NEWS
February 26, 2007
Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, the German author Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, the German author and art collector best known for his autobiographical novel Das Boot, died Thursday of heart failure, his museum and the office of the governor of Bavaria said. Bavarian Gov. Edmund Stoiber praised Mr. Buchheim for his contribution to the southern German state, including the museum that houses his collection of art from the Bruecke group of expressionists, including works by Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller.
FEATURES
By J.D. CONSIDINE | December 18, 1999
Even though they're released throughout the year, CD boxed sets are traditionally seen as holiday items, if only because these pricey, elaborately packaged sets make such impressive Christmas presents. Even if the recipient already has every album by a given artist, there's usually enough extras in a boxed set -- rare tracks, eye-catching design, illuminating liner notes -- to ensure that redundancy is not a big issue.In the early '90s, the boxed set boom focused almost exclusively on major artists: Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Frank Sinatra, James Brown.
NEWS
By MICHAEL OLESKER | March 9, 1999
THE LAST TIME we saw Frank Sinatra, he stood there in a three-piece suit in the numb July air of the Merriweather Post Pavilion stage in Columbia, trying to navigate a lyric with a note that had wandered astray.Sometimes it was like that in his last years. The soaring voice that unleashed adolescent passions half a century earlier would bend and lose its way, and Sinatra would strain to snatch it back on the far side of a fading lyric.When he did "My Heart Stood Still," he missed the last note so badly that he went back and tried it again, muscling his way through sheer willpower and hoping the ancient pipes would hold out. The voice was weary from too much use, and maybe from trying to carry an entire culture past its allotted time.
NEWS
March 20, 1999
James D. Johnson,78, an artist and illustrator who created album covers for Frank Sinatra and promotion posters for the movie "Ben Hur," died Monday of prostate cancer in Marietta, Ga.Hampartzoum Berberian,93, a composer of vocal, choral, operatic, symphonic and chamber works, died of cancer March 13 in Watertown, Mass.Ray Russell,74, a prolific horror and fantasy writer and a former executive editor of Playboy magazine, died Monday from complications from a stroke in Los Angeles.
FEATURES
By Chris Kaltenbach | October 20, 1999
Susan Stamberg doesn't mind being referred to as one of the founding mothers of National Public Radio, even if that does make her sound more like a museum piece than a working journalist.And, like all good mothers. Stamberg believes the best of NPR is yet to come."Oh, absolutely," she says over the phone from her Washington office, where she continues to report as a special correspondent for NPR, concentrating on cultural affairs (which includes, she jokes, everything that "is not Wall Street or the White House or Capitol Hill")
FEATURES
By Robert A. Erlandson | May 17, 1998
Back then, when he came with his young wife and daughter to live in a little New Jersey town, Frank Sinatra wasn't "Chairman of the Board." He was a skinny boy singer, just starting to lay the foundation of his enduring show-business legend.In the 1940s, Sinatra, who died Thursday at 82, was "The Voice," the kid from Hoboken who had the bobby-soxers screaming and swooning in the aisles at the Paramount Theater on Times Square in New York.In 1941, he was named the country's most popular vocalist.
NEWS
May 16, 1998
Tony Bennett: `One of Sinatra's favorite toasts to make with a glass in hand was: 'May you live to be 100, and may the last voice you hear be mine.' The master is gone, but his voice will live forever.`Mel Torme: "Frank Sinatra was a true original. He held the patent, the original blueprint on singing the popular song, a man who would have thousands of imitators but who, himself, would never be influenced by a single, solitary person."President Clinton.: "I think every American would have to smile and say he really did do it his way."
FEATURES
By Linell Smith | May 16, 1998
Katharine Smeten was just a schoolgirl in saddle shoes and bobby-sox when she and her Towson Catholic High buddies each paid a dime to see Frank Sinatra perform with the Harry James Orchestra at the Hippodrome Theater.The last time she saw him, at the Sands Hotel in Atlantic City, she paid $200 for her ticket. In between, there were another 64 shows.Yesterday, the news of Sinatra's death hit Smeten hard."I'm telling you, when I heard it on the radio, I felt part of my family died," the 70-year-old Towson widow said.
FEATURES
By Ann Hornaday | May 16, 1998
He embodied our most wholesome ideals and our darkest impulses in one single, stylish glissando. Frank Sinatra, who started as what he off-handedly called a "saloon singer," surprised them all when he began a serious acting career: Like everything in show business to which he turned his prodigious talents, he succeeded at movies, too, at least some of the time.After making his feature film debut in 1941 with the Tommy Dorsey band in "Las Vegas Nights," Sinatra went on to make nearly 60 movies, which described an arc as paradoxical as the man himself.
NEWS
By GREGORY KANE | May 20, 1998
Wherever Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is right now, he may well be shedding a tear.Farrakhan, like most of us, has probably spent the past few days mourning the passing of Ol' Blue Eyes - Frank Sinatra. The Italian-American crooner was the favorite singer of the African-American firebrand whose incendiary rhetoric has been labeled anti-white and anti-Semitic. Only in America.Farrakhan was a singer himself in his pre-Nation of Islam days. His admiration for Sinatra proves that Ol' Blue Eyes was the best at his craft, a singer's singer.