Category: people

Mel Brooks is one of the enduring comedic icons of his generation, and with the wild success of the stage version of The Producers, his politically incorrect zaniness has been embraced by a new generation of fans. Still, “there are some who think that Brooks’s humour is too one-dimensional, too vulgar, to be as enduring as, say, that of Woody Allen.” But contradictions are what Brooks has always been about, and he doesn’t seem terribly troubled by the concept of his legacy.

When scientists announced recently that Ludwig van Beethoven died as a definitive result of lead poisoning, a number of gaps in the composer’s biography – his gradual descent into deafness, his erratic behavior and violent temper – began to be filled in. But someone had to do the legwork for the lead poisoning theory to be proven, and that someone was author Russell Martin, whose quest for the skull fragments that would yield the truth could be alternately described as obsessive, gruesome, and fascinating.

A new biography of Edvard Munch suggests that the painter’s tortured childhood went a long way towards shaping the ghoulish style he would bring to his art. “Art enabled Munch to sidestep the claims of family, religion, sexuality and prevailing local attitudes to aesthetics… without simply repudiating his experiences. So it’s no wonder so many of Munch’s paintings are filled with smoke and smokers, tantalising and infecting at once. Often the world itself turns to heavy, poisonous smoke under his brush. Sick, dying and dead children melt into nothingness; predatory women with tangled red hair present themselves to the gaze; family trees become gibbets on which all the generations to come will swing.”

Marin Alsop has some work to do to gain the confidence of her new orchestra. “Ms Alsop has an ambitious, survivor mentality, though, and this has helped her face the humiliating thumbs-down from the Baltimore Symphony players, whom she had guest-conducted seven times. She describes herself as ‘forever a New Yorker, a fatalist optimist tinged with cynicism’.”

“I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the two.”

“Mr. Sandor was born in Budapest and studied piano with Bartok and composition with Kodaly at the Liszt Academy of Music there. He began to travel widely as a concert pianist in the 1930’s, and settled in the United States after his American debut at Carnegie Hall in 1939.”

Critic John Simon is out with three volumes of his collected pieces. “The irony of this is that writers (and bloggers) who benefit, likely without realizing it, from Simon’s path-blazing, pre-eminent debunking of crap are some of his most vocal critics. It seems almost foolish to have to point out that Simon’s reviews were politically incorrect well before the tide began to turn against PC, yet his detractors, who remain determinedly stuck on autopilot, could use a little nudging.”

“George Gershwin asked me to marry him, but I knew he didn’t love me, so I said no. He was sweet and vulnerable, successful and good-looking with an instant appeal. So terribly boyish. But he needed constant approval. So he had constant ladies. Whenever he met one, he pretended that he had written a waltz, just for her, that moment. He’d always use the same lyric and just put her name in the blank space. It was his mating call.”

California Republican Dana Rohrabacher has written a screen play. “I said [to my friend], ‘What do I write about?’ ” Rohrabacher recalled. “He said, ‘Dana, write about what you like to do. What do you like to do?’ I said, ‘Well, I like to go down to Mexico, drink tequila and chase women.’ So he goes, ‘Well, write a story that includes going down to Mexico, drinking tequila and chasing women.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we make it a treasure story?’ “

Curator Robert Storr is joining the staff of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Storr, a graduate of Swarthmore who has taught at Tyler School of Art, the University of the Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania, will continue to teach at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and hold his position as director of the 2007 Venice Biennale.”