s, the two met and became friends.

“One of the lessons I learned from Ellington,” Bolling said in 1991, “was that you write specifically for the personality of the instrumental soloist.”

It was a philosophy he followed when Mr Rampal, impressed by a piece for which Mr Bolling had written and performed with the classical pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier on French television, asked if Mr Bolling would write something for him .

“I wrote ‘Suite for Flute’ for Jean-Pierre,” said Mr. Bolling. “If I had written it for someone else, it would be completely different. Every musician has his own voice, and that’s why I write. “

Mr. Rampal died in 2000.

Frau Sklar described the appeal of playing the famous suite.

“The seven-movement flute part of the ‘Suite’ was expertly written and great for playing with the piano, especially with bass and drums,” she said. “That is one of the reasons many classical flautists want to play it. It’s very jazzy and improvisation is optional. I thought it was great that there was also a bass flute and alto flute. “

The 1982 New York Times reviewer Allan Kozinn described the formula Mr. Bolling created that had worked so well in the suite and in his later work.

“In his crossover pieces,” he wrote, “Mr. Bolling’s compositional strategy is to give his classical soloist a through-composed part, written in a style that uses baroque and classical gestures and allusions to the repertoire and idioms of the featured instrument is filled while his own piano, bass and percussion trio interacts with a light jazz counterpoint. “

Mr. Bolling has made numerous recordings and has performed extensively in France, the United States and elsewhere.

“One of the most adorable things about him was his love of music and his dedicated, magnetic personality on stage,” said Ms. Sklar. “He loved talking to his audience and thanking them with encores that they enjoyed. Sometimes the encores lasted a long time. If we were to watch backstage we’d wonder if they would ever stop! “

The Associated Press said that Mr Bolling’s 48-year-old wife, Irène Dervize-Sadyker, died in 2017 and that the couple had two sons, David and Alexandre.

Mr. Bolling’s compositions have sometimes been described as a “combination” of jazz and classical music, but his view was different.

“I don’t like the word ‘combination’,” he said in a 1982 interview for The Syracuse New Times. “This is just a dialogue between two types of music. I didn’t do anything new. It’s been like that for a long time. “

Mr. Bolling liked to have fun on the street. In restaurants he would often demonstrate a certain trick: place one piece of cutlery on top of another and then hit one so that the other flipped into his empty wine or water glass.

“It was funnier when he missed it,” wrote Ms. Sklar in The Flutist Quarterly, “and he didn’t just give up.”

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Entertainment

Michael Apted, Versatile Director Identified for ‘Up’ Sequence, Dies at 79

Michael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79

“The biggest social revolution in my life growing up in England was changing the role of women in society,” he said. “We didn’t have civil rights and Vietnam in England, but I think that one particular social revolution is the biggest thing and I missed it because I didn’t have enough women. And because I didn’t have enough women, I didn’t have enough choice about what options women had, who had careers, had families, and all those things. “

He continued, “If you look at everything from ‘Agatha’ to ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’, from ‘Nell’ and ‘Continental Divide’, they all have to do with the role of women in society and what women need to do to be a role in society or the choices women must make in order to stay in society or have a voice in society, both in simple and eccentric ways. I always care. And that, I think, comes from feeling like I missed something. “

Michael David Apted was born on February 10, 1941 in Aylesbury, Central England and grew up near London. His father, Ronald, worked for an insurance company, and his mother, Frances, was “some kind of die-hard socialist” who instilled a liberal attitude, as he told The Progressive in 2013.

From the age of ten he attended the renowned City of London School, commuted to the city by underground and then studied history and law at the University of Cambridge. His friends included fellow student John Cleese, who later joined the Monty Python Troupe, and he worked on theater productions with Trevor Nunn, Mike Newell and Stephen Frears, all of whom had prominent directorial careers. He took part in a trainee program in Granada and was soon working on “Seven Up!”.

When this film aired in May 1964, the reaction terrified him.

“The first,” he told The Times in 2019, “was extremely successful.” It was the truth of the class system from the mouths of babes, and the whole country was shocked – people were just blown away by the cracks in English society on celluloid. “

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Politics

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Dies from Accidents in Professional-Trump Riot

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Dies from Injuries in Pro-Trump Riot

A US Capitol police officer died Thursday evening from injuries sustained “during the physical confrontation” with pro-Trump rioters who descended on the US Capitol the day before the authorities.

The officer, Brian D. Sicknick, was only the fourth member of the force to be killed on duty since it was founded two centuries ago. After the chaos of Wednesday’s siege and the accusations that filled the waves in the air the next day, there was silence on the Capitol grounds late Thursday as hundreds of police officers from numerous agencies lined the streets to pay tribute to their fallen comrade.

But the loss of life also underscored the failure of law enforcement to prevent the siege of the Capitol. And with the leaders of both political parties calling for an investigation, it seemed likely to lead to calls for profound changes to the Capitol Police.

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Sicknick’s death were not immediately clear, and Capitol Police said only that he “died of on-duty injuries”. At some point in the chaos – when the mob raged through the halls of Congress while lawmakers were forced to hide under their desks – he was hit by a fire extinguisher, according to two police officers.

“He went back to his department office and collapsed,” the Capitol Police said in the statement. “He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”

Mr. Sicknick, who joined the force in 2008, died on Thursday around 9:30 p.m., Capitol Police said in a statement. The Washington Police Department Homicide is one of several law enforcement agencies involved in an investigation into his death and the general circumstances surrounding the violence in the Capitol.

The officer’s death brings Wednesday’s deaths from Mayhem to five. One participant in the pro-Trump rampage, Ashli ​​Babbitt, was fatally shot and killed by a Capitol police officer inside the building while climbing through a broken window into the speaker’s lobby. Three other people died after allegedly experiencing medical emergencies in the Capitol area, police said.

It was unclear where Mr. Sicknick’s encounter with the rioters took place, but photos and a video posted by a local reporter on the night of the mayhem showed a man spraying a fire extinguisher outside the Senate Chamber, leaving a small number of Police officers enter the area on a nearby staircase.

Legislators in both chambers and by both parties promised to find out how those responsible for the security of the Capitol had allowed a violent mob to enter the building. The House Democrats announced a “robust” investigation into the law enforcement collapse.

Three of the leading security officials in Congress – Steven A. Sund, Capitol Police Chief, Sergeant Paul D. Irving, and Sergeant Michael C. Stenger – announced their resignation Thursday.

The NCOs are responsible for the security in the chambers and the associated office buildings, while Mr. Sund supervised around 2,000 employees of the Capitol Police – a force that is larger than that of many small towns.

Earlier on Friday, Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat who heads the Home Funds Subcommittee that oversees the Capitol Police’s budget, expressed grief over the death of Mr. Sicknick in a Twitter post.

“This tragic loss is a reminder of the bravery of the law enforcement officers who protect us every day,” wrote Ryan.

The transition of the president

Updated

Jan. 8, 2021, 9:50 a.m. ET

Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chaired the House Appropriations Committee that opened a law enforcement review to the Capitol riot, said her “heart breaks at senseless death.”

“To honor his memory, we must ensure that the mob that attacked the People’s House and those who instigated them are brought to justice,” she said on Twitter.

Hundreds of police and rescue workers lined the streets by the Capitol for a moment of silence to honor Mr. Sicknick on Thursday evening. They stood in lines on Constitution Avenue and 3rd Street, saluting in silence as a police car drove through town for Mr. Sicknick, according to videos from local reporters.

Police said in their own statement that “the entire USCP division expresses its deepest condolences to the family and friends of Officer Sicknick for their loss and mourns the loss of a friend and colleague.”

Officials said around 50 police officers were injured when the mob flooded barricades, threw objects, smashed doors, broke windows and overpowered some of the police officers who tried to withstand the advancing crowd.

Capitol Police reported 14 arrests during the raid, including two people alleged to have assaulted a police officer. Local police arrested dozens of other people, mainly related to illegal entry and violations of the city’s curfew on Wednesday evening.

The Capitol Police are solely responsible for protecting the Capitol and the surrounding area.

Over the course of two centuries, the force has evolved and its mission has shifted and grown with the nature of the threats to the institution.

One event that had one of the most profound effects on the armed forces occurred on March 1, 1954, when Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the visitors’ gallery on lawmakers below and wounded five. Shortly afterwards, the police were issued weapons for the first time.

Exactly 17 years later, on March 1, 1971, an explosion broke through a toilet on the ground floor of the Senate wing. The Weather Underground, a militant left-wing group that carried out a series of bomb attacks in the late 1960s and 1970s, took responsibility. The incident resulted in all visitors having to be checked for weapons and explosives.

The first recorded death of a member of the armed forces was in 1984 when Sgt. Christopher Eney, 37, was killed during a training drill.

The last time a Capitol police officer was killed on duty was in the summer of 1998 when police officer Jacob J. Chestnut and Detective John Gibson of Russell Eugene Weston Jr., a man tormented by visions of an oppressive covenant, Government were fatally shot.

Mr. Weston, shot and injured in the incident, stormed into the heart of the nation for law and order. It all happened in a matter of minutes and reached its bloody conclusion when it reached the majority whip office complex on the first floor.

A fourth person, Angela Dickerson, 24, a tourist, was injured but recovered.

President Bill Clinton called the shooting at the eastern front entrance to the nation’s legislative forum “a moment of ferocity on the doorstep of American civilization”.

Legislators of both parties said at the time that they were hoping the bloodshed would allow a moment for reflection when partisan divisions could begin to heal.

Two decades later, the fourth Capitol Police officer in history was killed.

Emily Cochrane and Katie Benner contributed to the coverage.

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Business

Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart, Founding father of Sandals Resorts, Dies at 79

Gordon 'Butch' Stewart, Founder of Sandals Resorts, Dies at 79

But he was itching to start his own business, the family declaration said, and he seized an opportunity in 1968 when he saw the appeal of air conditioning for people living in an island climate. He started his first company, Appliance Traders Ltd., after starting Fedders Corp. from Edison, New Jersey, to represent the brand in Jamaica.

From there, Mr. Stewart developed his overall business philosophy: “Find out what people want, give it to them, and exceed their expectations in the process,” says the family statement. Adam Stewart initially said this included being ready to install air conditioners for his customers at any time of the day or night.

“He did whatever it took,” said Adam Stewart.

Mr. Stewart’s work with the Sandals and Beaches resorts has resulted in leadership roles in the Jamaica tourism industry, including a decade as director of the Jamaica Tourist Board. In 1992, his Butch Stewart initiative pumped $ 1 million a week into the foreign exchange market to halt the decline in the Jamaican dollar.

In 1994, he led a group of investors who took control of Air Jamaica, the Caribbean’s largest regional airline. He put together an investment group that paid $ 37.5 million for 70 percent of the airline and gave itself a 46 percent stake.

The move was the kind of grand public gesture that Mr Stewart had become famous for, according to the New York Times in an article about the move.

At the helm of the troubled national airline, Mr. Stewart began adding routes and improving service. As part of the turnaround, he increased the airline’s turnover and gained market share from competitors.

“One thing you have to give Butch Stewart is he’ll try anything to make the company work,” Peter J. Dolara, then senior vice president of American Airlines, told The Times. “The man is a fierce competitor.”

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Business

Shirley Younger, Businesswoman and Cultural Diplomat to China, Dies at 85

Shirley Young, Businesswoman and Cultural Diplomat to China, Dies at 85

Ms. Young’s ideas weren’t the only revolutionary thing about her. At the time, most employers offered severance packages to pregnant women on the assumption that they would never return to work after giving birth. When she was expecting and insisting on her first child in 1963, Gray Advertising had to invent her first maternity policy.

The company clearly thought it was worth it. In 1983, when a global recession forced the advertising industry to cut research budgets, Gray went the other way and founded an entire research subsidiary, Gray Strategic Marketing, with Ms. Young as president. She garnered a long list of Fortune 500 customers, including General Motors whom she hired in 1988 as vice president of consumer market development.

Almost immediately, she urged her new employer to invest in China and later moved to Shanghai to oversee the development of a billion-dollar joint venture with SAIC Motor, a Chinese company, to build Buicks.

For Ms. Young, many American companies failed to see the size of the cultural differences between the two countries and the ability to bridge them. She encouraged GM to expand its executives’ contact with the Chinese language and society through education and cultural exchanges, which they would later highlight in their artistic work.

As she continued to lead GM’s expansion in Asia, she became increasingly involved in cultural and charitable causes. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Ms. Young, along with other prominent Chinese-Americans, including Yo-Yo Ma and IM Pei, founded the 100-member Committee, a group dedicated to shaping the Trans-Pacific Dialogue. She was the first chairperson, a position she also held at a spin-off organization, the US-China Cultural Institute.

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Health

Kim Chernin, Who Wrote About Ladies, Weight and Id, Dies at 80

Kim Chernin, Who Wrote About Women, Weight and Identity, Dies at 80

Kim Chernin, a feminist writer and counselor who wrote compassionately about female body dysmorphism and its cultural causes, and about her own upbringing as the daughter of a fiery communist organizer incarcerated for her belief, died on December 17 in a Marin County hospital , California. She was 80 years old.

Your wife, Renate Stendahl, said the cause was Covid-19.

Ms. Chernin’s mother was Rose Chernin, a labor organizer and Communist Party leader who was convicted with others during the McCarthy era for attempting to overthrow the government (the government would also try twice to deport her to her native Russia) . In a landmark case in 1957, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions and ruled that it was not a crime to merely encourage people to believe a certain doctrine.

It was a seismic moment for the country and for Rose’s daughter, who struggled to define herself in relation to her mother – the “Red Leader,” as the newspapers liked to call Rose – and instilled a lifelong dislike for the younger Mrs. Chernin Advertising.

In 1980, Ms. Chernin was an unpublished poet when Ticknor & Fields purchased her book The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. The seven-year manuscript was rejected by 13 publishers.

Anorexia and bulimia were little discussed diseases at the time; However, there was an emerging crisis among young women on the college campus, and when Ms. Chernin’s book appeared she became a sought-after speaker on television and on the college campus. The book, which had a limited edition, sold out quickly.

“Obsession” was the first of a trilogy about women’s appetite and identity. In it, Ms. Chernin wrote about her own obsession with weight and her attempts to equate food with care. She used a variety of lenses – cultural, feminist, anthropological, spiritual, and metaphorical – to discover why so many women felt alienated from their bodies.

“Many of the emotions in life – from loneliness to anger, from love for life to falling in love – can be experienced as appetites,” she wrote. “And some would explain the obsession with weight in these simple, familiar terms. But there are deeper levels of understanding to guide. That night, for example, when I was standing in front of the refrigerator, I realized that my hunger was for bigger things, for identity, for creativity, for power and for a meaningful place in society. The hunger that most women experience, which leads them to eat more than they need, is satisfied through self-development and expression. “

She argued that the physical ideal for an American woman was a man’s body – lean and wiry, not soft and round – and if so, she asked what did that say about society?

Updated

Jan. 3, 2021, 5:36 p.m. ET

“There is a poetic truth at the heart of ‘The Obsession’,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his 1981 New York Times review of the book. “Eloquently written, passionate in its rhetoric and consistently receptive, it becomes a seemingly trivial subject from the inside out to uncover unconfirmed attitudes and prejudices. We Americans are probably far too worried about fat and its appearance. Perhaps Miss Chernin is right, when she argues that the problem is not the superficiality of our perceptions, but the depth of our feelings. “

Elaine Kusnitz, known as Kim, was born in the Bronx on May 7, 1940. Her father, Paul Kusnitz, was a civil engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her mother, Rose Chernin Kusnitz, using her maiden name, had graduated from high school early and worked in a factory to support her parents and sisters.

Both of Kim’s parents were Russian-born Jews and committed Marxists. Before Kim was born, they returned to Russia for some time, where Mr. Kusnitz was working on plans for the Moscow subway.

When Kim was 4 years old, her older sister and carer Nina died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Rose moved the family to Los Angeles and began working as an organizer to advocate farm labor and housing rights for their black and Latin American neighbors.

Kim grew up attending Communist Party rallies, initially in her stroller. From a young age she read Marx, Lenin, and reports on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama. Kim fought bitterly with her mother, who she also adored.

At the Yiddish school, which was sponsored by a left-wing Jewish organization, which she visited briefly, Kim quacked like a duck when she was spoken to in that language. But when her mother was imprisoned for five months at the age of eleven, she was desolate. And when she wrote her memoir “In My Mother’s House” in 1983, in which she interwoven her own story with that of her mother, she recorded her mother’s unmistakable, Yiddish-influenced voice: “You want to fly? Grow wings. Don’t like things the way they are? To tell a story.”

Ms. Chernin studied English at the University of California at Berkeley, where she met David Netboy. The two were married, had a daughter, Larissa, who she survived, and soon divorced. Her marriage to Robert Cantor also ended in divorce. After that, she took her mother’s maiden name as her own, as did Larissa.

Ms. Chernin met Ms. Stendhal, a journalist and author, in a café in Paris. They married together since 1985 in 2014. They were, among other things, collaborators and editors of each other’s letter and co-authors of “Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit”.

After “Obsession,” Ms. Chernin published nearly 20 books, but her aversion to advertising and marketing increased with age, Ms. Stendhal said, and her latest writings were donated directly to her archive in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Ms. Chernin, who was in psychoanalysis for 25 years and began counseling women with eating disorders after the publication of “Obsession”, did her doctorate in spiritual psychology, as did Ms. Stendhal, in the mid-1990s, which combines the spiritual teachings of all creeds with conventional psychotherapy .

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Business

Daniel M. Tellep, Engineer Who Steered Lockheed’s Progress, Dies at 89

Daniel M. Tellep, Engineer Who Steered Lockheed’s Growth, Dies at 89

Daniel M. Tellep, an aerospace engineer who initiated a merger between Lockheed and Martin Marietta to become the world’s largest military entrepreneur and then became its first general manager, died on November 26th at his home in Saratoga, California. He was 89 years old.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Susan Tellep.

Mr. Tellep was at the helm of Lockheed when the Cold War ended. Calabasas-based Lockheed has struggled with easing global tensions and examining potential decreased demand, as has Martin Marietta, who was led by Norman R. Augustine at the time. The merger in 1995 created a giant in the defense industry. In 2019, Lockheed Martin had net sales of $ 59.8 billion.

“The ‘Fusion of Equals'” he orchestrated between Lockheed and Martin “resulted in innovations and capabilities that continue to protect our nation, our allies and our highest ideals,” said Marillyn Hewson, chairwoman of Lockheed Martin, in one Explanation after Mr. Tellep’s death.

As a managing director at Lockheed and then Lockheed Martin, Mr. Tellep was responsible for the development of military communications satellites, photographic communications satellites, the Hubble space telescope, and more.

As an engineer at Lockheed, he pioneered space and rocket technology systems. He was the lead scientist on the country’s first re-entry flight experiments, which were conducted to determine how best to get a nuclear missile through the atmosphere into space and then back into the atmosphere without being destroyed. He also worked on ballistic missile systems fired from submarines and on the manufacture of thermal tiles to protect space shuttles.

“He basically had a lot of knowledge about how to prevent things from burning,” said his long-time colleague David Klinger in a telephone interview. “He was very good at both math and practicality at actually making things work. And he was so good that the company blamed him for more and more people. “

Daniel Tellep was born on November 20, 1931 in Forest City, Pennsylvania, about 25 miles northeast of Scranton to John and Mary Tellep. His father worked as a coal processor and then as a carpenter. His mother, who immigrated from Eastern Europe as a child, worked for a thread company. The family later moved to San Diego, where his father worked as a machinist and where Daniel grew up.

Daniel was obsessed with escape from a young age when he began to develop a lifelong passion for model airplanes. In a memoir he wrote for his family, he recalled building his first:

“No doubt the finished model was rough, but there it was three-dimensional and recognizable as one of the most popular aircraft of the era. I could hold it on my arm and move it like it was in flight. I remember looking at it for hours. “

He studied mechanical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, graduated summa cum laude in 1954 and earned a master’s degree in 1955. That year he moved to Lockheed. He was the main scientist of the X-17, one of the earliest research rockets.

Mr. Tellep’s work in re-entry technology and thermodynamics earned him the Lawrence B. Sperry Award from the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics at age 32. He was later elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Mr. Tellep rose to the ranks of Lockheed in 1984 and was named President in 1989 and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer in 1989. The company had problems and helped solve the problem. He was in charge when he received a major contract to build the F-22, the Air Force’s newest generation of combat aircraft at the time. The deal resulted in $ 70 billion in sales for the company and its partners and cemented Lockheed’s recovery.

His leadership was noticed.

“During Lockheed’s troubles of recent years, Mr. Tellep has retained his characteristic outward calm and kindness,” wrote the New York Times in 1991 of him, “although he proved as tough as the most ruthless corporate robbery.”

Mr. Tellep became the first chairman and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin in 1995. He was CEO for nine months and remained chairman until 1998.

He met Margaret Lewis in college and married her in 1954. The couple had four girls and were later divorced. He met and married the psychotherapist Patricia Baumgartner in 1970. They stayed together until their death in 2005.

In addition to his daughter Susan, his three other daughters Teresa and Mary Tellep and Patricia Axelrod survive him. his first wife with whom he stayed close; two stepdaughters from his second marriage, Chris Chatwell and Anne Bossange; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Mr. Tellep’s passion for flying extended into his adult years when he took to the skies in non-motorized gliders, which required a deep knowledge of wind and thermodynamics. He flew remote-controlled airplanes until his early 1980s. And the model airplanes he built as a boy, including a cherished airplane he lost, stuck in his memory.

“I started the glider on a hot summer’s day,” he wrote in his family memoirs, “and it seemed to be circling forever and barely descending. This was when I was learning about “thermals”. This rising column of air carries all light with it – and that included my glider. Since I did not write my name on it, there was no way it could be returned. Now, so many years later, it’s different for me. “

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World News

Tim Severin, Seafarer Who Replicated Explorers’ Journeys, Dies at 80

Tim Severin, Seafarer Who Replicated Explorers’ Journeys, Dies at 80

Tim Severin, a British adventurer who meticulously mimicked the journeys of real and mythical explorers such as St. Brendan the Navigator, Sinbad the Sailor and Marco Polo for 40 years, died on December 18 at his home in West Cork, Ireland. He was 80 years old.

His daughter Ida Ashworth, said the cause was cancer.

In May 1976 Mr. Severin left Ireland on his boldest journey: After St. Brendan, a 6th century monk followed, who is said to have undertaken a spectacular journey from Ireland with a group of other monks across the Atlantic to the “Promised Land” in one Leather wrapped boot.

St. Brendan’s was a seaman who spread the gospel while traveling in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. If the story of his trip to America were true, he would have beaten Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus by centuries.

After studying a travelogue – in a medieval Latin text that was written many years later with the title “Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis” or “The Journey of Saint Brendan the Abbot” – Mr. Severin put together a team of designers and craftsmen who helped him build a ship. The 36-foot two-masted oak and ash boat was covered with a quarter-inch thick ox leather.

The boat’s small crew, named Brendan, took off from Brandon Creek on the Dingle Peninsula on Ireland’s west coast. They sailed north to the Hebrides and west to the Faroe Islands on a course to Iceland. Day after day, whales that stayed near the boat visited; Mr. Severin thought they might have mistaken the boat for another whale.

Their arrival in Reykjavik in August 1976 enabled them to investigate the condition of the Brendan. After scraping barnacles off, they found that the leather had held. But because of pack ice, which would make navigation impossible, the crew encamped the Brendan and returned home to wait for better conditions.

When the crew went back on board the Brendan in the summer of 1977, they went to Greenland, where they had to cross the Denmark Strait, a dangerous canal.

“We knew that this would be the actual test of the boat,” said Severin in a 2012 lecture at Gresham College in London. “It was inevitable that we would get terrible weather in the Strait of Denmark. But we made a commitment that there was no going back. “

The Brendan survived the strait, but ice prevented landing in Greenland, and the Brendan sailed around them. But soon they were shrouded in fog – no one responded to the boat’s distress signal – and then slowed down by melting patches of ice in the Labrador Sea.

On June 26, 1977, the Brendan finally arrived on the coast of Newfoundland.

The purpose of the trip, he said, “was to show that the Irish monks’ technology was able to reach North America.” He added that he could not be certain that St. Brendan and his crew had sailed to North America, only that it could have.

Mr. Severin, who funded his adventures with book advances and other sources, wrote The Brendan Voyage, published in 1978, about the trip.

A review of the book in The Guardian called the trip the “most remarkable sea voyage since Thor Heyerdahl to prove that a balsa raft can cross the Pacific”.

Mr. Severin was born Giles Timothy Watkins on September 25, 1940 in Jorhat, Assam, in northwest India, where his father Maurice Watkins ran a tea plantation and his mother Inge (Severin) Watkins was a housewife.

Tim’s wanderlust was sparked by his early years in India – where he said in a 2015 interview on his publisher’s website: “The entire family environment consisted of living and traveling in distant, often exotic places.” And it grew up at boarding school in Tonbridge, Kent, England, where he read adventure books that fired his imagination.

He took the surname Severin to honor the maternal grandmother who looked after him in England while his parents were in India.

He holds degrees in history and geography from Oxford. While he was still studying there, he and two other students followed Marco Polo’s caravan route on motorbikes in 1961: They started in Venice, then traveled to the Chinese border in northwest Afghanistan, down the Grand Trunk Road in India and ended the trip in Calcutta.

The journey led to his first book – “Tracking Marco Polo” (1964) – and a career of adventure. To explore the stories of the fictional seafarer Sinbad the Sailor, Mr. Severin sailed in a replica of an Arab sailing ship from Muscat in Oman to China. To follow the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, as well as that of Ulysses, he traveled in a replica of a Bronze Age galley.

His other adventures included riding with Mongolian nomads to explore the legacy of Genghis Khan. Tracing the path of the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace through the Spice Islands in a Prahu, a kind of sailing boat; and see if there ever was a white whale like Moby Dick.

In his review of “In Search of Moby Dick” (2000) in the New York Times, W. Jeffrey Bolster wrote: “Severin works at the intersection of imagination, action and myth and is as ripe as any other place for a miraculous White to find whale. “

He wrote more than 20 books – Reports of his travels and historical novels based on his expeditions.

“To write about my own travels, I have to be sharper, more precise and clearer to tell what happened,” he said in an interview on his publisher’s website when his 2016 novel “The Pope’s Assassin” came out. “In contrast, writing historical fiction is a looser, more impressive process that stimulates the imagination and allows the plot to go its own way.”

On his last great trip, he searched for the true origins of Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe on islands where shipwrecks occurred, as well as in Central and South America. His book “In Search of Robinson Crusoe” was published in 2003.

In addition to his daughter, his wife Dee (Pieters) Severin and two grandchildren Mr. Severin survive. His first marriage to Dorothy Sherman ended in divorce.

Mr Severin’s first wife – a specialist in medieval Spanish literature – played a role in his decision to recreate the St. Brendan’s expedition. While reading The Voyage of St. Brendan, she told Mr. Severin that the story contained far more practical details than most medieval texts.

“It tells you about the geography of the places Brendan visits,” he recalled when she told him in “The Brandon Voyage”. “It carefully describes the progress of the journey, the time and distances and so on. It seems to me that the text is less of a legend than a story that embroidered a firsthand experience. “

Mr. Severin soon created his own legendary story.