INFEMNITY™ Arts and Culture News

  On this day when Black History Month morphs into Women's Herstory Month, I am compelled to mention and praise the new documentary on the life of pianist and actor Hazel Scott titled  The Disappearance of Miss Scott . Hazel Scott was an extremely talented pianist who made her career by "swinging the classics" as it was called back them. Born in 1920 in Trinidad, Hazel and her mother came to New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance when she was four years old. Four years later, she was enrolled to study piano at Juilliard. After being heard in several radio broadcasts, she was engaged to star at Café Society after her friend Billie Holiday secured the gig for her. Soon Hollywood came calling and she was cast "as herself" in five films. During the filming of her final film, The Heat's On (1943), Scott demanded that the black women who were dancing in the scene when she was at the piano wear costumes that were more dignified than the ones that the...

James Baldwin As we are nearing the end of Black History Month, I find myself reading and listening to the words of James Baldwin. He became one of the most articulate voices of the Civil Rights Movement, yet it is hard to find any description or discussion - in his own words - of his life as a gay man. One could guess that he describes some of his gay life in the novel Giovanni's Room , which can easily be dismissed as a work of fiction. We know that he met the man who became the love of his life, Lucien Happersberger, in Paris in 1949, when Lucien was 17 and James was 25. The fact that Lucien was white could have served as proof that, at least in Baldwin's mind, black men and white men could love each other. But unfortunately, Baldwin chose to remain in the closet, using references to "... my wife" and "... my woman, my children..." in his interviews. The truth is, the most significant woman in his life was his mother, and the children he referred to were ...

  Susan Seltzer in her office at Met Life On this day in 1990 at 2:13 am., Susan Seltzer passed away. She was thirty-three years old. Two and-a-half years earlier, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. After six weeks of radiation therapy, and then six months of chemo therapy, she lost her battle with cancer, and took her last breath while holding my hand.     Susan Seltzer was born in Yonkers, New York to Evelyn and Herman Seltzer. The family soon moved to New City, New York, where she went to high school. Susan attended Union College in upstate New York, and then transferred her credits at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where her classes were conducted in Hebrew, in which she was fluent. Her father was a V.P. at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and enabled her to have her first job as a Systems Programmer. Herman Seltzer was quite successful in his own right as an originator of the first IBM Mainframe computer, which is on display at the Smithsonian...

Débora Waldman Orchestral conductor  Débora Waldman  is the special guest on The Noshing with Nina Show this month. You will see clips of an interview that was filmed in her home in Paris, along with clips of some of her performances conducting l'Orchestre National de France and l'Orchestre Idomeneo .  A native of São Paulo, Brazil,  Dé bora Waldman accompanied her family to Israel in a Kibbutz where she lived until the age of fourteen. She then pursued her musical studies in Buenos Aires, in the Universidad Católica de Argentina. She is the only student in the history of this university that has been awarded two golden medals, both in orchestra conducting and composition. In 2002, she perfected her formation in Paris (where she lives) with Janos Fürst, and with F.X. Roth and M. Levinas in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM). Hailed as an energetic and profound young conductor,  Dé bora Waldman was discovered by the Or...