David Byrne
(1952 - )
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David Byrne, a true renaissance man, has been the leader of an intellectual
new wave rock-band Talking Heads, an actor, a filmmaker, screenwriter,
and composer of musical scores. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, he was raised
in Baltimore after moving to the U.S. at the age of seven. As a young
man, he studied photography, performance and video production at the Rhode
Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In
1984, he and the Talking Heads were the subject of Jonathan Demme's concert
film Stop Making Sense. He then tried filmmaking with his off-beat satire
of Texas life True Stories (1986). Some of Byrne's quirky songs have appeared
in feature films as well. In 1987, he and co-composers Ryuichi Sakamoto
and Cong Su won Academy Awards for their musical score for Bertolucci's
The Last Emperor. -- Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Gregory Corso
(1930 - 2001)
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Gregory Corso was born 26 March 1930, in New York, NY, the son of Fortunato
Samuel and Michelina (Colonni) Corso. His career included working as a
writer, manual laborer in New York City (1950-51), and employee of the
Los Angeles Examiner (Los Angeles, CA, 1951-52), a merchant seaman on
Norwegian vessels (1952-53) and in the English department of the State
University of New York at Buffalo (1965-70). He appeared in Peter Whitehead's
film, "Wholly Communion" and in Andy Warhol's "Couch."
He wrote novels, short stories, plays, screenplays and poetry. Corso was
awarded the Longview Award for poem, "Marriage", $1, 000 Poetry
Foundation award, the Jean Stein Award for Poetry, and American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters (1986).
William Seward Burroughs
(1914 - 1997)
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Writer; born in St. Louis, Mo. Heir to the Burroughs business machine
fortune, he was a Harvard-educated sometime medical student, private detective,
and exterminator. In the late 1950s he became associated with the Beat
writers in New York City. He later lived mostly in Paris and Tangier,
Morocco, and admitted to being addicted to heroin. His two dozen books
controversially blended homosexuality, science fiction, and underworld
seaminess; later works experimented radically with language. Naked Lunch
(Paris, 1959; New York, 1962) remains his best known work.
Timothy Francis Leary
(1920 - 1996)
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American psychologist and educator, b. Springfield, Mass., Ph.D., Univ.
of California at Berkeley, 1950. He was dismissed as a professor of psychology
at Harvard, where he taught from 1959 to 1963, for encouraging students
to experiment with the hallucinogen LSD. He became an outspoken advocate
of hallucinogenic drug use; his exhortation ""turn on, tune
in, drop out"" became a catchword of the 1960s. After LSD was
classified as illegal (1965) he was frequently arrested. In 1970 he escaped
from prison and fled to Algeria; in 1973 he was extradited and returned
to prison. After his release (1976) he continued writing and lecturing.
During the 1980s and 90s the charismatic Leary styled himself as a postmodern
guru, and celebrated computer technology as a utopian, boundary-demolishing
force. He took leave of life in the style in which he had lived it, detailing
his illness and drug-taking on the World Wide Web. In 1997 a Spanish satellite
carried his ashes into space.
Institut
for Antropologi, Københavns Universitet
Frederiksholms kanal 4, DK-1220 København K, Denmark
Tel: +45 35323464 - Fax: +45 35323465 - E-mail: reception@anthro.ku.dk
