Tag: Dies

Categories
Entertainment

Donald York, Musical Director of Paul Taylor Firm, Dies at 73

Donald York, Musical Director of Paul Taylor Company, Dies at 73

In her review for The Times, Anna Kisselgoff described the score as “contains panting sounds, pop songs and the occasional mean beating of a drumstick that breaks through the classical structures and struggles to stay intact at the bottom of the pit”.

Once, Mr. York waved his baton and conducted an absolutely silent orchestra.

Donald Griffith York was born on June 19, 1947 in Watertown, NY. His mother Magdalene (Murphy) York was an organist and choir director; his father, Orel York, was a history teacher who later worked as an instructor for the FBI

Donald grew up in Delmar, a suburb of Albany. He had perfect hearing and was already composing piano music at the age of 7. As a teenager, he attended a summer program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. In 1969 he earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from Juilliard.

Recognition…York family

After graduating, he played in several contemporary bands, including a synthesizer group called The First Moog Quartet, and for the pop duo Hall and Oates, before joining Paul Taylor in the mid-1970s. He has also conducted for the New York City Ballet and Broadway musicals, including “Clams on the Half Shell Revue”, Bette Midler’s mockery of Broadway show tunes. And he composed choral works and song poems.

In the early 1990s, Mr. York moved to Southern California. He is survived by his companion Debbie Prutsman, a performer and educator; his wife Anne York, a graphic artist he was separated from; three stepchildren, Nick, Tasha, and Andrew Bogdanski; and a brother, Richard. In 1985 he divorced his first wife.

Mr. York was a nocturnal composer. It was his habit to go to bed at 7 p.m., wake up between 1 and 2 a.m., make a pot of coffee, and go to work. He called these hours his “crazy time,” Ms. Prutsman said, adding that he would normally be ready by dawn.

Mr. York retired on November 17, 2019 and bowed at the final performance of the Paul Taylor Company season at Lincoln Center. His last concert composition for the American Brass Quintet will be performed in July at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he studied as a teenager. On his death, Mr. York wrote an operatic musical about a child prodigy named “Gifted”.

Categories
Entertainment

Milton Moses Ginsberg, 85, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies

Milton Moses Ginsberg, 85, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies

Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two remarkably ambitious and eccentric films before being forgotten, one about the breakdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press assistant in a Nixon-like government turned into a murderous werewolf, died on May 23rd in his Manhattan apartment. He was 85.

The cause was cancer, said his wife Nina Ginsberg.

Mr. Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own films, wrote and directed Coming Apart (1969), a raw black and white film that uses a single, almost entirely static camera to capture the loveless encounters and psychological disintegration to document a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who secretly records his encounters with a camera in a mirror box.

“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews. Richard Schickel from Life magazine praised it. But the one that devastated Mr Ginsberg came from Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice, who wrote: “If everyone in the cast had refused to undress for action or inaction, Coming Apart would have collapsed commercially into a half-baked amateur film who was incapable “. sell enough tickets to fill a phone booth. “

Mr. Ginsberg blamed this criticism for the failure of the film.

“That was it,” he told the New York Times in 1998, adding, “I did everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened. “

“Coming Apart” was followed in 1973 by another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington”, a bellicose political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Mr. Ginsberg as a boy. and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.

In Mr. Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year after the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays a White House deputy press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the editor of the Washington Post, and Martha. based Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.

“It’s not being advertised as a documentary,” wrote syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, “but when you think about what’s going on in this town, you couldn’t tell from the plot.”

In 1975, after Mr. Ginsberg was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he fell into a depression that only disappeared after meeting the painter Nina Posnansky in 1983. You and his brother Arthur survive.

After the commercial failure of his feature films, Mr. Ginsberg returned to film editing. He has worked on a variety of projects including the 1986 Oscar-winning documentaries, Down and Out in America, about the unemployed and the homeless who remain in the economy, directed by actress Lee Grant, and The Personals ( 1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.

He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for doing “Coming Apart”, which he ironically called “Murder of an Audience”.

“So if you long to be forgotten, both for yourself and for your film, follow me!” he added.

Mr. Ginsberg has never made another film, but in recent years he has completed several short video essays, including “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagoric exploration of his life that led through a microscopic journey into intricate clockwork becomes.

Milton Moses Ginsberg was born in the Bronx on September 22, 1935. His father Elias was a tailor in the textile district and his mother Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg was a housewife.

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to filmmaking, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor for NBC News, had a production job with documentaries Albert and David Maysles and was an assistant on “Candid Camera”, the popular television series that uses covert cameras to capture people in various situations. He said the show influenced the secret inclusion of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”

Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment with the reaction to his facial features was somewhat mitigated when the Museum of Modern Art showed “Coming Apart” in 1998. he did not enter the theater until it was over, when he was talking to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since then.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” said Laurence Kardish, the former longtime chief curator of MoMA’s film division who saw “Coming Apart” during the original release, over the phone. “It was very explicit and very raw, and it struck me as an essential New York film that shows a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”

When Coming Apart was released on video in 2000, an article in the Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically daring.” And in 2011 the Brooklyn Academy of Music showed both of Mr. Ginsberg’s films. After the deputy curator Jacob Perlin moved to Metrograph, the repertoire theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now artistic and programmatic director, he held a screening in 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of “Coming Apart”. Restorations of both Mr. Ginsberg’s films were completed by the film company Kino Lorber.

The belated acceptance of his films offered Mr Ginsberg a relief.

“In 2011, Milton said he had two afterlife,” said Mr. Perlin, who befriended Mr. Ginsberg, over the phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart’ and in 2011 when I showed his two films.”

Categories
Health

Jessica Morris, Whose Mind Most cancers Was Her Trigger, Dies at 57

Jessica Morris, Whose Brain Cancer Was Her Cause, Dies at 57

Through the nonprofit Our Brain Bank she founded, Ms. Morris encouraged more than just treating the tumor.

“If you are suddenly told that you have a disease that is considered incurable,” she said in the Human Guinea Pig Project podcast in 2019, “the only thing you urgently need is psychological support, and it’s not there.”

She also wanted to make sure patients had access to second opinions and funding so that those who were told by a doctor “nothing can be done” could take a more aggressive approach if they so wished. She herself took several novel approaches, her husband said, including an experimental therapy suggested by one of her doctors that injects herpes virus into the tumor in hopes of stimulating an immune response.

“Even if I don’t know exactly how certain treatments might work – and nobody really knows – it makes sense to block as many routes to cancer as possible,” Ms. Morris said on the podcast.

Another goal was to make it easier for glioblastoma patients to participate in clinical trials with drugs and therapies. Access to such studies can be tedious and frustrating for patients with limited life expectancy. And since glioblastoma is a complex disease in which each tumor has different characteristics, Ms. Morris and her organization have developed an app that patients can use to report symptoms and share information with each other and with medical professionals – to better understand the disease.

“Patient symptom data is a largely untapped pool of information that can inform researchers so they can better develop treatments,” Ms. Morris said during a 2019 panel discussion on patient-centered treatments. “Involving patients in this process has the added benefit of making people with the disease feel like they are dealing with the disease, and not the other way around.”

Jessica Jane Morris was born on July 22nd, 1963 in Greenwich near London. Her father Bill was an architect and her mother Elizabeth (Villar) Morris is an artist.

Categories
Entertainment

Graeme Ferguson, Filmmaker Who Helped Create Imax, Dies at 91

Graeme Ferguson, Filmmaker Who Helped Create Imax, Dies at 91

Graeme Ferguson, a Canadian documentary filmmaker who helped create Imax, the panoramic cinematic experience that immerses audiences in movies, and who was the company’s primary creative force for years, died on May 8th at his home in Lake of Bays, Ontario. He was 91.

His son Munro Ferguson said the cause was cancer.

In the 1960s, Mr Ferguson made a name for himself as a young cameraman known for his cinéma verite-style work when he was asked to make a documentary on the Arctic and Antarctic for the world exhibition Expo 67 in Montreal. He traveled for a year to make the film, which included footage about Inuit life and the aurora borealis.

The documentary “Polar Life” was shown in an immersive theater configuration: the audience sat on a rotating turntable while the film was played on a panorama of 11 fixed screens. The experience was a hit. Another film at Expo 67 that similarly used multiple canvases, “In the Labyrinth”, was directed by Roman Kroitor, Mr. Ferguson’s brother-in-law. Soon the two men had a vision.

“We were wondering if it would not be better to have a single large format projector or to have one that fills a large screen?” Mr. Ferguson told Take One, a Canadian film magazine, in 1997. “The next step, of course, was to have a large film format, larger than anything that has ever been done before.”

“We said, ‘Let’s invent this new medium.'”

But despite Imax’s formidable technology, Mr. Ferguson struggled for decades to convince investors to embrace his vision. In a history of innovation, setbacks and adversity, his company almost went under several times, and it took Imax years to fully realize the cinematic wonder of its day.

“People kept telling us that nobody would sit still for 90 minutes and watch an Imax movie,” Ferguson told Take One. “We have been told endlessly.”

Mr. Ferguson had already asked Robert Kerr, a former high school buddy who had become a successful businessman, to become their partner, and next he hired William Shaw, another former high school buddy, to become an engineer was to develop Imax technology. They soon developed prototypes for the camera and large format projector that were needed for filming and showing Imax films.

The group was eager to showcase their technology at the 1970 Osaka Expo in Japan, so they reached out to Japanese bank Fuji for funding. They showed a delegation of bank officials their Imax offices in New York and Montreal, both of which were filled with hardworking employees. Impressed by what they saw, Fuji Bank agreed to the project.

What the delegates did not know was that the New York office was Mr. Ferguson’s freelance studio and that the Montreal headquarters were production facilities that Mr. Kroitor had rented a few days earlier.

The first Imax film, “Tiger Child”, premiered shortly afterwards at Expo 70 in Osaka. Although the film was successful, the company continued to struggle with funding.

In business today

Updated

June 3, 2021, 8:18 p.m. ET

Back in Toronto, Mr. Ferguson learned that a new amusement park called Ontario Place was planning to build a large-screen theater. He reached out to the team and they agreed to buy an Imax projector. In 1971, Ontario Place began broadcasting North of Superior, an Imax documentary directed by Mr. Ferguson about the wilderness of northern Ontario. The venue became Imax’s first permanent theater and the model for future Imax cinemas.

In the 1970s, Imax transported viewers into unexpected realms: “Circus World” was a documentary about the Ringling Brothers and the Barnum & Bailey Circus; “To fly!” recorded the wonders of flight; and “Ocean” was about marine life.

In the 1980s, Mr. Ferguson approached NASA with the idea of ​​getting moviegoers into space by training astronauts to use Imax cameras on spaceships. The collaboration resulted in several successful documentaries that established the Imax brand.

Mr. Ferguson and his co-founders sold the company in 1994 when they were over 60 to two American businessmen, Richard Gelfond and Bradley Wechsler, who leveraged Imax and brought the brand to the public. In the Take One interview, Mr. Ferguson admitted that he was surprised at how difficult it was to find a buyer despite the company’s established success.

“The reaction time to new things is always longer than the inventor can ever imagine,” he says. “You think you might have built the better mousetrap and the world will be at your door the next morning, but they will be at your door about five years later. This is how the world really works. “

Mr. Ferguson remained connected to the company after the sale and worked as a consultant and producer of films such as “L5: First City in Space” (1996), “Hubble 3-D” (2010) and “A Beautiful Planet” (2016) which was narrated by Jennifer Lawrence.

Ivan Graeme Ferguson was born on October 7, 1929 in Toronto and grew up in nearby Galt. His father Frank was an English teacher. His mother, Grace (Warner) Ferguson, was an elementary school teacher. When he was 7 years old, his parents gave him a brownie camera that he used to photograph steamboats on Lake Rosseau, about 120 miles north of Toronto.

In 1948 he enrolled at the University of Toronto to study politics and economics. Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren taught a workshop at the university for a semester, and he became her lighting assistant. She encouraged him to give up the economy and make films instead.

In the 1960s, Mr. Ferguson was a cameraman in New York, working with filmmakers from the Cinéma Vérité movement such as DA Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. He worked for Adolfas Mekas and made footage for an Oscar-nominated documentary called “Rooftops of New York” (1961).

His marriage to Betty Ramsaur in 1959 ended in divorce in 1974. In 1982 he married Phyllis Wilson, a filmmaker who became his creative collaborator and produced several Imax films with him. She died in March at the age of 70.

In addition to his son from his first marriage, Mr. Ferguson has a daughter, Allison, also from his first marriage; two sisters, Janet Kroitor and Mary Hooper; a brother, Bill; four grandchildren; and a great grandson.

In his late 60s, Mr. Ferguson and his wife settled in a sprawling stone house on the Lake of Bays that he bought after the Imax sale. Mr. Kerr and Mr. Shaw also lived in lakeside houses about 140 miles north of Toronto, and the men often worked together on their boats. After Mr. Kroitor’s death in 2012, Mr. Ferguson became the last living Imax founder.

During the pandemic, Mr Ferguson read dismal reports on the state of Hollywood and changing viewing habits, with streaming videos drawing audiences out of theaters. But he wasn’t worried about Imax’s fate.

“He was absolutely convinced that it would thrive even if the rest of the exhibition industry was much worse off,” said his son Munro, “because he believed that if you left your house you could be just as good. “Look at something amazing.”

Categories
Health

Arthur Staats Dies at 97; Referred to as ‘Time Out’ for Unruly Youngsters

Arthur Staats Dies at 97; Called ‘Time Out’ for Unruly Kids

Literary references to the grounding of unruly children have resounded at least since the early 19th century.

Such banishes were later embodied in the 1894 watercolor “The Naughty Corner” by Swedish artist Carl Larsson, a picture of a sullen little boy banished to a chair in the living room.

In the late 1950s, not long after the birth of his daughter Jennifer, Arthur W. Staats turned more or less arbitrary parental punishment into a cornerstone of behavioral psychology and a household phrase. He called it a “time out”.

Extensive experiments by Dr. Staats (rhymes with “stains”) and co-workers found that removing a child from the scene of inappropriate behavior and whatever provoked an emotional bond with restraint was more ingrained than punishment. As a bonus, frustrated parents were given a short break.

Dr. Staats emphasized that children must be warned in advance of the consequences of their behavior and that the “time-out” tactic must be used consistently and within the framework of a positive parent-child relationship. He advised that time off (usually five to 15 minutes) should end when the child stopped misbehaving (e.g., having a tantrum).

Dr. Staats died on April 26, aged 97, at his home in Oahu, Hawaii. His son, Dr. Peter S. Staats said the cause was heart failure.

Arthur Staats had experimented with taking time off with his two children at an early age. “My sister and I were trained using the time-out method that my father invented in the late 1950s,” wrote Dr. Peter Staats in Johns Hopkins Magazine last year.

His sister, Dr. Jennifer Kelley, gave her own touch to the development of the process. “A few years ago,” she said in an email, “my brother made the joke that I was so bad my father had to make up some time out.”

In 1962, when Jennifer was 2 years old, Dr. State of Child magazine: “I put her in her crib and told her to stay there until she stopped crying. If we were in a public place, I would pick them up and go outside. “

He also experimented with preschool classes, teaching his daughter to read before she was three, and invented a “token reinforcement system”: a device he developed distributed tiny markings that could be saved and later exchanged for toys and other prizes .

That Peter founded the Pain Medicine Department at Johns Hopkins University and Jennifer became a child and adolescent psychiatrist may be a measure of her father’s success.

The older Dr. Staats described his approach as psychological behaviorism and cognitive behavioral psychology. His perspectives on emotional development and learning were so diverse that in 2006 Child magazine named him one of the “20 People Who Changed Childhood”.

American Pediatrics magazine reported in 2017 that a recent survey found that 77 percent of parents of children aged 15 months to 10 years needed time off to moderate their behavior.

Montrose M. Wolf, one of Dr. Staats, mentioned the procedure in a 1964 study, and Dr. Staats explained it in the book “Learning, Language and Cognition” published in 1968.

He was considered one of the few pioneers in behavior modification. As he wrote in his book “Marvelous Learning Animal” (2012): “Our small group provided the basis for the areas of behavior therapy and behavior analysis.”

While much research has focused on how differences in brain chemistry and physiology affect behavior and literacy, Dr. Staats that more research is needed on how a child’s learning and environment influenced these differences.

His experiments, he wrote, showed that “children have a variety of explicit problem behaviors that can be addressed through explicit training” – that dyslexic children can be trained to read and that a child’s IQ can be improved. The research, he claimed, provided “irrefutable evidence of the tremendous power of learning to determine human behavior.”

Arthur Wilbur Staats was born on January 17, 1924 in Greenburgh, NY, in Westchester County, to Frank Staats, a carpenter, and Jennifer (Yollis) Staats, a Jewish immigrant from Russia. His father died when he was 3 months old just days after the family disembarked in Los Angeles after traveling from the east coast to the west via the Panama Canal. His mother supported the couple’s four children by doing laundry for neighbors.

Arthur was an indifferent student mainly devoted to sports and reading for pleasure. At 17, he dropped out of high school to join the Navy and served on the battleship Nevada during the D-Day invasion. After the war, he enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles under the GI Bill.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1949, a master’s degree in psychology in 1953 and a doctorate in general experimental and clinical psychology in 1956.

After teaching as a professor of psychology at Arizona State University and as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, he was hired by the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1966. There he was professor of psychology until his retirement in 1997 and became professor emeritus.

Dr. Staats married Carolyn Kaiden, a fellow PhD student at UCLA. You worked on the book Complex Human Behavior: A Systematic Extension of Learning Principles (2011). In addition to his son and daughter, she survived him along with five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The legacy of Dr. Staats was reflected in the license plate of his silver BMW – TYM-OUT – and in the behavior of his great-grandchildren.

“We have two, ages 6 and 3, and they are really wonderful little girls,” said Dr. Kelley about her grandchildren. “The little one is very funny. If she does something wrong, she takes a break for herself. I guess she saw her sister take a break so she figured out how it works. “

Categories
Entertainment

Yoshi Wada, Ingenious Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

Yoshi Wada, Inventive Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

On the 18th Manhattan. He was 77.

His son and musical collaborator Tashi Wada confirmed the death but said the cause was unknown.

Yoshi Wada’s music was characterized by dense, persistent sounds that could create stunning acoustic effects. He absorbed much of various musical traditions – Indian ragas, Macedonian folk song, and Scottish bagpipes – while supporting his musical life by working in construction.

In an early technique, in the 1970s, he attached mouthpieces to pipes that could be over six feet long. In ritual concerts lasting several hours, he immersed the audience in the sonorous drones that emanated from this alphorn-like instrument, which he called the earth horn.

In combination with the electronics of the sound artist Liz Philips, the pulsating sounds of the pipes offered a new interpretation of the minimalist style that was then in fashion.

“The result was certainly one of the most coloristically attractive of the many recent examples of minimalist, stationary sound you hear today,” wrote John Rockwell of the New York Times of a Wada concert in 1974 at the Kitchen in Lower Manhattan, “more like an evening at the very beginning of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold’. “

Mr. Wada’s idiosyncratic singing and the use of bagpipes became the basis for two major albums released on free jazz labels in the 1980s. One, “Lamentation of the rise and fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” was recorded in an empty swimming pool; To delve deeper into the project, Mr Wada slept in the pool. The other release, “Off the Wall”, made on a grant in West Berlin, combined bagpipes with a handcrafted organ and percussion.

“What I would like to have is a feeling for the endless space,” he said in a 1987 interview. “I want to create this feeling of infinity with sound.”

Mr. Wada also created elaborate sculptural sound installations. For “The Appointed Cloud” in 1987 he hung organ pipes and gongs in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Led by a computer program developed by David Rayna, visitors pressed buttons to change the sound of the composition in real time.

“Lots of young children came,” recalled Mr Wada in 2016, “and they went crazy pushing the buttons and it was a lot of fun.”

Yoshimasa Wada was born on November 11, 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, to the architect Shukitchi Wada and Kino Imakita. His father died in World War II and his childhood was marked by the rigors of the post-war period.

Yoshi had strong experiences early on in hearing monks sing in a local Zen temple. Enthusiastic about Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, he started playing jazz saxophone as a teenager. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts and searched Japan for avant-garde collectives such as the Gutai Group and the Hi-Red Center.

“It looked at the moon in a Zen garden for a whole night,” Mr. Wada later recalled of a “happening” presented by the artist and musician Yoko Ono. “That was a very nice feeling. I remember taking a bath afterwards and going home. “

After completing his Bachelor in Fine Arts, he moved to New York in 1967. George Maciunas, who is considered to be the founder of the Fluxus movement, lived in Mr. Wada’s building. Soon Mr. Wada was caught up in Fluxus’ high-minded absurdism, which made music out of cardboard tubes and syncopated sneezes.

Mr. Maciunas had begun buying abandoned buildings in the Manhattan area that would become known as SoHo and converting them into artists’ cooperatives, and he enlisted Mr. Wada to help with the carpentry and plumbing work.

Never having formal training in music, Mr. Wada took electronic music lessons from composer La Monte Young and in the early 1970s became a student of guru Pandit Pran Nath, who taught classical North Indian singing in Mr. Young’s studio.

“He tried to take everything in on a very high spiritual level,” said Mr. Young in an interview about Mr. Wada. “He was a very pure and noble person.”

His fascination with the microtonal inflections and hypnotic drones of Indian ragas, along with his dissatisfaction with standard instruments, led Mr. Wada to create the earth horns. But his musical interest continued to expand. He heard Macedonian folk singing at a festival and decided to study it, then formed a small choir to sing eerie modal improvisations. He attended Scottish Highland Games in the late 1970s and was impressed with the possibilities of the bagpipes.

After learning the solo bagpipe style known as “piobaireachd”, Mr. Wada built his own “customized” version of the instrument – with plumbing fixtures, pipes and air compressors – for evening performances that fused composition and improvisation.

“In studying all these different traditions, he always spoke of wanting to find ways to make them his own,” said his son Tashi in an interview.

Mr. Wada supported his family by continuing construction work and even starting his own construction company. He stored his menagerie of makeshift instruments in the basement of their building, one of the ones that Mr. Maciunas had developed. Tashi Wada remembered that a drum kit from his childhood found its way into one of his father’s sound installations.

Starting in 2007, Tashi Wada, who is also an experimental composer, helped reissue his father’s older recordings, which are now available on the Saltern label. In 2009, the Emily Harvey Foundation, which promotes the arts and had preserved some of Wada’s ear horns, invited him to repeat his performances from the 1970s. History lost the original electronic drone system; Instead, Tashi recreated the parts live. Father and son became regular musical collaborators.

Mr. Wada’s first wife was Barbara Stewart. In 1985 he married Marilyn Bogerd; they divorced in 2014. In addition to her son, he leaves behind her daughter Manon Bogerd Wada and a granddaughter.

In 2016, Tashi Wada interviewed his father for the art magazine BOMB and asked him about the hallucinatory effects he had experienced while practicing his music in a small studio in West Berlin in the 1980s.

“I didn’t use drugs at the time,” said Mr Wada. “It was not necessary. Sound pulls me into a dreamlike world when the sound is right. That is a very good effect and keeps me awake. “

Categories
Entertainment

Raimund Hoghe, Choreographer of Power and Frailty, Dies at 72

Raimund Hoghe, Choreographer of Strength and Frailty, Dies at 72

In it he offered meditative, meticulous deconstructions of well-known images, with the slow, sometimes enigmatic gestures of the performers referring to the original works, as if the movement had been broken by a prism. Mr. Hoghe, indifferent and a physical contrast to his dancers, was a constant but deliberately unemotional presence. This kind of juxtaposition was a common theme in his work.

“You could say that not much happens with“ Boléro Variations ”,” wrote Claudia La Rocco in a 2009 review in the New York Times. “The performers lead beautifully crafted, often simple, phrases into a series of powerful recordings.” But in the end, she noted, “rich worlds of intention and regret blossom in every act.”

In another work, “Pas de Deux”, created in 2011 for Takashi Ueno, Mr. Hoghe offered the slow ceremonial donning of kimono sashes and a vision of the young dancer’s physical control and strength that was neutral to his own weak body.

“I brought this vulnerability to the stage that we should always be aware of,” and not just in times of crisis, he said last year when asked about working during the pandemic.

Raimund Hoghe was born on May 12, 1949 in Wuppertal. His mother Irmhild Hoghe, a seamstress, was a widow and had a 10-year-old daughter when she met Mr. Hoghe’s 15-year-old father. Mr. Hoghe never knew his father, who married another woman, although his parents continued to write to each other – letters he published in a book, “The Price of Love” (1984).

His mother, he said in interviews, always accepted his appearance and believed that she could go her own way. “She often said there were worse things than a back like mine,” he said in a 2004 interview in Le Monde.

Categories
Health

Ganga Stone, Who Gave Sustenance to AIDS Sufferers, Dies at 79

Ganga Stone, Who Gave Sustenance to AIDS Patients, Dies at 79

Ganga Stone, who survived on odd jobs in Manhattan until she discovered that her life’s mission was to bring free homemade meals to bedridden AIDS patients on her bicycle, then expanded her volunteer corps of cooks and couriers into an enduring organization called God’s Love We Deliver, died on Wednesday in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. She was 79.

Her death, at a health care facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Hedley Stone. She said a cause had not been determined.

In 1985, Ms. Stone was selling coffee from a cart on Wall Street and feeling unfulfilled. She came to the conclusion, she later told The New York Times, that “if my life were not useful to God in some direct way, I didn’t see the point in living it.”

But while volunteering at the Cabrini Hospice on the Lower East Side, she had an epiphany. She was asked to deliver a bag of groceries to Richard Sale, a 32-year-old actor who was dying of AIDS. When she realized that he was too weak to cook, she rounded up friends, who agreed to bring him hot meals.

“I had never seen anyone look that bad,” she recalled. “He was starving, and he was terrified.”

Legend has it that when she returned to the neighborhood with food tailored to Mr. Sale’s nutritional needs, she ran into a minister, who recognized her. When she told him what she was doing, he replied: “You’re not just delivering food. You’re delivering God’s love.” (In another version of the origin story, Ms. Stone said she was brushing her teeth when she envisioned “We Deliver” signs on restaurant storefronts.)

“It’s the perfect thing — it’s so nonsectarian it’s impossible to misunderstand,” she told The New Yorker in 1991.

The fledgling organization — made up of Ms. Stone and a few friends, including her roommate, Jane Ellen Best, with whom she founded the organization — began by delivering meals, home-cooked or donated by restaurants, to mostly gay men who were too incapacitated by a then-mysterious disease to shop or cook. They left their orders on her answering machine.

Not everyone wanted a gourmet meal.

“One guy wanted a can of Cheez Whiz and saltines,” Ms. Stone said.

In the first year alone, 400 of their clients died.

As the epidemic spread, the group attracted publicity and support from religious groups, government agencies and celebrities. (Blaine Trump, the former wife of former President Donald J. Trump’s brother Robert, is the vice-chairwoman.)

This year, God’s Love We Deliver, with a budget of $23 million, hopes to distribute 2.5 million meals to 10,000 people in the New York metropolitan area who are homebound with various diseases.

Ingrid Hedley Stone was born on Oct. 30, 1941, in Manhattan and raised in Long Island City, Queens, and the Bronx. Her father, M. Hedley Stone, a Jewish immigrant from Warsaw who was born Moishe Stein, was a Marxist who was an organizer for the National Maritime Union and later its treasurer.

Her mother, Winifred (Carlson) Stone, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants, was a librarian (she established the library for the National Council on Aging), who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease when Ms. Stone was in her mid 20s.

A graduate of the Fieldston School in the Bronx, Ms. Stone studied comparative literature at Carleton College in Minnesota and attended Columbia University’s School of General Studies, but never graduated.

Her eclectic résumé of jobs included driving a cab and working as a morgue technician. She was hired as a waitress at the Manhattan nightclub Max’s Kansas City, where she met Gerard Hill, an Australian busboy. They married in 1970, but she left the marriage after 13 months, and the couple divorced in 1973.

In addition to her daughter, her survivors include a son from that marriage, Clement Hill, and a sister, Dr. Elsa Stone.

A self-described radical feminist, Ms. Stone was steered by her yoga instructor to the spiritual teachings of Swami Muktananda. In the mid-1970s, after sending her 6-year-old son to live with his father, she embarked on a two-year retreat to the swami’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, India. She cleaned laundry, washed floors and went nine months without speaking. The swami named her Ganga, for the Ganges River.

When she returned to New York, Ms. Stone resumed her composite career until the mid-1980s, when she was inspired to start God’s Love.

She retired as the organization’s executive director in 1995 and was succeeded by Kathy Spahn. The next year, Ms. Stone, who taught courses about dying, published “Start the Conversation: The Book About Death You Were Hoping to Find.” She lived in Saratoga Springs.

“I’ve always been attracted to working with dying people, since it seems to me that there’s no more important moment in a human life than that one,” Ms. Stone told The New Yorker. “Everything else can go badly, but if that moment goes well, it seems to make a difference, and I wanted to make a difference in those moments for people.”

She added, “My sense of my own role in life was to share with people what I know about the deathless nature of the human self, but you can’t comfort people who haven’t eaten.”

Categories
Entertainment

Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.

But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”

Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”

The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.

Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.

He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.

His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.

Categories
Entertainment

Chi Modu, Photographer Who Outlined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

Chi Modu, Photographer Who Defined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

The Notorious B.I.G., stoic and resplendent in front of the twin towers. Tupac Shakur, eyes closed and arms in the air, tendrils of smoke wafting up from his lips. Eazy-E, perched atop his lowrider, using it as a throne. Mobb Deep, huddled with friends on the rooftop of a Queensbridge housing project. Nas, reflective in his childhood bedroom. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, gathered in a circle and staring down at the camera, sharpness in their eyes.

For the essential rap stars of the 1990s, odds are that their defining images — the ones imprinted for decades on the popular consciousness — were all taken by one person: Chi Modu.

In the early and mid-1990s, working primarily for The Source magazine, at the time the definitive digest of hip-hop’s commercial and creative ascendance, Mr. Modu was the go-to photographer. An empathetic documentarian with a talent for capturing easeful moments in often extraordinary circumstances, he helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars. The Source was minting a new generation of superheroes, and Mr. Modu was capturing them as they took flight.

Mr. Modu died on May 19 in Summit, N.J. He was 54. His wife, Sophia, said the cause was cancer.

When hip-hop was still gaining its footing in pop culture and the mainstream media hadn’t quite caught up, The Source stepped into that void. So did Mr. Modu, who was frequently the first professional photojournalist his subjects encountered.

“My focus coming up,” Mr. Modu told BBC Africa in 2018, “was to make sure someone from the hip-hop community was the one responsible for documenting hip-hop artists.”

His photos appeared on the cover of over 30 issues of the magazine. He also photographed the cover of Mobb Deep’s breakthrough 1995 album, “The Infamous…,” and “Doggystyle,” the 1993 debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg), as well as Bad Boy Records’ “B.I.G. Mack” promotional campaign, which introduced the rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack.

“We were pretty primitive in our look at that time, and we needed someone like him,” Jonathan Shecter, one of the founders of The Source, said.

Mr. Modu’s personality, he added, was “super cool, no stress, no pressure. He’d just be a cool dude hanging out with the crew. A lot of rappers felt he was someone they could hang around with.”

Mr. Modu’s signature approach was crisp and intimate — he rendered his subjects as heroes, but with an up-close humility. As that generation of emerging stars was learning how to present themselves visually, he helped refine their images. (He had a special rapport with Tupac Shakur, which spanned several years and shoots.)

“When you bring that high level of skill to an arena that didn’t have a high level of skill, you can actually create really important work,” he told Pulse, a Nigerian publication, in 2018.

For Mobb Deep’s album cover, he scheduled time in a photo studio, which yielded the indelibly ice-cold cover portrait of the duo. “A huge part of our success was that cover — he captured a vibe that encapsulated the album,” Mobb Deep’s Havoc said. “To see a young Black brother taking photos of that nature was inspiring.”

But Mr. Modu also spent a day with the duo in Queensbridge, the neighborhood they hailed from, taking photos of them on the subway, by the Queensboro Bridge, on the roof of the housing project building Havoc lived in. “Twenty-five years later they feel almost more important,” Havoc said. “They give you a window into that time.”

In addition to being a nimble photographer — sometimes he shot his images on slide film, with its low margin for error — Mr. Modu was a deft amateur psychologist. “He could flow from New York to Los Angeles and go into every ’hood. There was never a problem, never an issue,” Mr. Shecter said. His wife remembered Mr. Modu leaving a Jamaican vacation to photograph Mike Tyson, only to arrive and learn Mr. Tyson didn’t want to shoot; by the end of the day, via charm and cajoling, Mr. Modu had his shots.

Mr. Modu was also a careful student of the dynamic balance between photographer and subject — the celebrity was the raison d’être for the shoot, but the photographer was the shaper of the image. “The reason I am able to take control is that I am here trying to help you go where you are trying to go,” Mr. Modu told Pulse. “I’m on your team. I’m the one looking at you. You may think you are cool but I have to see you as cool to press my shutter.”

Jonathan Mannion, a friend of Mr. Modu’s and a hip-hop portraitist of the following generation, said Mr. Modu played a crucial role in establishing the presence of sophisticated photography in hip-hop. “He kicked a lot of doors off their hinges for us to walk through,” Mr. Mannion said.

Christopher Chijioke Modu was born on July 7, 1966, in Arondizuogu, Nigeria, to Christopher and Clarice Modu. His father was a measurement statistician, and his mother worked in accounting and computer systems processing. His family emigrated to the United States in 1969, during the Biafran war.

His parents later returned to Nigeria, but Mr. Modu stayed behind and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness economics from Rutgers University’s Cook College in 1989. He began taking photographs in college — using a camera bought for him as a birthday gift by Sophia Smith, whom he began dating in 1986 and would marry in 2008 — and received a certificate in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center of Photography in 1992.

He shot for The Amsterdam News, the Harlem-based newspaper, and became a staff photographer at The Source in 1992 and later the magazine’s director of photography.

After leaving The Source, he consulted on diversity initiatives for advertising and marketing companies and was a founder of a photo sharing website. And he continued to take photos around the world, capturing life in Yemen, Morocco, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Is addition to his wife, Mr. Modu, who lived in Jersey City, is survived by his mother; three sisters, Ijeoma, Anaezi and Enechi; a brother, Emmanuel; and a son and daughter.

In the early 2010s, Mr. Modu began efforts to reignite interest in his 1990s hip-hop photography, initially by partnering with a New York billboard company to display his work.

“He felt there were certain gatekeepers, especially in the art world,” Ms. Modu said. “He always said the people are the ones that appreciate the art and want the art that he had. And with the billboard thing, he was taking the art to the people.”

The billboard project, called “Uncategorized,” led to exhibitions in several cities around the world. In 2014 he had a solo show at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. In 2016 he released “Tupac Shakur: Uncategorized,” a book compiling photographs from multiple shoots with the rapper.

Working in an era when the conditions of celebrity photo shoots were far less constrained than they are now, he retained the rights to his photographs. He sold posters and prints of his work, and licensed his photos for collaborations with apparel and action-sports companies. Last year, some of his photos were included in Sotheby’s first hip-hop auction.

Years after his hip-hop picture-taking heyday, Mr. Modu still left an impression on his subjects. DJ Premier of Gang Starr — a duo Mr. Modu photographed for the cover of The Source in 1994 — recalled taking part in a European tour of hip-hop veterans in 2019. During a stop in Berlin, he heard from Mr. Modu, who was in town, and arranged backstage passes for him.

When Mr. Modu arrived, he approached a room where the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were all gathered. DJ Premier recalled the rapturous reception: “As soon as he walked it in, it was almost like a cheer — ‘Chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’”